Putting Passion into Pinball

Putting Passion into Pinball

Michael Schiess preserves Americana with a museum full of vintage games set on free play.

From the outside, Michael Schiess’ warehouse on the former Alameda naval air station looks like just another nondescript warehouse. But inside, it resembles a mad scientist’s workshop—tables covered in baskets of bolts, screws, and lightbulbs. There’s barely enough room for a person to squeeze between the rusting RC Cola and skeeball machines, their sides pried open and wire guts spilling across the floor. Schiess, 59, spends most of his free time here, tinkering with the machines and pinball games are his passion. An unassuming man with messy brown hair and a crooked smile, Schiess is founder of the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda.

“I always liked pinball and thought it was a fun game,” Schiess said. “But for a long time, there wasn’t anyplace to really play pinball in the East Bay. You might find a couple machines in bars, but they were always just the newer ones.”

The machines that Schiess remembered playing in his youth were fast disappearing from the dwindling arcades, getting bought up by wealthy pinball junkies and disappearing into private collections. Schiess began to appreciate pinball as more than a diversion, as something that might truly be lost, when he had the idea to use the games in an art project.

“I thought about getting into kinetic art,” Schiess said. “And I had the epiphany: Wouldn’t it be cool to do an interactive art piece? What if I bought some old pinball machines and re-scened them with my own artwork?”

The plan changed when it came time to remove the original artwork, the playful scenes of fast cars, space monsters, and pretty girls.

“I just couldn’t bring myself to put the sandpaper to the playfields,” Schiess said. “I realized, this was art! Someone needs to put this stuff out there.”

To Schiess, pinball is a quintessential American institution. There’s no mistaking pinball art—with its garish colors and lurid themes—for high art; Schiess describes it as “working-class art,” meant to appeal to the masses, to catch the eye of the ordinary bar patron and convince him to throw down a quarter for a little distraction from the daily grind. And like rock and roll or comic books, pinball machines have often been the target of moral outrage. In the ’30s, many cities banned the machines out of fear that they could be rigged for gambling. Schiess noted sadly how many classic pinball machines were destroyed in police raids. But even so, the lure of the game was too great. Modern pinball was born out of the Depression, but from the 1950s to the 1970s, it was a bigger industry than Hollywood.

Schiess opened his first pinball parlor in 2004 with only 19 machines. Today, the Pacific Pinball Museum has a collection of more than 400 working games. Although it began as the vision of a single man, Schiess is quick to point out that it’s since grown far beyond that and is today a sustainable nonprofit, due to the continued hard work and dedication of dozens of other pinball enthusiasts, including museum assistant manager Jeannie Rodriguez, museum board president Larry Zartarian, and Schiess’ wife—curator and gallery director Melissa Harmon.

“I wasn’t into pinball in the beginning,” said Harmon, who now curates the museum’s exhibition of pinball backglass art. “Mike shared it to me, and when I began to see the span and development of pinball art over a whole century, and how the art would relate to the culture and clothing styles going on at the time, that’s what got me excited. It’s a whole history that hasn’t been told.”

Schiess’ love for pinball spans several levels. He’s fascinated by how pinball represents the perfect intersection of art, history, and science.

“This is my pride and joy,” said Schiess, presenting a nautical-themed wooden machine from 1937 called Cargo. The backglass depicts King Neptune, lounging in his undersea court, surrounded by chests of sunken treasure and a gaggle of attentive mermaids. Schiess enjoys the unrepentant kitsch of the art, but he also likes how the machine reflects current events of its day. On the playfield, a ship bobbing on the ocean surface lowers a round iron bathysphere into the deep, the beams of its lamp illuminating the wreckage of old sailing galleons. To the artist, the bathysphere wasn’t a long-ago relic only seen in history books; it was a media sensation, its record-breaking dive into the ocean depths having happened only a few years before.

Schiess points to an ugly, bumpy fish with a wide, frowning mouth painted into the background of the scene. “This was a fish that was just discovered for the first time on that dive,” he said.

“He’s done a lot to promote the art of pinball,” said Johnny “Johnny-O” Olkowski, a local pinball tournament organizer. “He’s eccentric in a good way. He’s easygoing and has a lot of passion for pinball. Even though he’s the executive director, he’s extremely hands-on. He’s not one of these guys who says ‘Now I don’t have to get my hands dirty.’ He’s always working, always organizing.”

