Sunday, April 28, 2024
For most people, pursuing acting while also simultaneously serving as one of the world’s most famous inventors of pinball cleaners would be too much work.
But not for Granbury resident Joe Peters.
AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT
Peters, 83, didn’t even set out to sell pinball cleaner — it just sort of happened.
“I worked for a major chemical company in Dallas for almost five years, and it was very successful. This was in the mid-1960s,” Peters said. “Believe it or not, at that time, I was making $30,000 to $35,000 a year, which at that time was a lot, but the company was growing and growing, and being the independent that I am, I was like ‘I can do this,’ so I left them.”
Peters said he knew industrial chemicals well, so he purchased a used pickup he used to transport his chemicals to customers for about two years.
He then went to visit a man who owned a vending company and Peters asked him about a pinball machine.
“He said, ‘You're in the chemical business. Do you have something to clean and polish this?’ I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Get me something that would sell,’” Peters said. “Not being a chemist, but being a marketing major, I made phone calls here and there, did R&D, research and development, and I finally came up with a product.”
The man told him his product was good, so Peters bought a booth at an international trade show in Chicago, Illinois.
Peters said he was originally worried he wasn’t going to meet his expenses, as a booth cost him $500, plus lodging and food.
"I was just naive as it comes,” he said. “I didn't know anything about the industry, per se.”
But then two guys walked by Peter’s booth, ultimately changing his life forever.
"These two guys came by. Little did I know who they were, but they were engineers from Bally Manufacturing, who at that time was the world's largest manufacturer of pinballs and slot machines,” he said. “They sold 90% of all the slot machines in the world.”
The guys picked up a bottle of Peters’ cleaner and started to walk away, before he stopped them and told them they had to pay for it.
"My friend from Fort Worth came back a few minutes later, and I told him the story,” Peters said. “He said, ‘Are you kidding? That's Bally!’ and I went, ‘OK.’ He said, ‘Take a bottle and go and catch them and give it to them!’ So, I did. I didn't think anything about it.”
A month later, Peters gets a call from Bally’s marketing director inviting him to come up to their headquarters in Chicago to meet American stunt performer and entertainer Evil Knievel.
“He said, ‘We’re making a back glass and a new pinball with him on it, and we want to introduce your product simultaneously,’” Peters explained. “So, I flew up there again and went over to their factory, went upstairs, went into a little room and there's Evil Knievel and the president of the company. They took photographs and all that stuff, and everything went fine.”
About three weeks later, Peters was contacted again by Bally. But this time, they asked him to provide 10,000 samples of his pinball cleaner.
“You have to understand, I was very small,” he explained. “I was in a 1,500-square-foot office, so I didn't have a lot to work with. I got a little four-ounce bottle and I didn't have any mixing equipment. I did it all by hand."
Peters went to Goodwill and purchased an old blender to help with the mixing of the chemicals. He also used Elmer’s glue to attach his label called “Wildcat #125” on every single bottle.
After sending Bally all 10,000 bottles, Peters was told “congratulations” and that the company would put a bottle of his pinball cleaner in every future pinball machine that the company built.
"They had a schematic, a little booklet on every pinball they make that tells you all about it and gives you all the wiring diagrams and so forth,” he said. “Well, the back page they dedicated to me and Wildcat.”
A week later, he was invited to attend a cocktail party at the Continental Hotel in Chicago.
“The guy that I had met that got me started in this, he had a large distributorship in Fort Worth, but he was an outlet for a guy in Dallas, who was a major distributor of all games, but especially Bally, and the guy introduced me to him,” Peters said. “He went, ‘Oh, I know who you are. Come with me, son.’”
Peters was then led to a huge ballroom that was filled with major pinball distributors from around the U.S.
"This guy proceeds to go with me and introduces me to every distributor in the United States,” he said. “He says ‘I know who this young man is. He makes a good product. You call him Monday and buy his product.' And boom, the very next Monday, I started getting phone calls.”
From there, Peters’ pinball cleaner grew in popularity to a point that his company wasn’t able to make the product fast enough to keep up with demand.
"We started appearing in magazines and I started going to trade shows all over the United States which resulted in a lot of flying,” he said. “One of the trade magazines wrote an article about me saying that I was the most traveled manufacturer in the industry because I've tried to build up the company.”
Peters said eventually, owners of a large parts company — the world’s largest, he said — were interested in his product, but he kept telling them “No,” until finally he relented.
"Good thing I did,” he said. “They were spending $12,000 to $14,000, every 60 days."
As time went on, Peters’ company continued to grow, with him traveling extensively across the United States and across the world.
“The second or third year I was in business, I worked in 39 countries,” Peters said. “So, what does that tell you?”
Peters’ pinball cleaner was definitely a hit — but it wasn’t the only product he invented.
MULTIPLE INVENTIONS
As the pinball industry was progressing, so was foosball. It was while Peters was in Wisconsin that he visited a unique hotel in Oconomowoc, where he met a gentleman who was starting a foosball company.
"There was a country western singer, and his nickname was Tweety Bird, Conway Twitty,” Peters said. “He knew him really well, and he was gonna put him on the playfield of the foosball to get all the advertisement he could, so I met with him and later, he said ‘Joe, I need something for the rods. They don't always spin that fast,’ so to make a long story short, I developed a foosball cleaner. Well, not a cleaner so much as a silicone for the rods, but I patented Foozball.”
It didn’t take long for Peters’ foosball cleaner to become almost as popular as his pinball machine product.
Countries like France, Italy, Germany and Spain contacted Peters and wanted his product, with him selling $70,000 worth of foosball cleaner in a span of only three hours.
