The Haunted Pinball Warehouse

        This is the story about a man named Hung Well; a sixty-five year Taiwanese dealer who’d rather keep his junk than sell it.

Hung’s Quonset warehouse housed hundreds of hunkered heaps of electronic hoodoo that he was hard to sell or give away cheap. He was a mechanic (reconditioner?) and salesman (antique dealer?) of used arcade games. It was  a place for worn out video games, pinball machines, and jukeboxes that bars, pachinko parlors, and bowling alleys had discarded.

 Each arcade game was from a time he would never forget, a time that would never return, from the prime of his life; a past more valuable to him than his present or future.

This is the story of how Hung stood between me, a CD jukebox, and an AC/DC pinball machine on the eve of my sixtieth birthday.  

I was attracted to his company by the flashy Website his adult daughter had set up for him; she was there to answer in English; she wanted to take over the business and rid of some crap but she wouldn’t dare call it crap to his face. No one could buy anything from him and it made her and his wife crazy. They were tired of living in a room behind his office in the warehouse.

But let me not get too far into my story before I share with you Hung Well’s history to see the origins of his obstruction:

 A long, long time ago, back in the day of Taiwan's martial law, when American servicemen stumbled drunk on the streets of Taipei’s red light district, in its bars, clubs, and massage parlors, that’s where this story began.

 Hung Well-Hung was born in Taipei in February, 1947, a few days before the 228 incident, a couple of blocks behind the Taipei railroad terminal. He was the first son of a Japanese-speaking Taiwanese father who did brisk business in a clock and watch shop, washing money on the side. His mother did the washing and pawning.  It was best to have U.S. currency in those troubled times after World War II. Father did a brisk business selling old Japanese watches to Chinese shanghaied into going to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek. He fixed up the time pieces and sold them cut-rate.

Hung was twelve-years-old in 1959. At home, he watched  father work in the back room of the shop. With an eye-piece strapped to his forehead, Father sat fixated on the wind-up mechanisms. His father went from fixing watches to shortwave radios.

Hung entered Ta-Tung technical institute in the Year of the Horse, 1966. He was nineteen and excited about the technological promise of Taiwan as it prepared to take back Mainland China. He was a full-time student and mastered the fields adequately covered in textbooks and  repair manuals in the exciting field of electronics.

He stayed on campus talking with classmates about how to make a million dollars one day. It was after class that he chatted with his wife to be; a quiet girl from Taichung. She was studying marketing. They talked about their electric future with excitement.

      Walking home along Chung-Shan North Road amid the hustle and bustle of buses running their noisy routes, busy bus-girls punching ticket cards, blowing their whistles as smoky buses rounded corners at break-neck speed. He saw uniformed American servicemen walking along, stopping in front of brightly painted store fronts with covered windows. He wondered what they were doing in there. He saw Taiwanese women entering the storefronts and he heard the music, local and western rock ‘n’ roll, wailing through the thick Taipei air, the smell of sweaty alcoholic drinkers and cigarette smokers pouring out onto the sweltering streets.

The Flamingo Club, Florida Bakery, Suzie Wong Bar, OK Bar, and The Oasis Hotel was up ahead on the left. The King's and Central Hotels illuminated the street in the distance. Wu-Chou's Massage Parlor’s blue vertical sign.

Every bar and club had a jukebox and pinball machine. Wurlitzer Jukeboxes and Bally pinball machines were a common fixture. You could get five plays on a jukebox for 20 cents NT (5 cents U.S.), the same for a pinball game. 

 Eventually, after thousands of plays of soft-plastic pirated 45’s, those jukeboxes broke down, after thousands of tilts and cigarette burns. How many tilts could freeze a pinball machine? 

 Hung had an idea. Why not become a jukebox/pinball machine repairman? He knew all about electric circuits and his wife knew about marketing. They  started a business. 

America positioned thousands of troops in Taiwan starting in 1954; from 811 to 4,174 troops and 10,000 until 1977. All American forces were pulled out in 1979 after Nixon’s diplomatic opening with the People’s Republic of China. With the departure of the troops, the clubs were in trouble, and so was Hung Well’s career.

        After 1979, it became more difficult for Hung Well to earn money. Instead of repairing pinball machines and jukeboxes, he collected them; take the broken music machines away, brought to an obscure warehouse on the outskirts of Taipei. There they stayed collecting dust, his hair turning gray, too many broken machines and not enough customers. The entertainment industry moved into the future and Hung had to change with the times.

