Pinball would-be wizard's lament: For the days of Tropic Isle

One of my favorite childhood memories goes back to when I was 7 or 8 years old.

My dad would take me with him to his Friday-night bowling league. While he bowled, I'd play the pinball machine with the handful of nickels he had given me. That's right, whippersnappers: Nickels. And you got five balls per game, too.

Between playing pinball and watching the latest episode of "Twilight Zone" in the bar, I happily whiled away the hours. Afterward, I got to bowl a game or two. Sometimes, we'd go out for a midnight snack at a greasy spoon. Didn't get home until 1 a.m. or so some nights.

That was the start of my infatuation with pinball. It blossomed in elementary school, when right down at the end of my street, in a back room of Theby's grocery store, there was a small game room, featuring a "Tropic Isle" pinball machine. Again, it cost only a nickel and you could win a replay by amassing only 1,000 points. It was a real game of skill, too, because if you could shoot the ball through lighted numbers 1 through 5 at the top of the machine, the red "special" light would go on at the two side "drains" of the machine. You'd get a free game, too, for losing the ball there.

Early adulthood has some fond memories of meeting friends at the Lantern or White's Tavern in Naperville and playing the "Star Pool" machine for an absurd length of time.

I always thought when I grew up, I'd get my own pinball machine. So, when I was in my 40s, and my son Rob was maybe 7 or 8, we took a trip to Home Arcade in Lisle.

I hadn't been playing much pinball in those days, but I was a kid in a candy store in this place. Scores of pinball machines, and all of 'em set up for free play. Rob and his buddy might have been getting a shade bored but I could have spent the day there.

On the way out, I asked the owner, Paul Biechler, about the "Tropic Isle" machine I was so nostalgic for. Sure enough, he found it in some giant catalog and said he could get it for me at a price I can't recall but one that didn't seem unreasonable.

I filed this away for future reference, but never got back there.

Until earlier this week. That's when I noticed Biechler's "going out of business" ad in the Daily Herald.

"That's a good story," I thought, and initially assigned it to one of our metro reporters, Jake Griffin. But, partially out of guilt over how much I'd been dumping on Jake this week, and partly because of my own interest, I took it back and decreed I'd write the story. It appears on Page 3 of today's paper.

When I went by Biechler's store on Main Street in Lisle to interview him, I'll admit I had some vague notion that maybe I'd ask about the Tropic Isle again or see if there were any other bargains. But remember I'm the guy who whined in this very space just a week ago about scraping my nickels together to pay my property tax bill, so I didn't pursue a purchase.

I did, however, want to play a little pinball, and you can catch me doing that on dailyherald.com. You may recall last fall, I gloated about beating a 10-year-old on the golf course; so in the interest of fairness, I must report that a 67-year-old man, the soon-to-be-retired Biechler, cleaned my clock at shuffle bowling.

Perhaps trying to cheer me up a smidge, Biechler's wife and business partner, Ann, said:

"He gets to practice a lot," she said.

jdavis@dailyherald.com