Hi again, Ike, and thanks again for your reply! Hey, just because we hadn't logged in doesn't mean we hadn't
looked in.
We were actually looking for information last week on Bally's 1956
Bingo Doubleheader, and dependably found what we
needed right here in this forum, our usual first stop for pinball information. Checked in on our 2018 post while we were
at it, and then logged in to add what we'd learned in our sporadic, intermittent research of the past two years.
We've been collecting and researching baseball games -- mostly the boardgame, card game, and tabletop pinball/bagatelle-
for-home varieties, we're just pikers as regards real arcade games -- since the 1980s, and Cooperstown called on us as
consultants for their 2008 "Home Games" exhibit of the Mark Cooper collection. We've had a mutually informative
relationship with the Hall (we throw a lot of questions their way as well) ever since.
Sadly, it looks like Bueschel, Jensen, and Patton have all passed. Who now wears the mantle of Pre-Eminent Historian
of Pinball & Coin-Ops? Great as the contributed scholarship of those three guys was, it seems like there's still much more
to be learned and documented.
Having thrown ourselves, for the time being (we're so easily distracted), back into a search for the identity of the game
half-seen in that 1933 WaPo photo, we resumed researching Miner's work, and were struck with the
frisson that we were
possibly barking up the wrong tree entirely. Miner's
All-American Baseball Game, precursor to RockOla's better-known
1937 World Series, is shown at
https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=6107 and
https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=6108
-- and maybe that, and not the WaPo machine, is actually what Jensen referred to Bueschel having cited in his Expo '85
presentation. But Jensen reported Bueschel calling Miner's innovation
Baseball, or possibly
Base Ball, as seen in the photo,
not
All-American (Automatic) Baseball Game, and Bueschel evidently also made the claim (unrefuted by Jensen) that no
example of
All-American (Automatic) Baseball Game had been found. Does anyone here know if that was true in 1985,
or if it's still true 35 years later? ipdb.org provides images of only period advertisements for, and articles about, that
upright-cabinet, single-player game, which is nothing like the table-format two-man game (note Byrd at that lever)
that's seen in the WaPo photo.
However! There's also this
: a Miner patent applied for in 1928 and granted in 1931 for what, at least to our bifocal-
clad eyes, appears to be a different game completely from the
All-American model. The link to the actual page is a
mile-and-a-half long, so just go here --
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm -- enter patent number
1802521 , hit the "Search" button, and on the page that opens, click on "Images." The entire description of the game's
construction and workings is there as well, accessed by hitting the right arrows. So -- does that look anything at all
like
All-American Baseball Game ? To be fair, does it look like it could be the game in the WaPo photo?
Relatively sensible behaviour in our corner of the world has sufficiently suppressed transmission/infection rates
so that our libraries here were recently allowed to re-open, and we're going to try to get our hands on copies of
Bueschel's books on coin-op history to see if he provided any better details about the Miner innovation. It might
confirm our guess or prove that guess a stupid one, but even ruling it out would move the needle a little bit
toward finding an answer.
Thanks once again, Ike -- your attention to our quixotic quest is much appreciated!