Steve Kordek fished through his desk drawers, looking for a picture of his daughter. “‘Twas here, ‘taint here,” he muttered. “‘Twas here, ‘taint here no more.” Aside from the golf trophies, there were few personal items in his office at Williams Electronics Games, at the corner of Roscoe and California. It looked like an archive of pinball history, with promotional flyers for almost every pin game manufactured since 1932. Outside his window the Chicago River snaked past, and Com Ed transformers loomed overhead. It was November 29, 2000, and the next day Kordek would officially retire from a career that had won him the nickname Mr. Pinball.
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Back in 1947, Kordek worked at Genco Manufacturing Company, a Chicago outfit run by the Gensburg brothers. Before World War II the city had sustained 30 to 35 pin-game manufacturers, but by the end of the war, scarcity of materials and lack of government contracts had eliminated all but a half dozen of them. At that point a pin game was just a playing field with holes in it; the player scored points by kicking, shaking, and shimmying the ball into the holes. But all that changed in October 1947, when D. Gottlieb and Company, the first manufacturer of pin games, came out with Humpty Dumpty. Designed by Harry Mabs, the new game had six mechanical flippers that tossed the ball around. “The flippers did more for the pin-game industry than any of the gimmicks before,” says Kordek, “because you made pinball a game of skill depending on how you designed the game–anywhere from 60, 70, 80, to 90 percent skill.”
As a boy growing up in Buck-town, Kordek never planned to get into the electronics business. The eldest of ten children, he graduated high school in 1930, as the country was sliding into the Depression, and his parents refused to go on relief. “If I could get a job where I could get ten cents an hour, I was glad to take it,” he says. In 1934 he was hired by the Civilian Conservation Corps and sent to Lowell, Idaho. He excelled in the work–a veteran of the footraces sponsored by the Chicago Daily News, he would race the locals up the mountainsides–and after his tenure at the CCC he was hired by the U.S. Forest Service as a dispatcher for fire-fighting units. By the time he returned home on leave in late 1936, the Forest Service had offered him a scholarship to study forestry at the University of Montana.
But his grinding production schedule caught up with him in fall 1969, when he was hospitalized for a bleeding ulcer in his stomach. Surgeons had to remove about a third of his stomach, then a blood clot that had broken free of the ulcer began traveling through his circulatory system. At one point, he says, “a shade came across my eyes and I couldn’t see. It came about halfway down. I could see down but not up, and then it disappeared.” He thinks the blood clot, or part of it, had passed through the vessels in his eyes. He spent six weeks in the hospital. Now 58, he decided to slow down and began supervising a crew of four to six designers.
