The gold standard of dads has to be Walt Johnsen, the man after whom Walt’s Bar, a pinball, beer, and hotdog joint in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, is named. His son Jeff, who founded and owns the bar with brother Brad, tells it: “He’s one of those fix-anything guys, so he’d always be bringing home weird stuff like mall machines and go-karts, and he was also a classic car restoration dude. He got us into pinball when we were probably like 6.”
This was in Washington State in the ’80s into the ‘90s, and home was Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound. Being handy with things was how it was, so when Walt brought home Surf Champ, a 1976 beauty from pinball manufacturer D. Gottlieb & Co., his boys decided to give it a good clean. “We were big into motorcycle racing, so we used our carburetor cleaner,” says Jeff.
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After giving a zappy shine to what Surfer Today has declared the “best pinball surfing machine of all time,” Jeff and Brad learned that carburettor cleaner is so volatile that even a tiny spark triggers a fireball. “After it caught on fire and burned all our hair off a few times, says Jeff, “my mom was like, ‘That pinball machine’s gotta go unless you teach the kids how to actually fix it.’” Walt did his fatherly duty, instilling in his sons virtues of prudence, respect for craftsmanship, and to avoid explosions in the home.
Jeff learned his lessons well, and now, as a grown man, he has 120 pinball machines of his own to care for. “It’s a lot of maintenance,” says Jeff, who keeps 10 machines at any one time at the bar, rotating them (with the exception of Surf Champ: his childhood machine is a fixture) from his vast stock of vintage games. “Every single day I’m at the bar replacing bulbs, rebuilding flipper mechanisms — you name it.”
To move them around, and to wrangle one as a prize to the home of the victor of Walt’s annual outdoor pinball contest, Jeff uses a method he learned from his dad. “It’s an old trick from his era: they’d get coffin movers from out the back of mortuaries. They work perfect — slide right under the game.”
Walt, who still lives on Bainbridge Island with Jeff’s mom, gets down to Walt’s from time to time, inserting a coin and showing the kids how it’s done. “He was just here for a week,” says Jeff. “He whooped my ass at Taxi [a 1988 pinball machine]. Yeah, he got grand champ at Taxi. The whole bar was screaming.”
And what does this old handyman of the Pacific Northwest make of having one of LA’s coolest bars named after him?
“I don’t think he cares,” says Jeff.
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