This photograph jumped out, grabbed me by the throat, shook me like a rag doll, and left me writhing in the shards of my dissipated youth and misspent allowance as memories of my (failed) attempts to become the pinball wizard of the B & W Poolroom in downtown Russell Springs, Ky., rolled in like a cloudburst tide and receded just as quickly.

My one fleeting moment of pinball infamy came --and alas, vanished in a wink -- the night the machine and I became as one and I racked up innumerable free games, more than I could play, actually, and I had to pass them off to someone else, someone of sterner stuff and quicker hands. That was well over four decades ago, and I haven't dropped as much as four bits in a pinball machine since.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

(If memory serves correctly, Mr. Thomas M. "Tom" Brashear owned the pinball machine franchise in Russell County.) --A Russell County Exile