GIRARD — Rob Berk’s relationship with pinball goes all the way back to when the Warren businessman was a boy of 5 years old.

He remembers a pinball machine in his Warren house growing up. It was something, Berk said, he figures his father, Harold, acquired for something fun to do in the home.

That machine — Baby Face, made in 1947 — is now part of a collection of more than 1,200 retro pinball and video games Berk has curated over the decades, and now he’s ready for the public to play his beloved machines.

Berk’s Past Times Arcade, a combination arcade and museum, is readying to open sometime this spring or summer at the former Santisi’s IGA in Girard.

“It’s an obsession that got out of control,” Berk said recently while walking up and down rows upon rows upon rows of games, stopping often to tell the history of a certain machine or how it came to be part of his collection.

AMASSING A COLLECTION

Berk said he started acquiring, one-by-one, pinball machines that were made in the 1960s; they were the games he enjoyed playing and had a real connection to as a teen.

His first larger acquisition came from a man responding to an advertisement that Berk ran in a trade publication seeking vintage machines.

The man from Waupaca, Wisc., on the other end of the phone said, “I got a load of them. I’ll sell them to you for $100 each,” said Berk, who bought around a dozen and had to rent a moving truck to relocate the machines to Warren.

“That was one of many the hauls I made,” said Berk, who remembers the purchase being in the early 1980s.

He bought more machines from a man in Omaha, Neb., whose collection was about 350 games. That man, Berk said, wanted much more than $100 apiece.

“It was so many I didn’t know where to start, but he wanted quite a bit more money for them,” Berk said. “I said, ‘Why so much money?’ He said, ‘Where can you go and find so many games under one roof?’ So I bought some from him.”

Another trip took him to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where a man had about 200 machines stored in a warehouse. He wanted about $150 each.

“Every time I went to one of these places, I was like a kid in a candy store, I was going crazy,” Berk said. “From that guy, I think I bought about 40 or 50. It was one of my bigger hauls at the time.”

It’s now all added up to more than 1,200 games.

“It’s crazy, but I enjoy these games. I enjoy playing them, as do people, and the artwork is fun,” Berk said.

ARCADE

Berk, who also owns and operates a pinball expo each year near Chicago, plans for the arcade, 419 N. State St., Girard, to be ready soon.

He purchased the former supermarket building in 2020 for $285,000 and has invested much more to make it suitable for the arcade.

The building had been vacant since 2016. Knowing this and coming to the realization that no one, including himself, was getting any enjoyment from pinball machines and video games locked away in a warehouse, the idea of Past Times Arcade was born.

“I bought all these games … and I’m thinking to myself, what am I going to do with this stuff?” Berk said.

Berk said to get in once the arcade is open, it will probably cost a flat rate and patrons can play for as long as they want. The machines will be set to free play.

The selection of games is vast and some of it is rare, including a 1930s Wiffle game made by a man named Froom, Berk said. It’s said to be the first coin-operated pinball machine and was made in Youngstown.

There are games made overseas, from Spain, from Italy and from Japan to the world’s largest pinball machine appropriately named “Hercules.” It uses a billiard cue ball as the pinball. There’s also a Humpty Dumpty from the late 1940s; it was the first pinball machine made with flippers that were electromechanical.

The arcade also contains pinball machines from the early 1960s that had manufacturers experimenting by adding a shelf to the game to hold the player’s drink. The shelf also contains a cigarette holder.

Another game contains a flat spinning wheel in the playing field, a unique feature for the time, and also introduced players to multi-ball. The game, Berk said, was among the first examples of multi-ball play.

The arcade has about nine different Pac-Man games, a row full of vintage shooting games and many more modern, but still vintage, video games.

“The variety of stuff you see here is just unsurpassed anywhere I know,” Berk said. “This is years and years of collecting, 50 years of collecting.”

The building, the last traditional supermarket in Girard before it closed, has a new purpose with great potential to benefit existing businesses in the city, Mayor Jim Melfi said. People who come for the arcade also will dine and drink at restaurants and bars in Girard.

“For someone to take that building that was not in good shape and to make it into what it is today, a destination, really, it’s going to be a destination where people will come into this town specifically to go; it’s terrific,” Melfi said.