Confidential File

Spoil-Sport Coates Tilts the Machine

Invariably, I can pick out the good guys from the bad guys on western TV.

I'm
uncanny at predicting the forest-fire season, and, with rare error, can
tell you whether a man's happily married or not after only one casual
conversation with his wife.

Where I fall down is politics. 

They confuse me.

Ordinances, issues, propositions — no matter
how simple they're spelled out on the ballot, they have a way of
reducing me to a gibbering shadow of my former precocious self.

Take, for example, the one and only item in the city of El Monte's
municipal election today. According to the sample ballot I read, it
concerns pinball machine pay-offs.

The question before the people is: Should the machines be banned?

A couple of months ago I detailed the fight that some of the town's
citizens were having in prodding their local politicians to take action
to get the apparatuses out of cafes and bars where school kids were
pouring their nickels, dimes, and –these being times of inflation
–dollars into them.

I pointed out that the machines weren't fun games. They were paying
off. They were thinly disguised, syndicate-controlled slot machines.

I admitted that there was greater sin in the world today. But I just
couldn't understand how some small-time politicos would fight so hard
to keep this happy little vice within arm's reach of the sons and
daughters of their community. Especially when their own police chief
begged them to ban the machines, as so many other towns in this area
have done.

That's what I said two months ago.

But now, I see by the El Monte Herald, that I'm taking a stand against children. I want to snatch away their toys.

In last Thursday's edition a full-page, paid political ad exposed me for what I really am. The ad read:

"ON TUESDAY, June 23, 1959, VOTE NO * VOTE NO* VOTE NO

"DID YOU KNOW:

"1 — THAT UNLESS YOU VOTE NO, you cannot own or keep in your home any miniature mechanical bowling game or shuffleboard game?

"2 — THAT UNLESS YOU VOTE NO, you cannot own or keep in your own home a
game where, among other things, a ball is released or thrown by hand on
a table with obstructions, even though this game is a TOY and only for
you and your children's amusement?

"3 — THAT UNLESS YOU VOTE NO, you and your children may not own or
possess certain games that are for sale in all leading department and
toy stores?

"KEEP OUR CITY FREE FROM POLITICS."

It was an unnerving experience for me, after all these years of thinking I liked children, to find out that I really hated them.

So yesterday I telephoned some of the people — clergymen, PTA leaders
and El Monte Betterment Assn. members — who had conned me into taking
such an un-American stand.

They assured me that the political ad was a desperation effort by the
pinball faction to scare the citizens into voting against the ban. They
said the ordinance was carefully worded so as not to deprive El Monte's
younger generation of its toys.

They admitted that they were shocked and caught off guard by the clever
maneuver, and surprised that the El Monte Herald would print it without
checking its veracity.

But I'm afraid, in my case, it's too late. The damage is done.

I've got to go home and face my kids tonight, and they don't understand politics any better than I do.