4/22/2024 0 Comments Install a sharpshooter ratIn the early 1940s, pinball was in trouble. He's also the reason there is pinball in New York. He's the cowboy whose legs are draped with fawning barmaids on the backbox of the machine. I did a little online research and learned that the designer of the game was a man named Roger Sharpe. A repair person had taken it to find a replacement and then disappeared. He remembered the nonworking flipper being caused by a broken part. "You'd go into the prospective-son-in-law hall of fame!" He even brought up the benefits it would mean for his two young granddaughters, giving me two generations of family to possibly disappoint. His enthusiasm surprised me-and put on the pressure: "Are you kidding?" he said. I mentioned my plan to Jerry, to get his blessing in case something went terribly wrong. I would work on weekends, setting a goal to finish by Labor Day, six weeks away. One bored afternoon, when I discovered how easy it was to open up the machine and access the playing surface, I decided to see what I could do. Their faith in me is misplaced, considering my actual abilities, but I consider it a sign of affection. Sometimes when we come up for a weekend visit, a small to-do list will be delicately suggested. And in this family, those can be really little things: I get Bob Vila comparisons for resetting a sliding screen door on its tracks. The easiest way for me to do that is by fixing things. As much as they've welcomed me, I'll always have the urge to earn it. In that house, I always try to do plenty. The hot tub on the back porch was broken, too, and I wasn't about to open up the panel and start working on that. No matter how many times I walked by the machine to find a bottle of wine or get something from his toolbox, it never occurred to me to try to fix it. In the six years I've known him, the Sharpshooter game, which he bought secondhand from a bar supplier in the '90s, was mentioned only in occasional stories, or when his daughters kicked around the familiar idea of having it fixed and surprising him on his birthday. Eventually it became something for no one at all-a relic in the basement graveyard, across from the ping-pong table and next to the cast-off couch, an electronic putting green rolled up haphazardly beneath it. ![]() But kids don't have the patience for one- flipper pinball, so when the right flipper went out, the machine turned from a family thing to a Jerry thing. More than a decade earlier, with both flippers operational, the entire family-three kids and even his wife, Cynthia, who generally doesn't have an interest in that sort of thing but is drawn to any kind of familial excitement-would be downstairs with him, peering over the edge to watch or anxiously waiting in line for Jerry's ball to drop between the flippers, the loud clunk and seemingly endless chiming of the scoreboard signaling the start of their turn. In the basement of his family's home in rural Connecticut, the flashes of white and yellow reflected off the lenses of his glasses as he stood intently over his Sharpshooter pinball machine, sometimes for hours. So for years, Jerry played with only the left flipper.
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