“His whole life is pinball,” said Larry Zartarian, the head of the museum’s board of directors who has 175 games on permanent loan to the museum. “When he’s not at the museum, he’s always fixing machines.”

Schiess’ mother divorced when he was 15, and the family moved from Albuquerque to California, where Schiess attended Berkeley High. After high school, he returned to Albuquerque to attend electronics trade school, but later came back to the Bay Area as an electromechanical technician for the Exploratorium in San Francisco. But while Schiess thought pinball had enormous educational potential to help teach kids about everything from electronics and physics, he couldn’t get anyone to take the idea seriously.

“Everyone wants to be a computer programmer; no one wants to fix the power supply,” Schiess said. “I like teaching basic knowledge of electronics. Pinball is so simple; you can use it to explain circuits so easily. I always thought: Wow, it would be really good for teaching kids about electricity and math. And if you build exhibits with pinball, they’ll last forever. Most pinball games were subjected to daily public punishment but survived really well. I came up with the concept of playing and learning.”

In 1972, he met Melissa Harmon at the Berkeley Film House (which morphed into the gone-but-not-forgotten Berkeley Film Institute). Schiess shared his pinball interest with Harmon, who became fascinated with the art; the two used to go to Silverball Arcade, formerly located on the second floor above LaVal’s Pizza on Durant, to play pinball. At the dawn of the 1980s, Schiess noticed with dismay that many of the old pinball haunts were gradually being replaced with video games.

“I wasn’t attracted to video games,” he said. “I felt like they were programming me to play them. I knew how gravity worked. A ball on a slope—I get that. I didn’t like having some video-game programmer just having me jump through hoops.”

Intrigued by the idea of using pinball to teach science, Schiess started searching to find other pinball museums. There was a National Pinball Museum, but he found out it was just a website. Another pinball machine museum in France wasn’t open to the public; others weren’t museums so much as private arcades.

On a visit to Washington, D.C., Schiess went to the Smithsonian Institution, hoping to find an exhibition for the pinball machines. After three hours, he still couldn’t find one. Finally, on the bottom floor, he found an exhibit called “Coin-Op American,” which featured a single Ms Pacman machine. Schiess was incredulous. “I was all, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ “

“The Smithsonian wasn’t planning to do anything; nobody wants to make a museum; everyone wants to make an arcade,” Schiess said. “I really wanted to go the route of a museum. I was inspired to try combining three different museums: the Exploratorium, the Musée Mécanique at Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Oakland Museum—art, science, and history museum all wrapped up in pinball. Let people explore all three with pinball.”

To start, he rented a small room in 2004 in Alameda and installed 14 machines; to skirt archaic laws against arcades, he opened it as a private club called the Lucky Juju Pinball Room. Later that year, it became a nonprofit, renaming itself the Pacific Pinball Museum. In 2009, the museum added 40 pinball machines from Larry Zartarian’s collection. The museum is currently raising funds for a move to Alameda’s Carnegie Library, where Schiess hopes to be able to display more of the museum’s 400-machine collection.

For now, the museum is currently housed in a storefront on Alameda’s Webster Street, where visitors can see everything from a 19th-century bagatelle table (a primitive predecessor to pinball where players tried to knock balls in holes guarded by wooden pegs) to the 2000 game Revenge from Mars, which uses interactive video to simulate an alien invasion. The older devices are safely displayed behind ropes, but most of machines are still playable, and any day of the week, kids, families, pinball fiends, and even professional tournament players can be found testing their skills against games like Earthshaker, Cyclone, or Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray and filling the air with the familiar clunk-clunk-clunk of flippers and the ping of metal balls bouncing against automated bumpers.

“People tend to spend time in the room that they remember,” assistant manager Jeannie Rodriguez said. The front room, decorated with murals recalling a 1920s carnival midway, houses older machines, while the dimly lit back room holds more modern machines. “If they played a lot of pinball back in the ’80s, they’ll spend their time in the back room. Older people will stay in front and start telling stories.”

“This is what I wanted,” Schiess said. “I wanted a public place where anyone could come and play. Nobody else was doing this, but now here we are.”

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Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay writer and frequent contributor to The Monthly. As a child, he was terrified to visit the arcade because of the game Pinbot and its big, scary robot face.

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Margaretta K. Mitchell is a nationally known artist and professional photographer, author, and educator based in the East Bay. margarettamitchell.com.

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