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Rock-Ola History
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History of Rock-Ola Manufacturing Company

David Colin Rockola, was born in Manitoba, Canada. Though his name ended in a vowel, and many assumed him of Italian heritage, Rockola was White Russian. His father, George, immigrated to McCauley, Canada from Byelorussia in the 1890's. His father worked for a pump company in a small town in western Canada, and was an inventor. When David was 14 he left school and began to work in a hotel as a bellboy. Later, he opened his own cigar store in Calgary and had a slot machine on the counter which made quite some money.

At the age 23 he went to Chicago to work in a shop that repaired for Mills, Jennings and Watling, the top three slot machine manufacturers. He used to make the front panels of the slot machines.

In 1927 he started his own vending manufacturing company and founded "Rock-Ola Manufacturing Corporation" in Chicago. Rock-Ola Manufacturing Company started revamping older operators bells with jackpots. Success was instant. Rock-Ola became a major contender in the slot machine business by revamping jackpotless machines into various versions which they made for the conversion of Mills, Watling, Jennings and even earlier model Cailles. Rock-Ola was advertising five different jackpot conversion fronts; some had venders as well.

In 1930 pinball machines came on the market, and Rock-Ola decided to join the competition. In 1932 he introduced his own pinball game: "Juggle ball", and many other devices but that made him nearly bankrupt.

While Bell machine design concentrated on what else could be hung on the basic "Liberty Bell" superstructure to make the handle pull more entertaining and rewarding to increase the play and take, a lot was being done behind the scenes to create a whole new generation of play compelling payout machines. The first new machine class to get an inordinate share of development attention was a dicer, long a stable of coin machine play. The problem was that in half a century of development no one had been able to figure out how to make a dicer payout. The first such device to go commercial was a medium-size counter game called the MYSTERIOUS EYE, made by the Western Equipment & Supply Company in 1935, when the firm was barely two years old. By the end of the year the same basic machine was also introduced by Rock-Ola as BLACK MAGIG at much lower price than the Western Equipment game. It wasn't long before these preliminary payout dicers were blown away by more sophisticated machines, ending Western Equipment's advantage and putting Rock-Ola out of the payout machine business for good to concentrate on jukeboxes and pinball games, and later industrial food service vending.

Rockola passed away in 1993 at the age of 98. His jukebox, vending machine and weighing scale companies have all been dissolved or sold to other companies. However, today, in much of the Latin world, as Xerox is with photocopying or Kleenex with tissue, Rock-Ola is still synonymous with jukebox. Back To Rock-Ola


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