Thursday, June 21, 2007

Those Carefree Days of Childhood Gambling....


Where was it ever legal to put a gambling device where children could reach it? I live in Oklahoma, where you can't make a left turn without running into an Indian casino, and I've never seen anything like that.

5 comments:

SallyP said...

The heck with that! I want to be able to buy lunch for a quarter!

Anonymous said...

It certainly was in England, although such places might as well have had a neon sign at the door saying "MEET PERVERTS HERE."

Adam Barnett said...

joe - I can understand a pinball arcade, but this thing actually dispensed money if you scored high enough. Is that common in England???? Can children really go and gamble that way?

Anonymous said...

Well, they could when I was a kid. There was one place where the prizes were tokens which could be exchanged for a box of chocolates or a large carton of cigarettes. Different times...

T. Zombie said...

At some places you'd rack up "free games" and then cash out before you left. The arcade operator/bartender/grocery store owner/etc. would pay you in coin what you had earned on the credit reel. Some games even had three digit credit counters (it was hard to justify that one as not being for gambling because who was going to earn and actually play 999 games?). There were also pay out machines in the 30s and 40s that just gave you money, tokens, tickets, or prizes outright. Laws were passed to make it illegal for minors to play pinball around that time, too. The cops cracked down on pinball in the 40s and smashed them like slot machines. There's a famous series of photos of Mayor LaGuardia helping destroy pinball machines in New York with a hatchet.