"Tommy," lyrics by Pete Townshend

When Pete Townshend of The Who celebrated pinball with his rock opera "Tommy" in 1969, it would have been impossible to imagine the direction in which microprocessors would take the old-school, mechanical flipper-boxes over the next 15 years.

The modern machines - like the copies of "Elvis" at the downtown and Mendenhall Valley Bullwinkles Pizza parlors - are convoluted, vulcanized landscapes.

Knock the ball into the "Heartbreak Hotel," and Elvis may sing his 1956 classic. Hundreds of computerized chips store actual audio files from the "'68 Comeback" and "Aloha From Hawaii" television specials.

There's seemed to be a need over the last 20 years for pinball designers to try to compete visually and aurally with the ever-expanding limits of the video game.

Michael Penn / Juneau Empire   Pinball games are played side by side with video games at the valley Bullwinkle's Pizza Parlor. Over the last 20 years pinball has lost ground to home video-game consoles.

"There are definitely pinball games that I prefer," Rich Kevlorak, 34, said at the downtown Bullwinkle's on Sunday as he played "Elvis."

"But I play for the sake of playing. The experience of pinball - that is, being in the moment, in your own mechanical world - is something I don't get from hand-held video games."

You see people like Kevlorak haunting the pinball machine in the corner when you visit the arcade. Oh, the pinball addicts are out there. But in Juneau, a town where the number of machines continues to fall, these devoted few struggle.

"I'll always play," Kevlorak said. "I have a lot of friends who still play. It just seems like there's fewer machines in town."

CJ Enterprises, the amusement services company on Glacier Ave., maintains just one pinball machine in town: the Dirty Harry model at The Party Zone.

The downtown Bullwinkles has two; the Valley Bullwinkle's has three; and The Sandbar has one.

"A new video (or pinball) game can be anywhere from $5,000 for a mediocre game to more than $20,000," said Terry Ryals, owner/manger of CJ.

Michael Penn / Juneau Empire   Susie Stedman, 12, pushes a well-worn paddle button on a pinball machine at the valley Bullwinkle's Pizza Parlor on Saturday.

"With a Playstation 2 or a (GameCube), you can buy a new game for $60 and plug it in, and away you go for weeks," he said.

CJ Enterprises ran a video arcade, with pinball, in the mid-to-late 1980s in the Merchant's Wharf near the Hangar. But the arcade was shuttered late in the decade, partly due to lack of interest and partly because of ongoing crime.

Vandals would kick through the particle boards in the back of the machines and rob the vault for quarters, then rip apart the machines' circuit boards for good measure.

"It was maddening," Ryals said. "It only takes a few bad apples to ruin the whole crate.

"In Seattle, in Portland, in larger communities, you're not going to make a lot of money, but you can sustain the arcade," he said. "There are more people to play the game, have parties. Here, it doesn't get played enough to justify that much expense."

The lonely life of the pinball machine may be best exemplified by the NBA Fastbreak (Midway) model hanging out by the door of The Sandbar. Most of the time, the glass case is covered with an old poster.

The bar owners bought the machine about four years ago from the Red Dog Saloon.

"People just don't play a whole lot anymore," said Sandbar owner Gail Neimi. "But every now and then a dyed-in-the-wool pinball person will come in and enjoy it immensely."

This wasn't always the way.

Michael Penn / Juneau Empire   Lights on the Dirty Harry pinball game at the Party Zone.

Pinball gambling was banned in New York City from 1940 to 1976.

In Juneau, however, it was an integral part of the bar scene. The Triangle, the Arctic, Sweeney's and Tide's all had machines. The Triangle had a bank of six or seven in a row.

"You got to know all the machines in town," said Mickey Lovell, 74, who came to Juneau in 1953. "You could almost say I was an addict. I played anytime I went out. Of course, that's the only thing I've ever been addicted to."

Lovell was the pinball queen of downtown. She was considered one of the best players around, and her knees carried her battle scars.

"You really had to jiggle and shake those machines to get the ball in a certain slot," Lovell said. "Some of them, you could manipulate more. Once in a while, if you got too vigorous, it would tilt and you'd lose everything."

Lovell once took her paycheck straight to Sweeney's, near the present-day site of The Red Dog, and proceeded to blow it all on pinball. Her boyfriend took her out to lunch and dinner, and her sister loaned her money for groceries. Lovell borrowed another $10, returned to Sweeney's, and proceeded to win back $320.

Lovell played so much pinball that her first husband finally bought her a machine and had it installed in the front room of their house.

"And then he'd get mad at me because I wouldn't play the one at home," Lovell said. "I'd never get anything back. I said, 'If you'll pay me when I win, then I'll play your machine.'"

Poker, dice games and gambling of all sorts were perfectly legal in Juneau in those days. All that disappeared soon after statehood in 1959. Lovell lived on Prince of Wales Island for five years in the 1960s, returned to town, and discovered her beloved pinball games were gone.

"The town was pretty wide open back in the 1950s," Lovell said. "I don't know why they get so excited about pinball machines and about gambling, and then they allow all these lotteries."

Those pinball machines of the 1950s and 1960s were vivid and imaginative and made resourceful use of an age before microprocessors. The game themes often spoke of the country's hopes, fears and general dailliances.

Perseverance Theatre scenic designer Jennifer Morrell found this out as she researched the design of the three mock pinball machines used in the ongoing production of "Tommy." She settled on three actual 1950s-era titles: "Golden Gloves," "Rocketship" and "Balls-A-Poppin."

"Part of why I picked them was because they were recognizable images from the times," Morrell said.

Morrell and theater electrician intern Adam Levine journeyed to both Bullwinkle's as they were plotting the lighting patterns of the machine.

"I'd never played pinball in my life," Morrell said.

Pinball had a renaissance of sorts in the 1970s as companies developed microprocessors and motherboards to take the place of mechanics. Games could talk, sing, re-enact a natural disaster. But in Juneau, they couldn't quite compete with video games and the advent of the home-gaming industry.

In the early 1980s, Norm's Video Palace carried about 75 upright video games in its Mendenhall Mall storefront near Ron's Apothecary. There were at least three pinball machines: Centaur (Bally), Flight 2000 (Stern) and Eight Ball Deluxe (Bally).

"They weren't as popular as some of the video games, but they were popular enough to hold their own," said Craig Johnson, a former Juneau resident who ran Norm's. "I guess there was what you would call a small pinball crowd. They were addicted, and they'd play pretty much every day."

The Super Bear area was ground zero for Juneau's video-arcade needs in the early 1980s. Besides Norm's, a nearby restaurant called PJ's had a game room with about 20 machines. With one quarter and two hours, Johnson set a world record (2,458,770 points) in the game Looping at PJ's on Nov. 12, 1983.

Those 1980s pinball machines were fairly easy to maintain, Johnson said.

"Sometime you had to replace a worn rubber component, but mechanically they actually stood up quite well," he said. "You'd disconnect one of the switches and that would totally eliminate the tilt. Most of them had level legs on screws, but you could put two blocks of wood under the two front lefts, and that would make the playing field more level."

By 1984, Norm's had vanished. Its owners, done in by competition from CJ Enterprises and a general malaise in the video-game/pinball habits of Juneau youth, moved to Seattle.

Johnson, too, left for Seattle in early 1984 at the age of 20. Now 42, he lives in Sacramento, Calif.

"The complexity of the pinball machines has increased," Johnson said. "I would imagine that they're substantially more difficult to maintain.

"The last time I played a pinball machine was 1987, and it was Williams' F-14 Tomcat," he said. "I played because of the cool music, not because of the pinball machine itself."