But that’s not all.
Peters also created a product called TR-60, with the TR standing for “tape remover” that removes sticky residue from surfaces, and RC-88, a rubber cleaner (RC) that would clean the bumpers on pinball machines.
"I created a product that would not only clean it, but rejuvenate the rubber, make it soft. People would buy both of those,” he said. “I created a lot of products.”
WORLDWIDE SUCCESS
Through the launch of his successful career, Peters was also able to meet several celebrities like the Elvira character, Cassandra Peterson, and Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong and founder of Atari.
“She's gorgeous,” Peters said on Peterson. “I mean, she's prettier in person than she was in the movies. Beautiful girl. I also got to know Nolan fairly well, and he was richer than you would believe. Over the years I met a lot of people.”
But Peters didn’t really begin to realize the depth of his product’s popularity until he visited a large distributorship in Germany and a pub in London, where both places featured a bottle of his Wildcat pinball cleaner.
"I was doing quite well and had four secretaries and had built my plant Wildcat Chemical Company. It's now Wildcat Products," he said. “But there was a song, ‘Times, They are A-Changing.’ The industry, it was a-changing, and the industry was slowing down considerably. I was still doing well into the 80s, but it was slowing down, and distributors were dropping like flies.”
PRODUCTION DECLINE
He explained he had one of his secretaries conduct a survey in 1980, revealing there were 12,000 operators and about 300 distributors nationwide.
"Today, there might be 20 or 30 distributors and maybe several hundred operators,” he said. “They're gone, they're just gone. Bally, they're not in the gaming business anymore at all. But today, I think there are only two foosball manufacturers and there are only two pinball manufacturers.”
He said he’s heard from several different sources that “what’s new is old, and what’s old is new again.”
“I heard that there are some new arcades opening, and you can play anything. That may be a trend that’s starting to pick up again,” Peters said.
ACTING CAREER
But all the while Peters was building his successful company, he was also spending what little free time he had appearing in TV shows and movies.
“It started when my oldest son was in UNT, and his frat brothers said, ‘You got a great voice.’ His is not quite as deep as mine, but they said that he ought to go and do voiceovers or be an actor,” Peters said, thinking back. “He tried it in Dallas, and everybody turned him down. So, I called an agent and talked with her for 10 minutes. She said, ‘I don't really care about your son. I love your voice,’ and she said, ‘Will you come and visit me next week?’ I went to visit her, and within an hour she said, ‘I want you on contract.’”
Peters starred in an American Airlines commercial and was on “Walker, Texas Ranger,” on several different occasions.
“I played everything from a drug dealer to a drug user to a schoolteacher,” he said. “It was no big deal, but l did all of this was while I was still running Wildcat.”
Peters said he remembers shooting in west Texas on a day where it was freezing outside. He explained how the director sent someone to 7-Eleven to purchase ice chips for the actors.
“Before they shot a scene, we always had to put a piece of ice in our mouth, and that leveled the temperature of our body so that it came out clear,” he said. “I just thought that was cool.”
He explained that while filming a movie as a sheriff, he walked over to the nearest Dairy Queen for a Dr. Pepper.
"I had my sheriff's outfit on, had the badge, the gun, and the hat and I walked up to the drive-through window, and I say, ‘Can I have a Dr Pepper?’” he said. “But I went to give her money and she said, ‘No, we don't charge the police department.’ I went, ‘No, no, no, you don't understand.’ She said, ‘I know you’re the sheriff.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I'm an actor.’ I went back and some of the crew saw me, and they said, ‘Where'd you get that?’ and I told the story, and they went, ‘Come with us, we won't tell her.’”
Peters also explained how he was offered a job to serve as the voice for Big Tex at the Texas State Fair. However, he would be forced to work for 12 hours a day and only receive $10 an hour.
“That's where you have to start,” he said. “You're the rookie. I had a lot of opportunities in the business, so to speak, and didn't pursue them. The pay sucked and the hours sucked more. And I mean, my ego was not that great to where I had to have my picture in front of people. But I've worked with some well-known stars.”
Peters said he worked with a “big name, Nick Nolte,” when they were shooting a film in both Dallas and Cresson inside an old mansion.
“He was always drinking a bit,” he said.
Peters also starred in a movie with the late “F.R.I.E.N.D.S.” star Matthew Perry — who was alive at the time of this interview. Peters described Perry as being “terrible,” and “could never remember his lines.”
A GOOD RIDE
Peters has lived an interesting life, both as an actor and the inventor of a successful product — even though the need for a pinball cleaner has decreased drastically.
“Electronics has changed this world completely,” he said. “The industry that I was so much a part of is basically nonexistent. But my company name is still known and there are, like I said, maybe 25 or 30 distributors. But in the meantime, John or Mary, a real person out of their home, sells the products on the internet. Essentially, the industry is an absolute shell of what it used to be, and that's sad because it provided cheap entertainment for the public. It was an industry that circumnavigated the world and provided entertainment for an economic fee and sustained itself through word of mouth. People would say, ‘Have you seen the new pinball?’ and it's pretty much gone and that's a sad commentary on that industry.”
However, although his life isn’t what it used to be, Peters wouldn’t change anything about it now. He currently lives with his wife, Felicia, in Granbury.
“It's been a good ride,” he said. “The old adage of ‘been there, done that.’ I've traveled, seen the world, created my own products, my own company, and got the accolades that go with it, you know? And I mean, at 82, I couldn't ask for much more. I've had my 15 minutes (of fame).”