TV video clubs began catering to teenage sub-culture. Hung jumped on the bandwagon. By 1988, MTV clubs opened offering films on VHS tapes and private viewing rooms, more than a thousand clubs on the island. Hung repaired the VCR’s that broke down and added to his collection. Business was better but his eyesight was faltering.

Many opportunistic operators didn't bother to obtain proper business licenses and U.S. movie makers complained that such commercial use of copyrighted films were in violation of laws. Hung didn’t care about such technicalities. But the Taiwan   Government cracked down on unlicensed MTV operators confiscating "pirated" films being rented to patrons. .

Hung held on and hoped for the best. Jukeboxes, pinball machines, and then VCR and laser disc players and karaoke players from MTV clubs and bowling alleys. Hung retreated and found an inexpensive Quonset hut  not far from the air-force base in Taichung where he trucked all the abandoned entertainment machines.

Then, in 1995, a fire at Wei-Er-Kang KTV Restaurant in Taichung marked the end of the KTV era. Dozens of young people died and the government closed their clubs and game parlors His warehouse haunted with arcane American arcade machines.

A new entertainment, home computer video games, was taking over the market. Hung didn’t know how to repair computers. He became a dinosaur stuck in past technology left with a warehouse full of broken machines, until one day, his teenage daughter saw an ad from Stern Pinball, an American arcade game company looking for sales reps in Taiwan. Mr. and Mrs. Hung Well would become importers.

That's where I came in to the picture. It was 2012 when I moved to Taichung. I was looking for a jukebox or pinball machine for my new condo. I took a bike ride one morning and was able to find SAX, the company that imported and serviced jukeboxes and pinball machines. 

      I took a chance and rode there on my bike. After finding the warehouse down a nondescript lane, I rang the door bell.

 A man in his sixties came to the door. Right there, I saw a brand new Avengers pinball machine and a used Rowe CD juke box from the ‘80’s. We sat in the office and Mrs. Hung made me a cup of coffee. I told him I was interested in buying the AC/DC Pinball Machine I saw on the website. Also, I was interested in buying a CD or 45 juke box. Our conversation, in Mandarin, could go just so far. He told me his daughters had gone to school in America and spoke English. Edsel was in Taiwan now and could be contacted. He gave me her business card. I had to call my wife at home to speak with Mr. Hung and get more information.

He told my wife that they wouldn’t be getting more shipments of pinball machines for another nine months, however he had sold one six months ago to a man in southern Taiwan who wanted to re-sell it. It was 180,000 NT-$6000 U.S. new but I could get it used for 165,000 ($5,500 us). He said he would call the man and ask him if the pinball machine was still for sale and call me back. He then showed me the used Rowe CD jukebox.

 The jukebox still had the old title labels. Three decorative revolving CD’s in the top chamber needed a new motor to get them to spin. He plugged the machine in and the lights went on but I heard no music from the three large speakers. He would fix that. He said the juke box would be re-conditioned and would be much cheaper than the almost new AC/DC pinball machine. My dream was to get both of them for under $6,000. I told my wife that she could make it my 60^th birthday present. It would be cheaper than buying me a Jaguar.

I took another long bike ride to Da-Ya to the SAX warehouse the next week to hear the Rowe jukebox. The jukebox sounded good despite years of song memory punched in by patrons. With an English  manual, his daughter’s saw that by pressing ‘reset’ and ‘8’ the memory could be cleared. A number of things needed to be repaired inside the jukebox, it was plain to see, and a lot of cleaning and painting on the outside had to be done, but for $2,000, it was ridiculous!  I’d give him $1000 if it were in working order and he included servicing.

80,000 NT-$2,666 U.S. is what Hung wanted for the jukebox, but I was interested in the AC/DC pinball machine. 

I didn’t hear from Edsel Hung the next day after I sent her an e-mail refusing to pay $2,600 for a refurbished twenty-year-old bowling alley juke box with three hundred thousand plays. 

Two days later, there was still no response from Mr. Hung. I could kiss the juke box and pinball machine goodbye because I didn’t want to pay $2600 U.S. 

 Mr. Hung Well was going to have another arcade game in his dusty warehouse. His daughter and wife would be left one day to throw his junk away. 

He said he’d think about it. Mr. Hung from the jukebox/pinball place had ‘been thinking’ about my final offer for the Rowe jukebox and AC/DC pinball machine since my wife called him five years ago. He was going to be thinking about it for a long time pondering all the lost opportunities in his haunted arcade machines warehouse. 

My urge to play pinball in Taiwan hadn't gone away. It was on to the next plan of action...............(to be continued)