John Yates and Pinball Paradise: How Pinball is Reviving a Small Illinois Town

McLean, Illinois, has a population of 750 people and 100 pinball machines.

The town square seems straight out of the west: brown brick buildings that bake in the summer sun, surrounding a single red pavilion in the middle of the square, where families sometimes gather after church.

This downtown square used to host harvest parades, rallies and festivals, when the railroad was McLean’s lifeblood in the early 1900s. Now, it is empty and earth-toned. McLean weathered the loss of the railroad as the main artery of business and culture, and then of Route 66 after the iconic highway was decertified in 1985, though his truck stop on modern Interstate 55 is still going strong. These days, McLean is quiet, surrounded by cornfields; people keep to themselves. There is a library, museum, and hardware store in the town square, but (with the exception of the truck stop) local businesses are only open part-time, if at all.

The color scheme changes when you enter the bank in the old town, and things are not so quiet anymore. You go under a sign that says “PINBALL PARADISE” and suddenly everything is dark and neon and beeps and beeps, full of tourists. You’re in one of the small town’s two pinball and video game museums.

Pinball Paradise and its nearby sister building, the Arcadia Arcade Museum, are two fully functioning arcades located in downtown McLean, housing about 100 games from the 1950s to the 1990s. The way a city so small that it doesn’t have a grocery store (most residents shop in Bloomington-Normal, the college town 15 miles away) it got to have one arcade machine for every seven or eight residents is strange. .

John Yates, the owner of the two arcades, says that God “worked in a strange way” and led him to pinball. Growing up in Bloomington-Normal, he bought his first pinball machine for sale at a local arcade when he was in high school in the mid-1980s.

“I had no intention of being in the arcade business,” he said by phone. In fact, he began working with a different type of machine: While in the engineering school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he bought vending machines and installed them in dormitories and apartment buildings. “I was always an entrepreneur,” Yates said.

There was a garage behind his college apartment where he wanted to store his vending machines. “It was kind of bricked up,” Yates said. “Nobody knew what it contained or who the owner was.” He tracked down the owner, who later said Yates could use it if he cleaned up all the “trash” inside.

After breaking open the bricked-up garage door, Yates found something unexpected: 15 pinball machines. He took them one by one across the street back to his apartment, where he developed a fascination for fixing them. Yates loved to make the LEDs blink and the fins move like they were supposed to, welding and waxing different parts of the machines to bring them back to their former glory.

“I thought, This is very funny. I think I want to be into video games and pinballs instead of vending machines.Yates said.

After college, Yates ended up in Silicon Valley. He continued collecting pinball machines during his time in the tech world, buying buildings at McLean to store them.

He was part of a string of failed start-ups, the latest and most painful being Boxaroo, an online sales company that was in talks to be bought by eBay before the 2008 financial crisis. Venture capital ran out and Boxaroo didn’t. plus.

So Yates moved from Silicon Valley to rural Illinois. “I was a bit frustrated and depressed. I was exhausted, ”he said. “I had a family, with three small children. So I just wanted to do something simple and relax for a bit. ”

Yates moved to McLean and spent a year remodeling one of the buildings he owned: an upstairs apartment and a downstairs business area. At this point, he had bought five buildings in the city. Eventually he would own eight, or, by his estimate, two-thirds of McLean’s downtown plaza. At first, he used them primarily as storage for pinball machines. In 2009, he opened that first building to the public, Arcadia, which is located in the Old Town Pharmacy, as a vintage arcade. That went well, as Arcadia attracted 80s game enthusiasts from near and far. Then, a decade later, the building that had once been a bank and post office also became a Yates game project: Pinball Paradise. He put the machines to work in a few quarters, just as they did when they were first produced.

“I have to keep changing banks, because they hate me so much” for bringing bags and bags full of quarters, Yates said. “He had a bank that literally broke his coin machine and said, ‘We will never fix it and we won’t accept your coins.’ At the next bench, every time I walked in, the ladies frowned at me. So I moved to another bank. ”

Two decades after moving himself and his machines to the city, the pinball business is the entire world of Yates, and much of the world of McLean as well. The arcade and pinball museum attract between two dozen and 200 tourists a day. Along with the two game rooms, he runs four different game-themed Airbnbs at McLean, with Mario-themed decor and a few arcade machines per apartment. They have grown in popularity over the past year thanks to COVID-19, as the people of Bloomington-Normal and Chicago turn to options closer than usual when they want to escape.

