About Stern: Past and Present
A presentation by Gary Stern before the Century Club at the ASI 2004 Industry Show
(reprinted with permission from the PinGame Journal Issue #104)

I just want to warn you all that I forget stories, get 'em wrong, and tell the same story over and over again as my children and co-workers point out to me. My children can walk out of the room; my co-workers are stuck!

Many of you have heard this before, but I'll tell you quickly how my father got into the pinball business. He started as an operator in Philadelphia. He was a foreman in an overcoat factory but he had a couple of friends who told him to get some of these pinball machines. So he got two machines and put them in a location. He came back and found his machines behind a counter and somebody else's machines were there. Apparently, it was somebody else's location.

He said this was not the business for him, but then was told to put the machines in another location. He did, and ten o'clock that night he got a call that the machines were broken! He said, "That's it! I'm out of this business!" but he went out to fix the games anyway. These were push slot games that he found wouldn't work, not because they were broken, but because they were so full of coins that the push chute wouldn't go in!

That's how he got into the business. He would take my mother out and they would stop off at locations to empty the jukebox to pay for the date. He became a distributor, and my theory is that many of these older operator/distributors became distributors to get the product cheaper than their competitors. Today we have a lot of distributor/operators who took over "troubled" routes in the '70s and '80s and are more successful with their operation than their distribution. Some whom I know in Chicago, are out of distribution recently and are concentrating on their routes.

It amazes me that distributors today can have multiple locations and manage all these different satellite offices successfully. My father was in Philadelphia and started a satellite office in Wilkes-Barre. He found out, as he told me, that whatever he could make in Philadelphia, his manager in Wilkes-Barre could manage to lose! So he stayed with one office.

In 1947, he was a 35-year-old punk kid and came to Chicago to see his suppliers. Harry Williams was a few years older and my father came to see him. He sat behind Harry's desk, put his feet up and said to Harry, "Why don't you sell me your company." Well Harry went up in his airplane to think about it. He flew around Chicago for three hours and came back down to sell my father half of the company.

Harry was really into flying. So much so that he had a device used to train pilots called a Link Trainer. His head engineer was Gordon Horlick who trained pilots during World War II. He was a "real" pilot. Every afternoon, Harry and Gordon spent some time flying the Link Trainer. That was their work for the day. They worked in the morning, they flew the Trainer in the afternoon. My father flew it once and he had a perfect landing except he was 300 feet underground, other than that PERFECT.

Actually they wouldn't even let him in the factory to start. When we bought in, he was going to do sales and it was a long time before Harry let him out there. But Sam certainly knew how to manufacture pinball machines.

He moved to Chicago in 1947 and we all came in '48 and lived in the Belden Stratford Hotel. Here was a 35-year-old kid with a '47 or '48 big Caddy limousine the company had, with running boards on the side. I know there were running boards because of the driver named Mike. One day, my brother and I were in the back of the limo and Mike was stopped for a traffic offense. The cop who was pointing his gun at Mike and arresting him for not stopping at some sign was standing on the running board. Mike was talking back to him and eventually wound up driving off with the cop still standing there! That was the first time I wound up in jail; I was very young.

The original factory building was downtown and as I understand it, they used every other floor. One floor was occupied and the one below had jacks on it to hold up the floor above.

Then they moved into a building at 4242 W. Fillmore, which is where I started working. It was down the street from the Fillmore district police station, where they stole the batteries out of the cop cars, it was a 'great' neighborhood. We had a big jewelry robbery, I remember, and the getaway car came off of our lot! I also remember going out there to find one guy's car was on bricks, they had stolen the wheels during the work day. It was a wonderful place.

They made Magnus organs there. These were little organs, smaller than the size of pinball machine, and they were electric with a little fan. They tried all kinds of stuff including that record cutting machine but the records all stuck together so that never really worked. There was the book machine that was the best engineered thing, but we sold it to Rockola. And of course everybody made bumper pool tables.

