![]() ![]() ![]() He can’t bear to watch when the auction begins. He is here today, because he won’t be tomorrow. Virtually every penny he had poured into the museum. He has bartered landscaping work to help pay off a client who lent him $10,000, but the bulk of the money will come from selling his collection - one he concedes is probably worth less than half of what he spent to amass it. At 66, when most folks are contemplating retirement, he is in debt over the museum, eyeing a financial future that depends largely on how much cash this and half a dozen auctions to follow will raise. Graceland with flippers.īut his dream came with a hefty price. Silverman didn’t just have one of the largest collections of pinball machines in North America, he had a vision: a museum so spectacular it would forever cement pinball’s place in the annals of American pop culture. “David was the ultimate collector, and he loved his machines,” said Dan Morphy, owner of the auction house selling his collection. Silverman’s collection - more than 800 machines that span the history of pinball - from its beginnings in the drawing rooms of French aristocrats to its final days in strip-mall arcades, will be sold in small lots over two years to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt he has accrued. The consummate pinball collector is calling it quits. And if things go as David Silverman hopes, these people will pay a lot of money for one (or two) of these classic wood-rail pinballs or one of their modern cousins. One man from Silver Spring has brought them all together. Barrier broken, they take a tentative pull on the plunger, and from there it’s game on. A sheepish glance over their shoulder and suddenly they’ve got two fingers on the flipper buttons. “My friends and I, well, we’d hang around and just play.”Įven the shy can’t help themselves. “I was young back then,” says Cleary, 74. He stands at an old wood-rail “Gusher” machine and smiles at the memory of how much fun you could have for a nickeldime. Retired military, he lives just one town over and has made the short drive to have a look-see. For the half-dozen or so folks who have come, the sights and sounds of these classic machines, with their colorful back-glass images of beauty queens in bright purple bikinis or gangsters in brown fedoras or showgirls wearing red feathers, bring back sweet memories.īill Cleary is here. Pinball heaven has sprouted in this building on a two-lane roadway in eastern central Pennsylvania. The air is punctuated by the distinctive “ka-chunck kachunk, kachunk” of flippers, followed by the high-pitched “bings” of pinballs sent skittering. In a high-ceilinged, 36,000-square-foot showroom, pinball machines line two walls. But then the games that brought him joy became a burden. At one point, David Silverman owned 900 pinball machines.
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