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The coin-operated amusements industry, which developed jukeboxes, pinball machines, slots, gumball machines, and later video game cabinets, had its roots in gambling, a controversial industry in America. Most states had laws against or heavily regulating gambling, but the slot companies quickly found ways around the prohibitions. Gumball machines, for example, were used to sidestep state gambling laws against cash payout machines by offering gum as a prize, leading to widespread and long-standing distrust of vending machines by would-be regulators. From the beginning, pinball machines were a subject of municipal debate revolving around one main question: whether or not pinball machines were "games of chance," which by definition meant that they were gambling devices. As early as 1934, operators, game manufacturers, and distributors argued — most often unsuccessfully — that pinball was a game of skill, and not inevitably connected to gambling. It was true, of course, that some early pinball machines manufactured by companies like Bally and Williams did offer a cash payout and also that early machines, which lacked bumpers and flippers, were largely luck-based endeavors. Cash payouts were quickly abandoned as it became clear that pinball and gambling weren’t a comfortable (or legal) match.

 

The first full-fledged and highly publicized legal attack on pinball came on January 21st, 1942, when New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned pinball in the city, ordering the seizure of thousands of machines. The ban — which would remain in effect until 1976 — was the culmination of legal efforts which had started much earlier, and which could be found in municipal pockets all over the country. LaGuardia, however, was the first to get the job done on a large scale. A native New Yorker of half-Italian, half-Jewish ancestry, LaGuardia despised corruption in all forms, and the image of the stereotypical Italian gangster was one he resented. During his long, popular tenure as mayor of New York City, he shut down brothels, rounded up slot machines, arrested gangsters on any charge he could find, and he banned pinball. For the somewhat puritanical LaGuardia, pinball machine pushers were "slimy crews of tinhorns, well dressed and living in luxury on penny thievery'' and the game was part of a broader "craze" for gambling. He ordered the city’s police to make Prohibition-style pinball raids and seizures its "top priority," and was photographed with a sledgehammer, triumphantly smashing the seized machines. On the first day of the ban, the city police confiscated more than 2,000 pinball machines and issued nearly 1,500 summons. A New York Times article of January 23, 1942 informed readers that the "shiny trimmings of 2,000 machines" had been stripped and sent off to the country’s munitions factories to contribute to the war effort.

 

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 New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood became a haven for backroom pinball machines. Like so many things which are illicit, though, the attraction of pinball only increased in the prohibition years following World War II, and, by the 1950s, the quickest route to proving your rebel status in America was to be seen within a few feet of a pinball machine. That cliché would later be reinforced in the form of the leather jacket-wearing, authority-bucking pinball wizard The Fonz from Happy Days. In many municipalities and towns where pinball was not illegal, a required paid licensing system (which made the machines taxable at rates of up to 50 percent) was put into effect, limiting the number of machines in one location.