I remember negotiating the union contract with Harry Weaver who worked in the stock room but became head of the local union. They had us and Coin and maybe Bally, too. He was very nice and he had a committee of 13 employees and I had a couple of guys. He once got mad at me and said he should have left me in that box and shipped me out. Apparently I used to play in the boxes when I was a kid and they stapled me up in there.

It's interesting. Right now we're doing manufacturing, which is unusual in America. People ask why we don't send it offshore to Mexico or whatever. Those of you who have been in our factory know that there is really no reason to send the work to Mexico because we brought Mexico to Chicago; our workforce is Mexican. But in those days there were other ethnic groups. I remember that the north side of Chicago had a lot of Japanese living there and we had a lot of Japanese men working as well as a lot of Polish women. Chicago has the second largest population of Poles in the world. Only Warsaw has more Poles in it than Chicago.

When I was sixteen Sam started me working there in the stock room and that's because this is a manufacturing business. In manufacturing, you lose if you don't have good material control. I'm a big believer in nepotism. I think it's wonderful he gave me a job. Every summer I would work there. I remember one summer, I guess I was much older, we had a business disagreement and either I quit or he fired me. I think he fired me. So seven in the morning the next day, my mother woke me up to go to work. I said I don't have to go to work, Sam fired me. My mother said well I just re-hired you, get your ass out of bed and go to work. I had job security.

He used to need to wake me up in the morning. He'd call at seven and I'd pretend I was already up. He couldn't just call to wake me up so he'd say he was calling to give me one new idea. So every morning I woke to a new idea. It was great to wake up everyday like that. Working with one's father either works real well or real bad. You get to know your parent a lot differently if you work with them. It was quite an opportunity.

You'd think that the most important thing that the design group does is to design pinball machines? It isn't. The most important thing they do for us, is create and keep the bill of material. There are 3,500 separate pieces in a pinball machine. Over a half a mile of wire, more man-hours than a Ford Taurus. And in those days, even more because we weren't solid state. If the right flipper is not on the parts list, Eddy Spears, our Purchasing Manager, will notice it. But if a flat rail is left off or some special post is left off, we'll have a million and a half to two million dollars of parts coming in and nothing to build. It is a manufacturing business. It's not easy, but you have to control it.

The only thing I can remember that I did drastically wrong was when I was working in the stock room and I just didn't understand how Sam felt about his business. It was very hot and not air conditioned in that plant and I put up a sign in the stock room that I thought was cute. It read "Sammy's Sweat Shop," a nice painted sign. It caused a big uproar and I was ushered away and it was cleared away before my father came out and saw it. He ran EVERYTHING, not like management today, he ran everything.

Harry was with us all the time, even after he retired. He was like a second father to me and was the one who took me to the Museum of Science and Industry. Harry wanted to build a train game and wanted to look at trains and I got to go. He lived in California; he lived in Chicago; they had a life that you might think was wild. Harry was a great ballroom dancer and he would go dancing at the big clubs and people would gather around. Harry was married three times. He stayed in touch with the first two wives and took good care of them until they died. They both died on the same, exact day.

Harry and Lyn Durant both worked for Ray Maloney (Bally) at one point. They started together and then went their separate ways. But Durant had a Cord automobile. It was front wheel drive and apparently, as Harry told me, it made too much noise in the transmission and Durant thought something was wrong with it. So he asked Harry to ride on the fender, in the middle of winter, listening to the transmission.

Many of the people in this room knew Lyn Durant; I never did. He invented the shuffle alley and was making 525 of them a day in 1949. The cost was $125 and he was selling them for $225. That computes out to $52,500 a day, less the little bit of overhead he had.

[Steve Kordek interjected and continued the story "Collecting in cash. The line of trucks to pick up the games ran all the way down to Addison Avenue. They came down to pick up every game they could get. But the only way they could get them was to pay cash on the barrel. No records, no bills, no credit. Cash right then and there." Gary went on.]

Marty Bromley told me that his father, I. B. Brombert, came to see Durant and there were no games for him. So he went down to the dock and took a stamp and marked the boxes for himself. He went back around and handed Lyn the money and Lyn said there's no games for you. The reply was, "Yes there are, they're loading them now!" It must have been quite a wild time with the volume there. But most of you also know that Lyn Durant died with nothing. He was quite a liver.

