Tucker In His Basement

     It’s not every day that you get to re-live a bit of your past – especially a bit that you might not have taken full advantage of at the time.  Take pinball machines for instance…
     On our way home from Ashland yesterday, we stopped in Portland for a visit with our Oysterville neighbor Tucker Wachsmuth.  In all our years of friendship, we had never seen his and Carol’s Portland home though we have heard much about it.  The house once belonged to Tucker’s grandparents just as our house once belonged to my grandparents and, like our house, it is full of stories.  As we entered the living room, for instance, he pointed out the corner where his grandparents had been married and where, years later, his son Charlie had also been married.
     Another corner held an interesting collection of maritime artifacts awaiting transport to the Oregon Maritime Museum, and in the adjacent dining room, the long family dining table shared the space with a piano and a child-sized dollhouse. There were stories to be told everywhere but it was the basement that was to be the focus of our visit.  There Tucker houses his collection of pinball machines.
     We had heard about the pinball machines for years but it didn’t prepare us for the beauty, the enormity, the fun of the collection.  Nor were we prepared for the stories that went with them.  Each of the several dozen machines had its own unique history – when it was made and by what company, how it differed from others of its era.  But, just as interesting to us were Tucker’s descriptions of how he obtained each, how he taught himself to repair them (“I just seemed to have an aptitude for it…”) and what he plans to do with them when he and Carol eventually move full-time to Oysterville.
     The basement housed other things as well – gumball machines, Tucker’s sign collection, a pair of oyster tongs, all kinds of tools and, perhaps best of all, juke boxes in working order.  We played Skee-Ball and a baseball game, listened to Chubby Checker, The Fleetwoods, Ricky Nelson and Elvis and wished we could stay for days and days right there in Tucker’s basement.  Oh, yes, and did I mention the old-fashioned milkshake machines…