Piece of the Pike Takes Fans Back to an Earlier Era

The converted auto showroom is silent as about 60 people hunch over rows of miniature pinball machines, carefully aiming the plungers as small silver balls roll along the wooden boards. When they look up, it’s to eye the bingo card signs above each machine.

Three minutes later, a bell rings. At the back of the room, a woman screams, “Yes!” and others in the room groan audibly. An attendant, dressed in a finely embroidered black suit and red bow tie, comes over and hands her 15 shiny tokens while an announcer on a microphone alerts the room that there’s a winner.

Mike Cincola observes the scene with a sparkle in his eyes, and chuckles a bit at the whispered profanity from frustrated losers.

“There is nothing else like this anywhere. This is a true American oddity,” he says.

It was just another afternoon at the Lite-a-Line. For 63 years, people have been ambling up to the creaky machines to try their hand at a game that combines pinball with bingo. The Lite-a-Line is the last operating attraction of Long Beach’s storied Pike, the grandest coastal amusement park of its day.

The Pike had been demolished by the mid-1970s -- except for the Lite-a-Line. It continued operating until the late 1990s, when developers converted the former amusement park into a shopping mall. But the Lite-a-Line then reopened a few miles north.

In a world of video games and ever more elaborate roller coasters, this low-tech game continues to draw a steady flow of fans.

The Lite-a-Line remains largely through the efforts of Cincola. His wife’s family is the Looffs, a name instantly recognizable to amusement park buffs for bringing the first carousel ride to the U.S. The family built parks all over the country, and just before World War II installed the Lite-a-Line at the Pike.

With the Pike gone, Cincola, a longtime Long Beach resident, became obsessed with the family’s legacy and fought to keep the game going. After the city brokered a deal for condos and shopping centers to dot the desolate site of the former Pike, Cincola moved the game to a former car dealership three miles inland. And the fans continued to come.

Each machine has 25 holes that correspond to the rows of numbers on the bingo cards. When a player gets a pinball in one hole, that number lights up on the card. The goal is the same as in bingo: The first player to light up an entire line wins a house jackpot, ranging from $15 to $150, depending on the number of people playing.

On Saturday night, when the neighboring bars are full, so is the Lite-a-Line. There’s a mix of old-timers who recall the days at the Pike and new young players who like the retro feel of the place.

Debbie Wingert is sitting at her lucky table, No. 32. She grew up in Long Beach and remembers watching people streaming in and out of Lite-a-Line. When she turned 21, the required age for players, she started playing the game too.

After 20 years, she still isn’t bored, and drives in from San Bernardino to spend about $20 and get her “Lite-a-Line fix.”

Wingert says the game is comforting. “Everything else has changed so much, but this little game is just as fun as it’s always been.”

Meanwhile, Ray Sokasain, recently 21, got introduced to the game by his grandfather. “It’s totally old-school Long Beach with a little bit of Vegas mixed in,” says the twice-weekly regular.

About 200 games are played each day with about 300 different players over the 14 hours the game operates. In keeping with traditional amusement park hours, it’s open every day.

Many of the operators have worked at the place for decades, collecting tokens, announcing the start of games and providing an ear to customers in need of someone to listen.

“It’s a little like being a bartender,” says Mary Sisk, 75, who has lost count of how long she has worked at the Lite-a-Line but is sure it’s more than 30 years. “People come here over and over, to play the game to relax and get advice from us about their lives.”

The game has always been the same, but Sisk has seen the faces behind the plungers change. When she was a young woman, Long Beach was a Navy town, and drunken sailors would plop on the green vinyl stools, slump over the machines and play game after game.

More recently, the game has “gone multicultural,” as Cincola puts it, with Asians, African Americans and Pacific Islanders among the most frequent visitors. Young hipsters also have discovered it.

It was 1997 when the city announced plans to build a shopping mall at the Lite-a-Line’s longtime home inside the Pike’s old carousel building in downtown Long Beach.

Cincola concedes it probably would have been easier to just shut it down.

“Instead, I struck a deal that made everyone who cared about this place happy,” he said.

The city promised to preserve the historic roof of the carousel building and turn it into the home of a Long Beach historical museum if Cincola sold the property. And Cincola swore to his wife and longtime employees that he would keep Lite-a-Line running, even if it meant moving it.

“There was no question that we had to keep it going, for history’s sake, for our regulars and for our employees. If you look at what’s over there now [at the Pike site], it’s just fancy condos.”

In 2001, he closed the attraction for the first time since the Lite-a-Line’s founder, Arthur Looff, died.

“We just picked the game up, and very carefully, with experienced movers and careful electricians who could reconstruct the wiring, moved this really old game,” he said.

But the giant green dome that capped the carousel building is still sitting on a giant flatbed in a parking lot north of the new Pike, deteriorating.

When Cincola looks at it, his face settles into a frown. “It upsets me to see history being treated like that,” he says.

Next week in Surroundings: the effort to preserve the legacy of the Pike.