Norfolk Island’s Auxiliary Settlement: Penal Origins and Pitcairn Continuities

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Local history, Regional History

Just five weeks after the First Fleet led by Captain Arthur Phillip arrived in Port Jackson in 1788, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King was despatched to Norfolk Island 1,673 km north-east of Sydney to establish an ancillary settlement of convicts and free settlers※. The British, recognising the island’s strategic importance in the western Pacific and the need to keep it out of French hands, had a further, practical motive for colonising Norfolk Island. Captain James Cook on his 1774 Pacific voyage identified the island’s (Norfolk Island) pines and (New Zealand) flax plant as invaluable materials for the construction of masts and sails. As it turned out they weren’t, being too brittle for this purpose, although the island’s soil proved good for agriculture and farming (in the early settlement days Norfolk served as Sydney’s ”food bowl”) [Robert Macklin, Hamilton Hume, Our Greatest Explorer, (2019); ‘History’, (Norfolk Island National Park), www.parksaustralia.gov.au].

≜ Norfolk Is penal settlement, ca.1790 (Geo. Raper) (State Lib. of NSW)

From the early days of settlement the convicts made an unsuccessful attempt to depose King. In 1800 Rum Corps officer Joseph Foveaux was made commandant of Norfolk Island, and he successfully but ruthlessly suppressed a new insurrection in 1801 by United Irish prisoners. Foveaux summarily executed some of the convicts without due legal process and courted controversy for his practice of selling female prisoners to settlers. However overall he was commended by the authorities for the advancement of public works on the island under his administration [B. H. Fletcher, ‘Foveaux, Joseph (1767–1846)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/foveaux-joseph-2062/text2567, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 30 December 2020].

(Image: www.lonelyplanet.com)

Abandonment and penal rebirth
Settlement on Norfolk Island went in fits and starts. In 1814 it was abandoned altogether◕ due to a combination of factors – a poor harbour made for perilous landing sites; isolation and remoteness; too costly to maintain; diminished necessity (Sydney had achieved self-sufficiency in food) [‘Looking at History’, 14-Aug-2015, wwwrichardjohnbrblogspotcom]. In 1825 the island was resettled again as a penal colony. This was the beginning of Norfolk’s darkest chapter of its history. The British determined that the reestablished penal colony would be home to the worst case prisoners. Norfolk Island’s second penitentiary has been described as a “planned hell”, with a series of convict uprisings and escape attempts a recurring feature (eg, the 1846 “Cooking Pot” rebellion resulted in its 12 leaders being executed for the murder of four minor officials [Burridge, K. (2013). Review of Mühlhäusler, Peter, and Joshua Nash, Norfolk Island: History, people, environment, language. Oceanic Linguistics, 52(2).] (see Postscript for a different perspective on the question of the penitentiary’s severity).

In the wake of the Bounty
By 1855, with transportation to New South Wales ended, there was only eleven residents left on Norfolk Island (the colony’s remaining 119 convicts had already been relocated to the draconian Van Diemen’s Land prison system). The following year the island was turned over to (194) descendants of the Pitcairn Island mutineers and their Tahitian families. Each was entitled to 50-acre grant of land on Norfolk. Some of the new settlers returned to Pitcairn within ten years but many who stayed pursued their traditional vocations of farming and whaling❂.

(Photo: Getty Images/Lonely Planet)

By the late 19th century the settlers on NI were engaged in a range of industries – forestry, cattle and the growth of export crops (lemon, passionfruit, banana). Changes in land use altered the ecosystem of Norfolk Island. The intensive agricultural use, the clearing of native land, saw the original subtropical rainforest give way to a pastoral landscape of rolling green hills encircled by rocky outcrops (‘Norfolk Island NP’).

Norfolk Island, inching towards autonomy and self-rule
After Australia achieved federation Norfolk Island was administered as an external territory, control alternating between the Australian Commonwealth and NSW. During WWII an Allied airfield was constructed on the island, testimony to its strategic importance in the Pacific theatre of the war. In 1979 Norfolk Island was granted limited self-government by Australia. A constant theme for Norfolk Island throughout its post-war history—perhaps even existing from the initial Australian takeover before WWI—has been the tensions and ambiguities resulting from a search for identity…the NI community is aware of the constant shadow of Australian governance over it and yet it also sensing in its distinctive Pacific Island nature a yearning for self-rule and independence (Burridge). In 2015 Canberra delivered a body blow to the autonomous aspirations of locals when, on the back of an NI economic decline due to the GFC and diminished tourism, it rescinded the Island’s self-government [‘Norfolk Island broke, set to be stripped of self rule’, (Nine News), 19-Mar-2015, www.9news.com.au].

