I didn’t go to Coney Island looking for the spot game. It found me. I’d all but given up my elusive quest to once again work my game of choice, a game of skill I learned as a carny kid in the 1960s.
When I went back on the road in 2001, a show owner told me he didn’t allow the spot joint on his carnival. “Anything that’s controversial we do our utmost to stay away from,” he said. “The spot joint belongs in a museum.”
But here it was, a glowing orb on Jones Walk, Coney Island’s independent midway.
Concessionaire Benny Harrison framed the joint for me after I told him I grew up working it with my dad. He copied the dimensions from a plywood spot board that he had in storage and built a light box. The red circle, just over seven inches in diameter, hovered over a translucent white ground.
“It needed more light,” Benny said with a mischievous smile in his eyes when I asked how he got the idea. Two fluorescent bulbs were nestled inside the box.
Benny was an electrical wiz who could repair a classic water race, wire any kind of amusement device, and build a prototype game. He put the spot joint together in his workshop behind the animated windows of “Coney Island Always,” his miniature amusement park on the Walk.
Navy blue lettering at the top of the light box proclaimed “COVER THE SPOT.” A label at the bottom said “$2 TO PLAY – one hand only pleeze.”
In the summer of 2009, it was my second part-time job. When the Coney Island History Project exhibit center closed for the day, I’d head over to the Walk to work the spot joint for Benny.
The rules were essentially the same as my father’s game. Players were given five metal discs to drop in sequence:
Rule No. 1 – Hold plate in one hand, one inch over spot.
Rule No. 2 – Once plate is dropped, it may not be moved.
“No laying down allowed.”
Rule No. 3 – Red spot must be entirely covered to win prize.
Coney Island once had numerous walks that led from Surf Avenue to the ocean. Jones Walk was the last of its kind. Though it no longer went all the way to the beach, its narrow midway was bustling with games and attractions.
There were Pac-Man and SpongeBob-themed water races, balloon darts, and a toss a ping pong ball in a goblet game. There was the mystical allure of Tammy, the palm reader, and the sweet scent of pina colada with free refills.
Benny reigned over a trio of Wacky Wire machines assisted by a rotating cast of female agents. His game of skill challenged players to maneuver a looped wand from one end of a vertically spiraling wire to another without touching it. The marquee above the stand heralded it as Skin the Wire, the original version of the game that featured an inert horizontal wire and debuted on the Island in the ‘50s.
The Cover the Spot light box was wedged between two Wacky Wire stations. There was barely space for me to squeeze behind the counter but I was thrilled to be there. And when I called the people in to play, it felt like the last time I’d done it was just yesterday.
“Hey, I’ve got a fascinating game! A game of science and skill! If you come in now, I’m not too busy. I’ll show you how to do it.”
It was the summer after Astroland closed forever and before Luna Park opened in its place. Neighboring Jones Walk was jammed with customers clamoring to spend their cashed paychecks. In my mind’s eye, the parade of people exuded the sensuous vitality of Reginald Marsh’s portraits of the 1930’s and ‘40s. I saw women with glossy lips and curvaceous hips and the men who accompanied or ogled them in Marsh’s paintings of Coney Island. Only their outfits had changed with the times. The women wore crop tops and low rise pants with the word Juicy embroidered on their rears. When one of them strutted by in stiletto heels, Benny would titter and call them “amusement park shoes.”
Benny was tallish but he appeared taller and larger than life in his small stand crammed with prizes. The joint was flashed to the rafters with digital picture frames, guitars, violins, electric scooters, radio controlled helicopters, and the plush toys popular that season: Elmo from Sesame Street, Bart Simpson, and Dora the Explorer. Each one was bedecked with a yellow, heart-shaped sign that cheerily said, “Hi, I’m the Prize.”
Looming up behind me and supervising my every move was the life-size animated figure of Chuckles, the zombie clown. His jaw was continuously flapping, his bony hands shaking, his whole body vibrating. Chuckles would never have been able to cover the red.
“Chuckles is not a prize,” said a handwritten note on the clown’s left knee. I began to think of him as Benny’s alter ego. In later years, the clown held a tin cup with a note that said “Chuckle’s retirement fund” to persuade gawkers to ante up. A note on his right knee said “toss ‘em in.” Benny was born in 1940 but “the sand was in his shoes,” as the saying goes in Coney Island, and he had no plans to retire.
I could never figure out whether Benny viewed the light box as a lark or a business opportunity. When I asked if he’d ever worked the game, he said “nope.” The plywood spot board and its set of discs was one of the games that he’d bought from a supply house or the toy fair and held onto for a rainy day. He had a collection of brand-new games imported from England and Germany. The Wacky Wire came from Canada. You never knew when you’d need to change games on short notice. At least that’s the way it was with the carnival. But for Benny, each game was an acquisition and he acquired duplicates, which he kept in storage.
Like Jones Walk, Benny was the last of his kind.
