Search the Community

1934 - .

Edward Northington Mimms was an college educated inventor (One patent, an oil lubricating system for crank cases on a Model T Ford, U.S. patent 1430919) and marketer who initially got his start in the fan business selling, leasing and renting vending machines, jukeboxes and amusement games like crain/claw, slot machines and pinball machines to the various diners, restaurants, building lobbies, transportation stations, bars taverns, honky-tonks and so forth in the later middle Thirties. It didn’t help pinball’s image that most of the machines were manufactured in Chicago, a hotbed of organized crime during the Great Depression. Criminal interests were said to control a large segment of the industry, and pinball was even linked to the notorious “Murder, Inc.” gang. New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was among those who believed that pinball bred crime and juvenile delinquency. The mayor said the pinball industry took in millions of dollars a year from the “pockets of school children in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money.” After cracking down on illegal slot machines, LaGuardia made prohibition of the “insidious nickel-stealers” the target of his next crusade.