We had a bomb threat when I was working at Williams for my father. He called from the airport and I said Sam, we had a bomb threat! He said, "Well, what do you want I should do? Take care of it," and he hung up and got on the plane. But the question was do you let the people out or not let them out. Well, we didn't let them out. Across the street, on Roscoe, Bally had a factory and they had a bomb threat and they let the people out. Then, every week they had a bomb threat!

Our second bomb threat, or what we thought was a bomb threat was because we were very organized. The story was that you paged my brother, Dr. David Stern, like he's walking around the factory, if there was a threat. Of course, he was never there except for the day he WAS there and we paged him. Everyone thought we had a bomb!

I lived in Lincoln Park and my car was not working so I told the cab driver to take me to 3401 North California Ave. He said, "That's United Manufacturing," which it wasn't anymore, "Lyn Durant." How did he know that? Apparently, you guys would know better than me, but one Christmas Eve, Durant, whose apartment was upstairs above the factory, wanted to go downtown and called a cab. The cab showed up and Lyn asked the cab driver why he was working on Christmas Eve? The driver replied with reasons like he had to buy presents for his kid and he needed the money. Durant gave him a tip that folded up looked like a dollar, but it was a hundred. So there was always a cab nearby, for years, in case Durant needed one.

Durant used to drink quite a bit. He used to give away fur coats, give away cars. The Williams lunchroom was Durant's ballroom. One day he was coming up the elevator with the owner of a Chicago nightclub, Jack Schotts, to the second floor and he said to the elevator operator, "I want a drink." Jack said we're almost there, but Lyn repeated, "NO, I want a drink now." The elevator operator stopped and opened the elevator door. It's half way up, and the door opens and there in the elevator shaft was an alcove where Durant had built a bar so he could stop the elevator and serve booze to his friends.

Sam and Harry had a special relationship. They worked together for a long time and working with them, you learned something. I was sitting after dinner with them one time and they had a playfield drawing out that Harry had brought from California. The three of us were on the floor looking at this drawing. Sam said great, but I think in the upper left corner you should do this or make some change to it. I picked Harry up at the hotel the next morning and he's got another drawing, corrected to show just what my father had wanted. There's no drafting table in the hotel, no way he had time to change the drawing; he just had done two drawings. One the way he knew Sam would like it and one the way he knew he wouldn't.

When we were making Stingray, our second game at the old Stern (I'm the programmer of that game), there was no way we were gonna get new chips in time, so we took the chips from the old game and double switched it. If you wanted light A and a thousand points here and you had a light A on the old game and a thousand points over there, you'd double the two switches. My father said it would never work. I knew it would, so we put a flipper in a hole in the middle of the playfield and showed it to him. "You can't do THAT" he said, and started talking about why and what else we could do but he lost sight of what we were going to do and focused on the flipper. He was right, of course, that wouldn't have worked, but we got to do what we wanted to do in the first place.

That is where we started with solid state and the technology had changed everything. Before then, Harry would say he could do everything himself: he could come up with a concept, design the layout, design the mechanical parts, do the wiring diagram, make the sample himself and play it and change it. With solid state, everything became specialized and it just continued to change.

I started Data East Pinball in 1986. This was after my father passed away. Data East Pinball was then purchased by Sega in 1994 and became Sega Pinball. In 1999, I then purchased the company and re-named it Stern Pinball.

Today we're still making pinball and still changing. We don't have all the technology the other folks do, the high tech stuff. Technology will continue to change things but we're still making the oldest dinosaur in the business. There are changes both outside and inside. People say that we have a monopoly because we're the only people making pinball machines in the world. We don't have a monopoly because we're competing against all the other coin-op entertainment games that are taking our spots, we're competing, as is the rest of the coin-op industry, with all the other non-coin-op entertainments including people staying at home. There's a good side to that, because we have a new business selling our games, through distributors, to homeowners. We basically think we have two markets, two demographics in America. 25 year olds in the bars, plus or minus five years and 45 year olds, plus or minus 5 or 10 years, who are buying games for the home. They're raising a whole new crop of players because now they're 12 and 15 playing in Dad's rec room and when they're 21, or 19 with a phony ID, they're going to the bar playing our games.