He’d worked in Coney Island from the time he was a boy, starting out in his family’s candy business. As a young man, he ran a cotton candy and caramel corn stand, first at Feltmans and then in Astroland. When Benny was in his early thirties, he lost his candy business and started over with games.
“I couldn’t lease a space,” he told me about his wheel of fortune with a man in the moon face. “The Wheel was on a wagon and I would push it from Neptune Avenue to the boardwalk to open.”
I was astonished. “What did you do for a laydown?” A wheel required a counter with a laydown of numbers.
“I had numbers down in front.” He mimed unrolling an oilcloth laydown on the ground.
“How many numbers did you have?”
“Enough.”
A few stands down from the Wacky Wire, the door to his workshop displayed a Wizard of Oz poster. Benny had a wry sense of humor. He had covered the word Kansas with a Coney Island sticker. “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Coney Island anymore,” Dorothy said.
To the left was the display window of Benny’s “Coney Island Always.” It cost only a quarter to see the miniature Ferris wheel, carousel, and chair-o-plane whirl, the parachutes on the Jump go up and down, and the Loop-O-Plane swing back and forth. To the right was the window with Benny’s girlfriend, a life-size dancing doll he’d bought at the auction of the Danbury, Connecticut Fair. He transformed her into “Miss Coney Island” and gave her the motto “Don’t Postpone Joy.” I’d drop a quarter in the “25 cents to Fall in Love” slot whenever I went by. The dark-haired beauty looked like Shannen Doherty. Her Mardi Gras beads jiggled as she bounced up and down to doo wop songs that Benny played in those days. The “Softer than the summer night” of “This Magic Moment” and the “My love-a, I was wrong-a” of “Little Darlin’” had to compete with the guy across the way yelling “Any Prize, Any Size!”
But when I settled into my shift behind the light box, the cacophony fell away. Once I held the plates in my hand and began dropping them one by one in the sequence my father had taught me as a child, a familiar feeling washes over me. I’m the little girl behind the counter of the spot joint in a photo taken when I was about ten. Even then I knew that the spot game was not about winning or losing a prize; it was not even about covering all the red. It was about being able to do with ease what very few people can do at all. I’m home again.
My concessionaire parents had never taken me to Coney Island as a child. The closest we got was going over the Brooklyn Bridge when we made a wrong turn on one of our wholesale house trips to Lower Manhattan. When I moved to New York after college I felt drawn to the summer long carnival by the sea. The pull got stronger every spring.
I learned that Coney Island was the midway of midways, the place where the hot dog was invented, the roller coaster was perfected, and the enclosed amusement park was born.
This year I was stunned to find out that a forerunner of the spot game flourished in Coney Island in the late 19th century, several years before the first carnivals went on the road. It was known as the plate board game. The discovery took my breath away. Decades had passed since my father told me, “It’s a very, very old game. The only thing is people have forgotten about it.” I’d scoured the digitized archive of historical newspapers determined to learn the origins of the spot game once and for all.
I found out that there were 30 “plate board men” working in Coney Island in the 1890s. Most of them were tenants of John McKane, the Island’s notorious political boss and police chief. He’d ordered the plate board men not to play for more than 25 cent stakes but Coney Island was known as Sodom by the Sea and none of them followed his orders.
“At this writing the most popular game on the island is a spot and disk contrivance,” according to an 1892 article in the NY Sun. “A table has a score or more of red spots six inches in diameter painted on its top. The player is provided with five brass plates five inches in diameter for ten cents. If he covers one of the spots out of sight by pitching the plates, quoit fashion, on it, he is to receive $2.”
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I had to read the sentences over and over again. The strange thing was the plates were pitched as in a Pitch Till You Win instead of dropped directly over the spot. This plate board game was much harder to win than my Cover the Spot!
The article went on to explain that the plate board game offered no prizes. “It is a plain bet of 20 to 1 that the player cannot cover the spot. The bet is safe as to the ordinary visitor at the island. Not one in a thousand could do it on first trial.”
“A fakir will cover a spot all over save for a tiny segment on one side, and then the fakir offers to bet long odds that the remaining part of the spot cannot be covered.”
In those days the word fakir was synonymous with faker and swindler. The title of the article was “Coney Island Swindles: Games at which the Player has No Chance at All.”
This is as far as I know the first mention in print of the game that would evolve into Cover the Spot, or as it was known in the early 20th century, Spot-the-Spot. It’s also the first mention of a player being offered the chance to cover the last portion of the spot, the equivalent of dropping the last plate, which is what made the game controversial among show owners.
By 1914, Coney Island had both spot-the-spot workers and plate board men. The Billboard noted that “L.M. Simon, known from Coast to Coast as ‘Fingers,’ had opened a new spot-the-spot game on the Bowery.” One of his competitors was Louis Gordon, who had six concessions in Luna Park, including a plate board and two spot-the-spot games.
When Benny built the light box for me nearly a century later, the plate board was long forgotten and the spot game hadn’t been seen in the World’s Playground, as he still liked to call the Island, in more than 40 years.