(Image: www.mapsland.com)

Endnote: The period since the transportation of convicts to NI ended has been marked by an absence of violent crime. However early in the 21st century the tranquility was punctured by not one but two murders in the peaceful island community. In 2002 a young woman (an Australian mainlander working in NI) was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Two year after this, the NI government’s deputy chief minister was fatally shot in Kingston the NI capital…the murder had a family rather than a political motive and was not connected to the earlier homicide [New Zealand Herald, 20-Jul-2004].

≜ NI’s old and newer prisons with the iconic Norfolk Is Pines in the background (Source: www.aucklandmuseum.com)

Postscript: Norfolk Island, a “punitive hell” for incorrigibles or an overstated case?  
The conventional view of Norfolk Island as a penitentiary by the mid-19th century is that it “was the most notorious penal station in the English-speaking world and represented all that was bad about the convict system”⚃ (eg, convicts universally brutalised by sadistic gaolers). The colonial secretary in London directed Governor Brisbane in NSW in 1825 to send “the worst description of convicts” to Norfolk, (those) “excluded from all hope of return”. The characterisation of the NI penal colony as “hell-on-earth” is myth not fact according to historian Tim Causer who demurs from the consensus opinion. He argues that the NI inmates were not predominantly of the worst kind, not recidivists, not “doubly-convicted capital respites”, as widely stated. Using the available data Causer shows a contrary picture: over 2,400 of the convicts were first offenders who came directly from Britain and Ireland; nearly 70% sent to NI were sentenced for non-violent crimes (against property) (“‘The worst types of sub-human beings’? The myth and reality of the convicts of the Norfolk Island penal settlement, 1825-1855”, (Tim Causer), March 2011, www.researchgate.net].

__________________________________________
※ the original inhabitants of Norfolk Island were Polynesian seafarers (14th-15th century) who journeyed there from the Kermadec Islands or the North Island of New Zealand

◕ and replaced as a penal destination by Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania)

❂ roughly half of the present NI population of 1,800 are descended from Pitcairners

⚃ at the time NI penitentiary was universally synonymous with criminality and perversion, even alluded to by Charles Dickens in Hard Times. NI was widely considered equal to or worst than the barbaric penal colony at Macquarie Harbour (Tasmania)

Suburban Sydenham: A Mixed and Changing Landscape of Grand Estates, Workers’ Cottages, Industrial Concentration and Airport Encroachment

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Aviation history, Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Leisure activities, Local history, Politics

Sydenham is a tiny inner suburb of Sydney which sits on traditional Cadigal land, part of the Eora nation, some eight kilometres south-west of the CBD. In the formative colonial period Sydenham was subsumed under a wider area known as Bulanaming which stretched from Petersham to Cook’s River  and included  a chunk of undesirable swampy land  (Gumbramorra Swamp).

(Map: www.dictionaryofsydney.org/)

Grand designs Sydenham
From the 1850s on, the better land on the eastern part of the suburb was turned into grand estates for well-to-do colonial businessmen. These large villa estates occupied an area from Unwins Bridge Road back to Cooks River Road (later renamed Princes Highway). Perhaps the pick of these “large country retreats” in Sydenham, located between Reilly and Grove Streets, was the Grove Estate, with its two-storey Georgian villa, owned by John George Church. Adjoining the Grove Estate was ironmonger Richard Reilly’s Tivoli Estate with a similarly impressive Georgian villa➀ [Meader, Chrys, Sydenham, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/sydenham, viewed 25 Dec 2020].

The working class swamped
Commencing in the 1880s, the grand estates started to be broken up by subdivision and the suburb’s complexion took on a recognisable working class character. Rows of Victorian cottages sprang up, many occupied by workers at the nearby Albion and other brickworks in nearby St Peters. At the same time developers sold cheap, unviable land in the swamp area to the working class. This was the notorious Tramvale Estate—badly designed, lacking in basic sewerage facilities, low-lying, prone to flooding and poor drainage—resulting in the spread of disease, plagues of mosquitos in summer and an all-pervasive, persistent stench, leaving the owners holding what amounted to a “white elephant” they couldn’t re-sell (Meader).