We do always talk about pinball being a street piece, a bar business. Harry was doing a game, Hot Hand, which you might remember had a big flipper at the top. It was a card game and there were a lot of holes and it knocked the ball from one hole to another. Harry said, kids are gonna love this. I said tongue in cheek, "That's great, but your job is to get people drunk and keep 'em drunk, we don't really care about the kids."

We are always looking for different types of locations. New street locations are the movie theaters and stores like Wal-Mart. We need those because bars are suffering from restrictions like anti-smoking and drunk driving laws. We must broaden our player base. We were making games for a certain type of player, but now we are trying to expand. We make our games with Spanish speech because this country is going to be 50% Spanish speaking so we are trying to slowly widen our appeal. I think it's very important that this business expand its player base.

The other thing we do is make a game that is retro, not nostalgic. A new Volkswagen convertible is retro. If you have a '78 Beetle convertible, that's nostalgic. We make retro pinball.

I've read that 3% of people in English pubs play an AWP. If they can broaden that base and get another 2%, they're gonna expand their business incredibly. If they lose the first 3% then they go backwards. We have the same thing. We have to make it where the young people have FUN. We have to keep the core player and satisfy the collector and the enthusiast, for example. We have to make a game that everyone can understand and enjoy. We make what we call mechanical action pinball. The casual player doesn't notice a light in front of a target. He sees a target drop, or Kenny fall over dead or the Balrog come out. A physical state change. He gets an idea of what to do and he feels good when he does it. It's self-educating and he does it again, it's Pavlovian pinball. We're trying to make a game today to get the casual player without losing the core player.

We license all our product, which does a number of things. When you start making Lord of the Rings or Monopoly, which was a great slot machine from Williams, you've got an instant leg up and people are already looking for the game. It also puts us in touch with other creative people outside of our little world. It puts us in touch with the Simpsons people who did artwork and the speech for the Simpsons pinball machine. Arnold did the speech and worked with us for our game Terminator, as he did with the first Terminator. The Lord of the Rings art was done by the movie people's artist. You get with different creative people and by dong that we make a game that has elements of fun but also has other people involved and not just those ivory tower ideas. If you make a stuffed animal that looks like a mouse, you won't sell it unless you pay Walt. It's the same concept. We only make licensed games.

The reason we do all of this is, first of all, is because we want to make a living. Virtually all of us at our company have been in pinball at one place or another. Gottlieb people with great mechanical engineering, software designers and playfield designers from Williams. We basically have looked to get the best people we can. All of us have a mission. We are trying to make a living but in addition we are trying to save an American icon.

You might say, what's the big deal? What's the importance if pinball goes away? Well, for the operator it's important if he loses ANY genre of game. As soon as he loses one, he won't have it later. What goes around, comes around. Something is gonna come back and he needs that variety. There's not a lot out there right now for an operator.

But more important than that, as we say, it's an American icon. If it disappeared it wouldn't be the end of the world, but we think it's a little bit of the fabric of life and that's what we're doing, trying to preserve pinball.

I've rambled enough. Now do I get to take the food down to the show floor for everyone, isn't that the deal?

Editor's Note: A number of people at the meeting expressed their thanks to Gary for his talk and wished him and is company well. President Steve Kordek remarked,"I just want to say that I'd like to see pinball stay here from now to forever. I've gone through a series of times when pinballs were not produced...other games took precedence and pingames were not produced sometimes for as long as a year and a half, particularly when you were making bumper pool tables.

"I always said, 'Pinball's gonna come back.' Everyone said, 'Steve Kordek says it will come back, it will come back.' Well, it always came back. Now it doesn't have to come back, it's staying and I just hope that it does stay because pingames are things that were created in America and is really an American concept and I hope that it stays. I wish you (Gary) the best of luck and the people you're working with. And I certainly hope you're making a buck out of this thing because if you're not, I don't know what the Hell you're staying in the business for!" PGJ