Skee-Ball’s Philly roots helped it take over the world

Joseph Fourestier Simpson of Philadelphia was born when the nation — the world — was on the precipice of change. In postindustrial America, everyone was looking for the next great thing.

Simpson, the son of a 19th-century sailmaker who died when he was just a teen, never got to go to college. Rather than resigning himself to the dreary fate as a Pennsylvania Railroad clerk, he with his restless spirit and brilliant mind, turned to inventing.

An over-center storage trunk latch he invented was patented just in time to be shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, the same first World’s Fair on American soil that featured a sculpture arm that would become part of the Statue of Liberty and the debut of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.

Alas, Simpson’s trunk latch never made it big. Neither did his myriad other inventions. Nor did his career as a self-taught lawyer or his wood-planing business.

But Simpson was no quitter. Around the turn of the century, amusement parks, both Down the Shore and trolley parks outside the city were coming into vogue. In the winter months, the hills of those trolley parks became centers for the latest craze — ski jumping.

Just like that, a mighty idea came to Simpson: “If a person could be launched into the air, why not a ball?”

Simpson invented what he’d come to call “the beautiful game.”: Simpson created Skee-Ball, where a small ball is rolled up narrow wood lanes and over a hump, launching the ball into the air toward circular targets, like a bullseye.

“An entirely new idea in the use of a ball!” the inventor proclaimed.

Those first Skee-Ball alleys he installed in 1907 at Young’s Old Pier in Atlantic City were just the beginning of the Skee-Ball story.

And the Balls Roll On…, a documentary now streaming on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play, and which has won awards at film festivals, tells the saga of a game beloved by generations of kids and adults alike. (There’s even a Skee-Ball song, recorded by the Recess Monkeys, a rock band from the Seattle area.)

The journey of Skee-Ball is fraught with high hopes, heartbreak, a little guy trying to make it big, rich kids catching the wave, and big movers cashing in. In the midst of all this, Simpson was almost erased from its history.

As the film attests, the seemingly simple game has survived over 100 years, through the Great Depression, two World Wars, recessions, industrial transformations, and technological revolutions, to become an summer arcade staple for millions.

It should come as little surprise that one of the people who brought this tale to light started out as a Jersey boy.

When filmmaker and author Thaddeus O. Cooper was a kid growing up in New Jersey, his family would spend time at the Jersey Shore.

“When I got old enough to run around on the boardwalk by myself, when we were at Point Pleasant, I’d go play Skee-Ball because I thought it was a cool game,” said Cooper, who now lives in California’s Bay Area.

Years later, Cooper was playing digital Skee-Ball on his phone when he got the notion of making a short video about the history of Skee-Ball. “How hard could it be?”

But when he started researching, what he found on the internet raised more questions than it answered. At first, Simpson wasn’t mentioned at all.

Then Cooper saw a Vineland connection; Simpson and his family had moved to the New Jersey municipality. Cooper and his partner Kevin Kreitman contacted the Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society and curator Patricia Martinelli. It turned out that the society had a collection of Simpson’s letters and papers — a treasure trove of original material for research.

“That completely changed everything at that point,” Cooper said. “It became really obvious that there was a real story here, and a really compelling story that we didn’t anticipate.”

Ultimately, the story of Skee-Ball would lead Cooper and Kreitman to write two books, Seeking Redemption: The Real Story of the Beautiful Game of Skee-Ball and And the Balls Roll On ...: The Short History of the Beautiful Game of Skee-Ball, before creating their documentary.

To Cooper and Kreitman, Skee-Ball is the story of a classic business startup.

But it’s also an epic of many characters, the ebbs and flows of their fortunes, and this game that somehow managed to get picked up and passed along from one business interest to the next, even when other amusements fell out of favor and faded away.

First, of course, is Simpson, the creator.

“It’s a tragedy in Shakespearean terms,” said Kreitman.

Simpson was brilliant, but he lacked the business acumen and the connections to make his inventions the success they had the potential to become. “He was heartbroken, he was frustrated, and he kept trying.”

Jonathan Dickinson Este came not longer after in the game’s history, and some sources erroneously name him as its originator. Unlike Simpson, Princeton-educated Este came from an elite Philadelphia family.

He got his college friends jazzed about playing Skee-Ball. Soon it was all the rage. And Este had money to invest plus the connections to attract backers to promote the game, including two big expositions in California in 1914 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.

With Este at the helm, Skee-Ball became a fixture at tony establishments like Philadelphia’s Union League and the Philadelphia Racquet Club, the Chevy Chase Club of Washington, and the Baltimore Country Club.

Charles “Chief” Bender, pitcher of the Philadelphia Athletics, had Skee-Ball alleys at his Center City sporting goods store.

Eventually, Este, a restless and adventurous young man who enlisted in World War I to become a fighter pilot, decided he wanted to pursue ventures other than Skee-Ball. But his stewardship was just one chapter in a long history of many.

Skee-Ball’s trail brought it to other businesses and businessmen, flourishing in places like Coney Island, upstate New York, and Philadelphia again, as the filmmakers’ documentary and books tell.

But Cooper and Kreitman’s story of Skee-Ball also travels the arc of the history of its times.

In the roaring twenties, working-class Americans and immigrants flocked to outdoor playgrounds like the Jersey Shore and Coney Island, and Skee-Ball proliferated there.

During the Depression, the filmmakers said, Skee-Ball was relatively cheap fun, and Skee-Ball’s original 32-foot-long alleys were shortened to fit more of them in smaller places. The first National Skee-Ball Tournament was in 1932 at Layman Sternbergh’s Skee-Ball Stadium in Atlantic City.

First prize was a whopping $1,000 — big money in those hard times — about $34,500 in current dollars, according to Cooper and Kreitman.

Skee-Ball continued to spread as society and entertainment evolved to places like family entertainment centers, restaurants, and bars.

It’s even caught on in some overseas markets.

“There’s now a bar in Germany that’s got a couple of Skee-Ball alleys, and they do tournaments, which is really interesting,” said Cooper.

Skee-Ball also has a following in Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

“They love the modern alleys, the really modern ones,” Kreitman said. “Most people here would prefer ones that look like they came off the line in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

And the people here — all over the Jersey Shore and those choice alleys in Philadelphia — have loved the game for generations and probably will for generations to come. With another summer on the way, young and old alike will be stepping up to an arcade alley and going for that 100-point throw.

Maybe Simpson never struck it rich with Skee-Ball. Perhaps his name is remembered by few. But his beautiful game lives on.

“Even without any real advertising, it’s got this universal feel, and it never went away,” Kreitman said.

Maybe one of the Jersey Shore players in And The Balls Roll On summed it up the best:

“It’s just one of those games that gets into your blood,” he said. “Once you play a Skee-Ball game, you never forget.”