Adjoining suburb: Cooks River Road, St Peters (1935) 🔻

(Photo: State Library of NSW)

Industrial landscape and dichotomy
The swamp was finally drained in the 1890s and the land on it repurposed for heavy industry and engineering works. Factories took root, such as Australian Woollen Mills and the Sydney Steel Company (supplier of steel for the Sydney Harbour Bridge construction)➁. By the early 20th century Sydenham had taken on a twofold complexion: an industrial western part and a primarily residential eastern part (Meader)

The post-WWII period brought an influx of migrants to the inner west suburb, mostly Greeks, Macedonians, Croatians, Serbs and Slovenes from the former Yugoslavia, Turks and later Vietnamese. In the 1950s and 60s Sydenham proved a good recruiting ground for young athletic Aboriginal men who would go on to play rugby league for the Newtown club (Meader).

🔺 Sydenham farms

Sydenham cultural and entertainment ‘hub’  
Sydenham has at best been only modestly endowed with shopping options  (a handful of shops trailing off from the railway station➂) in comparison with  surrounding urban hubs like Marrickville, the local Sydenham community could boast a pub (the General Gordon) and a cinema, the Sydenham Picture Palace, later superseded by the art deco Rex Theatre (47 Unwins Bridge Rd) closed in 1959 and converted into a roller-drome in 1960. Sydenham at one point also had its own live theatre venue, Norman McVicker’s Pocket Playhouse (94 Terry Street), which operated from 1957 to 1973 [‘Pocket Playhouse’, www.budgeebudgee.wordpress.com].

🔻 Vivien Leigh attending the Pocket Playhouse with proprietor Norman McVicker, 1961

From under the radar to under the runway  
In the early 1990s the Federal government spearheaded a plan to add a third runway to Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport  which presaged irreparable change to Sydenham’s (eastern) residential zone. The scheme was vigorously opposed at a grass-roots level and supported by a Coalition of (thirteen) Sydney Councils including Marrickville Council (although it later did a volte-face and sided with the government). Although supposed to be ‘voluntary’, some Sydenham residents who were reluctant to sell and move were ‘persuaded’ to comply by intolerable noise levels for residents from the airport just 2km away and from adjacent demolition work in progress [‘The fight to save Sydenham’, (Tom Wilson), Green Left Review, 24-Oct-1995, Issue 208, www.greenleftreview.org.au].  When the dust had settled, in excess of over 120 Sydenham houses had been acquired and demolished for the runway go-ahead…this clean-out were described by the Sydney Morning Herald as the airport “gobbling up a whole suburb”. Only a solitary cottage of the row of historic dwellings in the frontline Railway Road survived the decimation, No 19, “Stone Villa” (now an artists’ studio)➃.

PostScript: Sydenham Green  
By way of compensation for the demolished houses in Railway Rd, Marrickville Council was handed back the land in 1994…after deliberation the Council turned it into Sydenham Green, a  public park with ‘funky’ community sculptures and a skate park—and being directly under the flight path of the third runway—a quirky arch monument of sorts recounting the local community’s valiant efforts to stop its realisation. By its very presence, Sydenham Green stands as an “everyday reminder of how aircraft noise tore the heart out of a suburb” (Meader).

_______________________________________________
➀ both the Grove and the Tivoli villas were demolished during WWI

➁ largest employer in the Marrickville Municipality, >7,500 staff

➂ known as Marrickville Station until 1895 when the Bankstown line opened and Marrickville got its own railway station

➃ a belated casualty was Australia’s first Coptic Church (24A Railway Road), which had dodged the authorities’ demolition plans for two decades only to see a fire reduce its survival efforts to ashes in 2017

Brickfield Hill: From ‘Brickopolis‘ to Centre of a Sydney Retailing Dynasty

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Built Environment, Inter-ethnic relations, Local history, Retailing history

Sydney is chock full of locality names—names like Taverners Hill, Clifton Gardens, Pearces Corner, Tom Ugly’s Point, Russell Lea, Camp Cove, Tumble Down Dick, Bushrangers Hill, Brush Farm, Strawberry Hills, Charing Cross, etc—places on or off the map not big enough or important enough to warrant the status of ‘suburb’ in their own right.

