Paul Kemp, the general manager, said the small arcade in the back of the old-school diner is often filled with young people on the weekends.
“We actually market it to the young kids,” he said. “The nostalgic games are really having a big comeback right now.”
Kemp had no idea that a 1944 law still says it’s illegal for kids under 18 to play pinball in Maui County or even loiter near the machines, he said.
That could change Friday, when the Maui County Council is taking up a bill that would officially strike the World War II-era ordinance from the books.
Council member Gabe Johnson, who introduced the legislation to repeal the old law, said it has been years since anyone faced criminal charges for allowing minors to play pinball, so it was about time that the county’s laws caught up to reflect modern values.
“There are some laws that have been on the books for so long, and they’re outdated. They need to be updated,” he said. “So let’s start with something fun. Let’s start with something simple, and let’s untie the knots of the past.”
Pinball: Tempting Kids To Waste Their Lunch Money
County laws regulating pinball were once commonplace across Hawaiʻi, where many believed the arcade game promoted gambling and other destructive behaviors, said Maui-based lawyer Lance Collins.
“I know kids today are locked into smart devices like computers and smartphones and they are playing these very complicated, sophisticated games, but when pinball came around, it was a big deal,” Collins said. “There was a concern about people spending all of their pocket money being addicted to these kinds of games. In some ways, people could use it as a form of gambling.”
Maui enacted its anti-pinball ordinance in 1944, and the Legislature passed a bill in 1945 that instituted a statewide ban against minors playing or lingering near pinball machines, citing the need to curb gambling and prevent schoolchildren from spending all of their lunch money, according to an article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
Over the course of the next several decades, people were arrested all over the state for pinball-related crimes, ranging from allowing minors to play the game to offering cash or free games to anyone who scored highly, according to local newspaper articles.
During one pinball sweep in 1974, 10 people in Wailuku and Kahului were arrested and 11 pinball machines were confiscated after local parents and an undercover police officer reported that people were being paid for wins.
The Hawai‘i Supreme Court eventually declared a similar Honolulu law prohibiting minors from playing pinball unconstitutional in 1980, after the ban was challenged by lawyers for an Oʻahu arcade owner who had been arrested for permitting teenagers to play pinball.
The law was once valid, but it had become irrelevant, in part, because of the advent of electronic video games, Associate Justice Herman Lum wrote in the court’s official decision. “It does not require much imagination to conjure up other areas where a youngster may foolishly, yet legally, spend his lunch money,” he wrote.
The ban has lingered in Maui’s county code, along with other outdated laws that county officials, including Collins when he was a member of the Maui County Council in the 1990s, have since tried to clean up.
“There used to be a whole bunch of little crazy laws like banning pinball,” Collins said, and pointed to laws prohibiting single women from being near dance halls, regulating dancing at bars, and instituting curfews for minors.
Collins said this week that he was unable to express his opinions on the ban because he now serves as a per diem judge.
“But I can tell you that in 1996 I was vociferously in favor of removing all of these outdated territorial laws that were trying to micromanage people’s lives that don’t further any societal goals,” he said.
Even though Kemp has never been concerned that he was breaking the law — the arcade at Cool Cat Cafe is one of a handful on Maui where minors have access to pinball machines — he said he was glad to hear the official end of Maui’s pinball prohibition was near.
“They should absolutely repeal it,” he said. “I didn’t realize that pinball was ever considered such a hazard for young kids.”
This story first appeared in the Civil Beat. Read the original here.
