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And it Still Costs a Quarter!

Category: Uncategorised

Published on Tuesday, 20 July 2010 05:00

Written by Thom Ring

For a pre-​computer and video-​game kid, there was no place more magical than an arcade.

I still can remember the first I ever visited. It was in Ocean City, Maryland, where my aunt and uncle had a summer home. The arcade also had a Ferris wheel - indoors. Hey, I was five. I recall my favorite arcade game, too. You used a periscope to sink battleships with torpedos. Crescent and Rocky Point parks both had the game, and it was a rare treat to drop my quarter (Okay, Dad’s quarter) in the slot when I visited either’s Rhode Island-​shore home for a day of fun and fantasy.

Well, they say you can’t go home again, and both of the aforementioned parks have bitten the dust of progress. But you can play that game today, and even more astonishingly it’ll still cost you all of a quarter.

Spring Lake is located in my hometown, Burrillville, RI. It’s a popular destination on hot summer days for thousands of people who live far from the ocean in northern Rhode Island and central Mass. Spring Lake offers a broad blanket of sand stretching down to the fresh water of a lake that restricts these waters to canoes, kayaks and electric trolling motors. Some canoes are available for rentals. There are concessions for fried fare and ice cream. But what makes Spring Lake stand out in singularity sits at the back of the beach. Spring Lake has an arcade.

Actually, it’s more than an arcade. Spring Lake’s arcade is a museum of some of the most popular games in arcade lore, as well as some of the rarest. On the other hand, calling Spring Lake’s arcade a museum isn’t fair or accurate, either. Every game here that works is here to be played, including my favorite torpedo game. And further, each game still activates by dropping into its slot the same amount of coin it took to play it when it first was created. For many games that’s a dime. There’s even one or two that require only a penny.

There’s a row of pinball machines. There are cranes for trying to retrieve loot. There’s a bank of skeeball alleys. There’s even one of those old photo booths that spits out a strip of black-​and-​white pictures taken within seconds of each other.

I first discovered Spring Lake before I moved to Burrillville when it was featured in the Providence Journal. Ultimately I wound up coming here every summer with my two daughters. We’d each take a turn in the booth and then pile in together, our four impromptu poses filling a strip of pictures. It’s interesting to note that I still have the strips in a frame as well as a similar photo of me taken a half-​century ago at that arcade in Ocean City. My wife gave me a strip taken a few years ago in one of those new-​fangled color digital booths. It’s pretty much faded to blank white paper.

Oh, if you go to Spring Lake to visit the arcade, make sure to take a close look at the basketball game there. It amazed me to see that Bill Clinton played the game in the 1940s!

Spring Lake can be found just of Spring Lake Road, with parking on Black Hut Road in Burrillville. It’s open from Memorial Day to Labor Day weekend and welcomes folks for all over, although Burrillville residents get a discount.