‘Plan de la Ville de Sydney’ (Lesueur’s Map, 1802) (Source: State Library, NSW)

One of the earliest in the Sydney colony with an interesting back story is Brickfield Hill. Located on indigenous Gadigal country at the south end of the CBD, Brickfield Hill is a loosely-demarcated area❋ with a small hill, the place where the early colony’s clay was sourced for the making of bricks and tiles…bricks plus a hill, hence the name “Brickfield Hill”. This endeavour started virtually from year one of the European takeover of the Great South Land…the First Fleet in 1788 included  convicts with brick-making experience – James Bloodworth, the most significant of them was to prove invaluable to the embryonic settlement’s progress. With only makeshift accommodation in the form of canvas tents, the construction of more secure and permanent housing was of the highest priority. Bloodworth was immediately appointed master brick-maker for the Port Jackson colony by Governor Phillip, assigned labourers and tasked with the job of manufacturing 30,000 tiles per month [Ringer, Ron, Bricks, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionary of Sydney.org/entry/bricks, viewed 19 Nov 2020 ; ‘Brickfield Hill’, www.kathyprokhovik.com), 06-May-2018].

The public brickfield on the ‘Hill’ became such a hub of activity that in 1799 it was described as “a suburb of the town of Sydney … within a few yards of the main road” (George Street) [‘Bricks and Nails: Building Materials as Criteria for Dating in Sydney and Environs from 1788’, Robert Victor Johannes Varman, (Unpublished PhD thesis from the University of Sydney, Sept. 1993), www.ses.library.usyd.edu.au].

Brickfield Hill, George Street (Photo: JR Clarke / State Library, NSW)

By 1804 there were 72 houses within the village of Brickfield Hill, but it wasn’t the most salubrious part of Sydney to live…that part of George Street was “infamous for its steep, dangerous and dusty road” (Varman). The “exceedingly unpleasant” place, “covered by a filthy brown haze and choking dust storms of windy days” the southerlies that swept along the street were given the name the ‘Brickfielder’ [“Brickaholic’s tales behind the history of Sydney’s ‘golden mile’”, (John Huxley), Sydney Morning Herald, 26-Sep-2008, www.smh.com.au]. By 1840 the public brickfields had become a blot on the landscape…the dusty brick pits and polluting kilns were not conducive to the increasing residential composition of the village. Its dingy, seedy taverns were dens of crime and rampant practices of bestial cruelty. In 1841 the government ended the brick industry in the locality. In it’s place small brick-making concerns in private hands fanned out in directions south and west to suburbs such as Newtown, Camperdown, Pyrmont, Glebe and to St Peters which eventually emerged as the premier site for brick-making in Sydney. Merchant stores, warehouses and more housing (leading to slum conditions) helped fill the void in Brickfield Hill (Varman).

(Source: SL – NSW)

Gradient was a sizeable issue in Brickfield Hill in the early period … the steeply sloping terrain along that section of George Street impeded the transport of heavily-laden carts. During the 1830s the authorities finally addressed this. A colonial earth-moving project succeeded in reducing the gradient between Bathurst and Liverpool Streets to a more gradual and manageable slope [‘Brickfield Hill (1) – The Hill’, Sydney Eye, www.sydneyeye.blogspot.com/].

At the beginning of the 20th century Brickfield Hill achieved the kudos of an altogether different association as the new home of one of Sydney’s early retail giants. In 1905 Anthony Hordern and Sons opened its “Palace Emporium” on the site, their mega-department store rose up on the ‘Hill’ – six stories high and comprising 21 hectares of retail space. At its zenith Hordern’s Brickfield Hill emporium was reputedly the largest department store in the world. [‘Brickfield Hill’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

In its post-department store life the Hordern building’s vast “rabbit-warren” network of rooms and corridors was home to the Business School of the NSW Institute of Technology until the 1980s. Acquired by Malaysian property developer Ipoh Garden Development in 1985, it was demolished the following year amid considerable controversy to make way for the World Square complex⍉ [‘Anthony Hordern & Sons’, www.wikiwand.com].

With the leveling of Hordern’s Palace Emporium building and the earlier closure of the Brickfield Hill post office, Brickfield Hill’s long existence as an identifiable locality in Sydney’s CBD was consigned to the past.

