When he was 15 his mother would drive him to his job fixing pinball machines at pool halls and later at the Déjà Vu strip club in East Lansing, Mich. He installed it in his parents' garage and was soon milking neighborhood kids for dimes. His obsession started with Mayfair, the first machine he ever bought-for $200 in 1970 when he was 14. He doesn't need to: Pinball has already made him prosperous. The arcade's tax status helped him persuade the Las Vegas county commissioner (a pinball fan) to arrange a waiver of the $70-per-machine licensing fee. Witness to that are the arcade's dark blue carpet (salvaged from a Vegas convention hall), mismatched ceiling tiles and a change machine that Arnold scavenged from a dumpster behind the Golden Nugget casino. Low-rent, downtown, highly efficient and if anybody's paid, they're not paid much." His inspiration is a weathered copy of a 1991 FORBES story that extolled the Army's streamlined and parsimonious ways. The other half ($350,000 so far) he donates to the Salvation Army. But in March the movie theater next door went out of business, taking with it much of Arnold's foot traffic.įor a decade he has earmarked half the profits for the organization's building fund, now $400,000. Revenue averages $12,800 a month, more than enough to cover $4,500 in rent and $2,500 in electric bills-at least for now. He operates the arcade as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so he pays no taxes on what the machines bring in. "Kids come in here looking for violent kung-fu videogames and stomp out." Such attitudes complicate Arnold's goal: to make sure his collection lives on, open to the public, long after he is gone. Which is why today's youngsters mostly can't be bothered with such mechanical contrivances. "You can't go on the Internet and play these games," he says. The games in the arcade are the cream of his 1,200-machine collection, which Arnold began in 1970 and estimates is the best in the world (he's probably right). He usually has his head buried in the guts of a vintage machine, maybe fixing a flipper on Mata Hari. In a grubby T shirt, with a long ponytail and Coke-bottle glasses, Arnold, 51, looks like the nerdy kid who never grew up.
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