Flashback Friday: Pinball Crackdown

Parents have long been suspicious of bad influences on their kids, and apparently in the ’40s, the big concern in Brooklyn was pinball machines.

This photo was published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on January 23, 1942, and the accompanying article describes the scene: Under the direction of Mayor LaGuardia, police confiscated more than 900 pinball machines around Brooklyn, including 166 from the Savoy Vending Company, which was located at 651 Atlantic Avenue (where the Atlantic Center Mall is now).

LaGuardia told the Eagle that he’d been driven to round them up after receiving a lot of complaints “from mothers of school children, who called the machines ‘nickle snatchers.'”

Benjamin M. Day, head of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, told The New York Sun that he felt the games should be outlawed, despite a court’s decision otherwise, because of their terrible influence on kids:

Declaring that youth must be protected from corruption at all costs, Mr. Day appealed to school principals and church leaders to co-operate with the police in eliminating the machines, which he said are stepbrothers to the slot machine and heavy contributors to youthful delinquency.

Indeed, many held that idea, and worse. LaGuardia accused Savoy of being a “racket dominated by interests heavily tainted with criminality,” and a district attorney claimed the business was a front for the “Murder-for-Money” gang.

In the New York Supreme Court’s decision in a case the following month, where Savoy attempted to recover the seized machines, the court sided with the police, stating that the pinball machines might not have appeared to allow gambling, but didn’t discourage it, either. And worse: the effect they had on the children!

From the court’s decision:

It is hardly likely that the child who has no lack of opportunities for play and clean amusement is drawn from his healthy associations to squander lunch money and often hard-earned spending money upon the play of coin-operated machines for mere amusement. It is the lure and enticement of a hoped-for but never realized easy gain. And there we have the beginning of a hold upon fancy and imagination that increases its demand, nurtured by unsavory associates, until, too late, the path of petty crime, juvenile delinquency and hardened criminality has claimed another victim.

We weren’t able to uncover when the business shut down, or if this controversy had any major impact on them, though we do know the site where their building was is the one that had been considered in the ’50s for the new Dodgers Stadium, until the team left for California when the plan fell through.

But apparently some remnants of Savoy’s “evil” machines still exist — you can occasionally find old brass tokens for sale.