PostScript: The Hordern story
From humble beginnings as a King Street (Sydney) drapery shop in 1823, Hordern and Sons built up an Australian retail empire.  After a stint in Melbourne retailing, Anthony Hordern (Senior) built his first Sydney emporium in Chinatown (Haymarket). The AH showcase, opened in 1905 to replace the fire-destroyed Haymarket emporium, was the new Palace Emporium (AKA the “Senior Store”). The Brickfield Hill retail ”super-store“—with a main entrance of imported Italian marble—later diversified its commercial activities to include a branch of the Commonwealth Bank, tea rooms, a post and parcel office, rest rooms, public phone booths and a Thomas Cook travel agency. Expansion of the business occurred from the Fifties with new Hordern & Sons stores opening in Canberra, Wollongong, West Ryde and Mid-City Pitt Street.  By the late 1960s Anthony Hordern & Sons was massively losing business to suburban malls and to city competitors…it’s retail empire crumbling, the Brickfield Hill flagship was acquired by Waltons Ltd. In early 1973 the doors of the iconic retailer, once lauded as a “colossal business premises”, closed for good. (Wikiwand entry).

🔽 (Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. Sydney Living Museums. [TC 658.871 HOR/54]) 

____________________________________________

❋ roughly covering the area from Sydney Town Hall (Bathurst Street) to Central Station, skirting the present-day locales and suburbs of Haymarket and Surry Hills

⍉ which then stayed as a gigantic hole In the ground for 18 years until World Square was completed in 2004

⊰⊱⊰⊱⊰⊱

Pinball in the Drain: The Peoples’ Arcade Game On Tilt for Three Decades

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Leisure activities, Local history, Memorabilia, Popular Culture, Social History, Society & Culture

The United States over the years has had a mania about banning lots of things—there’s been an unspoken exemption granted to bad taste—but one of the more curious  prohibitions in the 20th century was that on the seemingly innocuous pinball machine. 

ED7F8E21-E72E-4A54-AAD2-BF8F5ADC2844

In the early 1930s the Gottlieb Company of Chicago introduced the first coin-operated, machines, the “Baffle Ball”. The timing was right, the Great Depression had hit, playing pinball was a cheap and accessible form of entertainment for the financially impoverished masses, and the machines caught on. A few years later machines became electromechanical and automatic score counters were added, making games more appealing [“The History of Pinball Machines and Pintables”, BMI Gaming, www.bmigaming.com/].

The moral legislators
By the time of America’s entry into WWII pinball’s popularity had grown exponentially. Not all sectors of American society however were enthusiastic about the game. Churches and school boards harboured a perception of pinball as corrupting the morals of American youth, asserting that children would steal coins and skip school to play❋. Lawmakers too viewed pinball negatively because they saw it a game of chance and thus was a form of gambling. They shared the view that it “a time and dime-waster for impressionable youth”. Legislators were also suspicious that it may be a “mafia-run racket” because of Chicago’s centrality in pinball machine manufacturing, a “hotbed of organised crime” [“That Time America Outlawed Pinball”, (Christopher Klein), History, upd. 22-Aug-2018, www.history.com ; “11 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinball History”, (Seth Porges), Popular Mechanics, 01-Sep-2009, www.popularmechanics.com].

⍌ City authorities vandalising the machines
(Source: Chicago Sun-Times)

BCC4F580-635B-465B-91C8-5BEB3CF47834

New York City’s crusade against the pinball
The mayor of NYC, Fiorello LaGuardia, took these perceptions to heart, launching a very proactive approach to rid the city of these “insidious nickel-stealers” by ordering the police force to make “Prohibition-style pinball raids” on candy stores, bowling alleys, speakeasies, cigar stores, drugstores, amusement centres, etc [“The Mayor Who Took a Sledgehammer to NYC’s Pinball Machines”, (Conor Friedersdorf), The Atlantic, 18-Jan-2013, www.theatlantic.com]. Illegal pinball machines and slot machines were confiscated and some were smashed in staged, publicity-conscious showcases (Klein).

LaGuardia’s anti-pinball machine crusade took on extra zeal after Pearl Harbour, which allowed him to characterise it as a patriotic cause…the line run by the NYC mayor was that the copper, aluminium and nickel components of the outlawed machines could be better utilised in the materiel requirements of America’s war efforts (Klein). This didn’t prevent many machines ending up dumped in NYC harbour.