Just as the spiraling movement of the Wacky Wire caught people’s attention and put a new spin on “Skin the Wire,” Benny’s light box promised to revive the fortunes of the spot joint. It illuminated the game board and deflected questions about its shady past.
The last night I worked the spot joint on Jones Walk was a Fireworks Friday.
A friend who visited that summer said I was in my element demonstrating how to cover the red.
“You put the first plate half on the red and half on the white. Just like this,” I would say, repeating the lines I’d memorized as a child.
I held the discs anywhere from three to six inches over the spot.
“Then you put the second plate on the left. And you put the third one over here on the right, making sure that you cover the middle.”
But Benny’s plates were too large for my hands. They were larger than the set I had inherited from my dad. And they weren’t zinc. Benny’s plates were aluminum and went down with a plink rather than a plunk. They had a tendency to bounce. The spot was larger as well but I had no difficulty covering all the red all the time. The problem was it was easier for the customers to do it too.
That night, a guy from the other island, Staten Island, who’d won a week or so ago, came back to show off his skill to his girlfriend. Her curly black hair, penciled in brows and kewpie doll mouth mirrored the face of the Betty Boop clock that was one of Benny’s prizes.
“He’s gonna win a teddy bear for my teddy bear,” she said of the plush prize he’d brought home. “He’s lonesome.”
I leaned in and dropped my voice. “Hey, I got a secret to tell you. The second time around is a cinch.”
The guy handed me a twenty and kept the ten and stack of singles on the counter.
He came closer and closer to covering the spot except for tiny specks of red where the plates intersected. Each speck was brilliantly illuminated and seemingly magnified by the light box.
“You got this!” I said to encourage the customer to keep playing. “You can do it!”
But his girlfriend began to lose confidence and contradicted me. “You can’t do it!” she taunted him, yanking him by the arm and trying to pull him away from the counter. They started bickering.
He shook her off. “Watch me!”
The guy asked me to show him how to cover the red again. Benny was glowering at me but he didn’t have to say anything. It may be show and tell time, but my father had taught me not to tell too much. He also taught me how to head off trouble by getting a customer to leave.
It was too late to point to the sign on the floor that said: “NOTICE: MANAGEMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT, AT ITS OWN DISCRETION, TO LIMIT THE NUMBER OF PRIZES.”
I tried to “chill the mark”—get him to quit—by saying, “What happened, your hand is shaking like a leaf,” and, “some people are lucky and others get married.” All the lines I’d learned to make a fellow feel discouraged.
But this guy wouldn’t quit. After spending about 40 dollars, he seemed even more certain than when he’d started that he’d do it before long.
And then, boom! The first volley of fireworks was shot off.
The Walk emptied out as people rushed toward the boardwalk like the tide flowing toward the sea. Even the girlfriend ran out to the middle of the midway to watch the fireworks.
I was left alone with the mark, whose ability to concentrate improved after his girl left his side. He slammed another twenty on the counter and by the time he finished spending it, he’d managed to cover the red until there wasn’t a speck showing from every which way I looked.
Benny and Chuckles were as agitated as I was calm and collected.
“That looks good to me,” I said as I handed the guy his teddy bear. Then I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Another big winner!” His girlfriend squealed and ran over to give him a hug. There was no one else around to hear me except the game operators across the way. But my customer and his girl walked away happy, which is what mattered to me.
“Take a break,” Benny said with a rueful smile.
I lifted the hinged countertop and went onto the midway to see the rest of the fireworks.
Multiple shells whizzed upwards and burst into flower between the swinging cars of the Wonder Wheel. As the petals traveled outwards they left a trail of stars that gradually faded. I exhaled and listened for the faraway roar of the crowd.
I knew that people would start to make their way back to the Walk and we’d have a second spurt of business into the early hours of the morning. But I decided to call it a night.
I feel lucky to have worked on Jones Walk when it was still a boisterous place. A couple of years later, the concessions on its west side were shuttered by a real estate speculator and those on its east side were evicted by the city. Benny moved next door to the History Project on West 12th Street at the invitation of Deno’s Wonder Wheel Park.
Benny never worked the spot game again and neither did I but we remained friends for the next fifteen years until he passed away in March.
He gave me the light box. It stands atop my printer, a souvenir of Benny’s inventiveness and generosity. It functions as a night light and room decor, keeping company with my mom’s vintage wheels of fortune and razzle board chart and my dad’s wooden milk bottles and shoe race car.
But if I tip it over, it’s ready to go to work again as a carnival game.
If you come in now, I’m not too busy, I’ll personally wait on you.
Tricia Vita is a New York-based writer, oral historian, reminiscence facilitator, and teaching artist. She creates storytelling workshops at older adult centers and records oral histories for the Coney Island History Project. Excerpts from her memoir in progress about traveling with a carnival have been published in Boston Review, Provincetown Arts, and Yankee.
Photo credit: Tricia Vita