Pinball wizard Steve Kordek

Not everyone gets a half-page/three-column obit in The New York Times. But Steve Kordek did.

Not a household name in your household? Mine, neither.

But he invented something that was pretty darned important, and that was putting two flippers/two buttons at the bottom of the pinball machine. Which meant you no longer had to use body English – whacking the machine back and forth – to keep the ball rolling.

Mr. Kordek died a few weeks back, at the age of 100, and his life story reads like one of those All American, apocryphal-but-true sagas that we don’t seem to hear enough of these days.

He was a Polish guy from Chicago, son of a Polish guy who worked in the steel mills, and the oldest of ten kids – in case you can’t hear it, let me note that what was just written was done in a full-blown Chicago accent – and, if he hadn’t gone ahead and married a Polish girl, he might have married my mother. (Not that she knew him or anything. But they were both Northside ethnic Catholics, so it could have happened. Maybe the Polish girl Steve did marry went to Alvernia High School with my mother, too.)

During the Depression, Mr. Kordek went to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps, doing stuff like planting trees and building lookout towers for fires – the stuff we used to do in the way back when we still believed in investing in infrastructure.

As the story (or the obit) goes – as I mentioned, this has all the elements of apocryphal-but-true -

…in 1937, he was walking down the street without an umbrella,  when a torrential rain forced him into the lobby of a building he was passing. It was the Genco Company [one of – get this – the “more than two dozen pinball manufacturers in Chicago at that time”]. A receptionist asked if he was looking for a job.

Wasn’t there a song about this during the Depression? Something along the lines of “I Met My Million Dollar Baby in the Five and Ten Cent Store”?

And how interesting that the name Genco figured prominently in another All American story, this one pure fiction: it was the name of Vito Corleone’s olive oil company in The Godfather.

Anyway, Mr. Kordek started working as a 45 cents an hour solderer, went to night school to learn about electronics, and started working his way up through the Genco ranks. Where, in the late 1940’s, he improved on a six flipper/side button design with his simple two-by-two.

The rest, as they say, is revolutionary history.

There was also an obit in Vending Times, which even fewer folks get than one in the NY Times.

In pinball circles, Kordek became a legend, and well into his nineties he would get mobbed at pinball events. "Every year he would go to Pinball Expo in Chicago, no matter what, and everybody would want to hear him talk and listen to his history -- because it was the history of pinball," [David} Silverman [of the  National Pinball Museum said.

He continued designing pinball games into his 90’s.

I’m not someone who grew up playing pinball. It was a boy thing. It was a bigger city thing. It was an old-fashioned thing. It was a smoke-filled room thing.

Kids in madras shorts – at least in my world – didn’t play pinball.

Still, when I’m in an arcade, I gravitate towards the old-fashioned, flipper-based  pinball machines, not the electronic whiz-banger gizmos. I live the simplicity of them, the modesty, the lack of score inflation, the lack of flash. I wouldn’t mind having one in my home (even though there’s no room for one.)

Anyway, I enjoyed reading about Mr. Kordek’s life and times for a lot of reasons.

• It’s a blue-collar, ethnic Chicago story.
• He stayed put – living in a Chicago suburb when he died.
• He’s from my parents’ generation.
• All hail the New Deal!
• It’s about a country where folks invented and manufactured things that were tangible and useful, yet also had brio and cool, even.
• It’s about finding something you’re good at and really like.
• It’s about working well past the increasingly arbitrary age of 65, which is what you get to do if you find something that  you’re good at and really like (as long as what you’re good at and really like isn’t completely physically taxing – I get why a lot of workers have to pack it in by the time they’re in their sixties).

Here’s what Mr. Kordek had to say a couple of years ago to The Chicago Tribune (taken from The Times obit):

“I had more fun in this business than anyone could believe.”

As business epitaphs go, not a bad one.