⍌ 1963 ‘Swing Time’ Gottlieb machine

C708CA3F-5C42-4265-B52D-DDD434E94635
Banned, but not eliminated
Other cities were quick to follow NYC’s example, Including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New Orleans, with pinball bans extending across the country. Other cities like Washington DC didn’t go as far but prohibited children from playing it during school hours. The inevitable consequence of banning was to drive pinball activity underground (resurfacing in places like the back rooms of ‘porno’ book shops). Thus marginalised, pinball become “part of rebel culture”⧆ (Klein).

D1103E91-9ADB-499A-ABF0-3C597751E0DA

⍓ Roger Sharpe, “calling the shot!” 
(Source: IFPA)

The long ban, ended by a ‘Sharpe’ player Remarkably, the outlawing of pinball machines persisted until the 1970s – despite the technical innovation of “flippers” (pivoted arms activated to propel the ball back up the table) introduced in Gottlieb’s 1947 “Humpty-Dumpty” machine which made the game more one of reflexes (skill) than of chance. Finally, in 1974 the Californian Supreme Court, accepting the skill component, overturned the prohibition in that state. In 1976 NYC councillors were still skeptical about pinball and it took a spectacular courtroom demonstration by one of the game’s top exponents, Roger Sharpe, to break the impasse. Sharpe won over the doubters by nominating beforehand which lane he would propel the ball through and then making the shot, demonstrating that patience, hand-eye coordination and reflexes, not luck, were the ingredients for success in the game◰ [“How One Perfect Shot Saved Pinball From Being Illegal In The US”, (Matt Blitz), Gizmodo, 19-Aug-2013, www.gizmodo.com.au].

1DF18208-5E51-440D-9AA4-10326727EEA9

⍓ An “Indiana Jones” Williams machine with revolver for plunger

With the ‘liberation’ of pinball, player interest revived in the late Seventies, but it was a short-lived triumph. The advent of video games provided compelling competition (the newer technology requiring fewer repairs and less space). By the Nineties the writing was on the wall for arcades and the coin-op industry, as home video-games and the internet were rendering them obsolete [“The First Family of Pinball: Meet the local wizards behind the game’s huge resurgence”, (Ryan Smith), Reader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. In any case, the repealing of the prohibition wasn’t uniformly implemented…Chicago city authorities resisted, still associating pinball machines with “nests of gangs and drugs” for juveniles [“Chicago once waged a 40-year war on Pinball”, (Ryan Smith), The Bleader, 03-May-2018, www.chicagoreader.com]. Prohibition in Kokomo, Indiana, was not ended till 2016✦ [“Pinball—once a source of vice and immorality—now, legal in Kokomo, Ind., after 61-year ban”, (Ben Guarino), Washington Post, 15-Dec-2016, www.washingtonpost.com].

1D1CC61F-17A6-4F95-ABE9-ACF8AB04D909

PostScript: Surviving if not exactly thriving
Today, the Stern Pinball Co (Chicago) is the only manufacturer of machines left in the business in America. If not played by casual gamers in anything like its numbers in the “Baby Boomer” era (except in video game mode), it has experienced a resurgence of sorts – as an annual series of professional tournaments (Stern Pro Circuit)  (among its internationally ranked seeds are Roger Sharpe’s two sons).

884E37D6-F374-4473-A562-882A4DE68EF8

⍓ Roger Daltry (Tommy “Pinball Wizard”) at the controls 

❋ Seth Porges identifies something quasi-religious in the anti-pinball position, a “temperance-fuelled” belief that the activity was “a tool from the devil” corrupting young people (Friedersdorf)

◰ the councillors were also persuaded to overturn the ban by the eloquent testimony mounted by Sharpe, who went on to be a pinball star witness in subsequent, successful hearings in other states. Another factor in the outcome may have been revenue-raising, eg, Mayor Daley in Chicago wanted to lift the ban so as to tax individual machines and licensing operators (Smith, “Chicago once waged”)

⧆ the rebel image remained into the late 1960s and ‘70s with the anti-establishment tone of The Who’s rock opera about a “pinball wizard”, Tommy

✦ it was a similar story in Nashville, TN, for anyone under 18, and in some places and times it is still illegal – such as on Sundays in Ocean City, N.J. (Porges)