Along with museums, Airbnbs and other rental apartments, Yates estimates that he now owns 1,500 pinball machines. Most of them are not on display, but are in storage. He sells them on eBay, where he also sells pinball pieces; Finding the correct parts for a 1955 or 1968 machine is difficult these days, as there are only a handful of companies that still make pinball machines. And Yates is training his youngest daughter, Samantha, 13, as his apprentice.

Samantha and her 15-year-old sister, Daphne, navigate the ranks of machines fluently, naming the years different games came out and telltale signs of their age or condition. As we speak, Samantha points to a Hi-Diver 1950s game, complete with wooden rails, that reads, “My favorite pinball era are these… you have to carry the ball yourself. […] You can tell they’re older if you have to carry the ball. ”

Yates and his family members are the only people who run Pinball Paradise and Arcadia. They have no employees and, until Airbnb’s business increased during the pandemic, they brought very little economic impact or tax revenue to McLean, all while buying a large chunk of the buildings the city had to offer. Given this, Yates is not without criticism.

“Nobody has open hostility towards me, but there are definitely people who resent me,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s resentment, or jealousy, or what. But they see me as someone who is successful. ”

When Yates approached the owner of the local hardware store and the elderly owner of the house next door to ask them to add his buildings to his collection, he was met with a firm no. Yates says he contributes to the city, stating that the new $ 75,000 pavilion in the town square built in 2020 came, in large part, from the hotel taxes he pays on his Airbnbs. (Given the privacy of the tax records, we were unable to verify this claim.)

A former McLean resident, who was uncomfortable being named, said he thought Yates was exaggerating the amount of city real estate he actually owned, adding, “What difference does it make? Anyway, we are all just one generation away from a wrecking ball. ”

Yates said of McLean residents: “If you’ve been watching me, you’ve seen that I work 16 hours a day and do everything myself. It’s not like he’s a big fat cat sitting down and commanding an army of servants. “And some in town are fans of what he does: current Village of McLean board members, for example, are” big fans. “according to Yates.

“I get a lot of pats on the back and people say, ‘Oh, we’re so thankful for what you’ve done to the city,’” he said. “Everyone gives me credit for saving the city center, because all these buildings were collapsing and I have restored all the buildings.”

Yates is full of big plans to keep changing McLean’s landscape: During my visit, he suggested at various points to build a pizzeria in the plaza, or an amusement park, or a third arcade, or a pottery studio.

He describes all of his ideas as “good, clean family fun,” which is a huge change from the way pinball was perceived across America in its heyday. For much of the 20th century, pinball was considered a criminal activity, a way for teens to waste their time, and even a gateway drug to gambling addiction. Was forbidden or restricted in many municipalities, the most famous in New York City. Pinball’s image was damaged by the fact that most of the machines were made in Chicago, a hotbed of crime during the Great Depression, and by its association with other morally suspect businesses, such as billiard halls. The mayors confiscated pinball machines and built Photographs in which they smashed the offending objects into pieces.

But for Yates and his church-going family (his middle daughter, Daphne, hopes to enter the ministry), pinball is downright healthy. “We’re trying to build a family attraction where it’s something that draws families who want to come and just have a good, clean fun,” Yates said.

For area resident Eric Gordon, Arcadia and Pinball Paradise represent a return to some of the vibrancy the city once had. When I first met him, he had brought his teenage son, Cole, to town to remember his own family history there and to bond over a shared love of 80s games. Eric Gordon told me that his father was pumping gas at the stop. local truck dealer during the Great Depression, and even met his wife doing it. Now, Eric Gordon said, McLean’s downtown never looked better.

“He looked pretty tough” as a kid, Eric Gordon said. “But this looks fantastic … and I can show my son the games he played when he was his age or younger.” Cole Gordon noted that he is not as good at games as his father, although, of course, he lacks decades of practice.

“What a great way to bring generations together,” Eric Gordon said of the arcades. And soon, the arcade will be passed on to the next generation, as Yates’ daughter, Samantha, trains in what he calls the “lost art” of electromechanical pinball maintenance, ready to take her place in the pinball world. often dominated by men and, as she put it, “help my daddy”.

Yates’ success was unplanned: “I haven’t really marketed this at all. I never ran an ad, I never put up a billboard, “he said. There is a Facebook page and a listing on the Village of McLean website, but that’s about it. However, as it continues to expand its operation, Yates plans to try to attract more and more tourists. “And that’s when I think there will really be an impact on the city.” Maybe pinball is what keeps people visiting McLean for generations to come.