March 18, 2013, 10:30 p.m.
SAY there’s a heaven. It’d have one of these: a Space Jam pinball machine.
The machine, and another less-cool Flintstones one, sits flashing and whirring at the entrance of a coin laundry in Merewether.
For customers, each device is a welcome distraction from the battle to avoid eye contact.
Space Jam the movie was released in 1996, which makes us think the pinball machine appeared in the laundry around then.
The display says the top scorer over the years, in one game, amassed 31,871,510 points. He or she must have been a demon that day, a blur of elbows and hands and gleaming eyes.
Were you that player, dear reader? Or have you held a top score on another pinball machine, or a video game?
Occasionally wrong
BOY, were we wrong.
We asked about a photo of a rugby game from 1950 - specifically, we wanted to know which Newcastle ground it was played on.
Hastily, we ruled out the No.1 and 2 sportsgrounds. Our forensics team of a Topics writer and a sports reporter deemed the setting too industrial to be Cooks Hill.
But while some readers made a case for it being Passmore Oval or a field in Boolaroo, the overwhelming consensus is that it’s No.1 Sportsground.
We’re told that the main buildings in the background with the towers and chimneys are Viggers Timber Yard and Cook’s Timber Yard.
Thanks to Stewart Hughes of Merewether, Royce Bell of Port Macquarie and dozens of others.
The angle of the photo looks out towards the corner of Parry and Union streets, in what was then a decidedly industrial, cafe-less Cooks Hill with not a single origin espresso to be had.
Back then, a dirt track snaked around the ground. Dirt bikes used to race there, some with sidecars, with a waist-high wooden fence to protect the crowd on the hill.
‘‘There wasn’t much safety in those days,’’ says a 73-year-old reader who grew up in Cooks Hill.
The toilet block remains virtually unchanged.
Now here’s an aerial photo of the ground, from 1947. It was taken during a celebration of Newcastle’s 150th jubilee, when 8000 schoolkids formed a map of Australia. Were you one of them?
Looking for Bev
BEFORE we leave No.1 Sportsground, we must mention its now-defunct fast food options.
David Noble, of Hamilton South, wants to know ‘‘whatever happened to Bev’s chips?’’
Bev’s chips sound nicer than the pies that were sold at the ground, the way John Mehan of Mayfield remembers it.
‘‘The pie cart was next to the toilet. Very hygienic,’’ Mr Mehan says.
‘‘The pastry – well, you could use it as an inner spring mattress. The bloke would ask, ‘Hot sauce or tomato sauce?’, and you’d say, ‘Tomato sauce’, and he’d stick his thumb in your pie and squirt in some tomato sauce.
‘‘He had a kerosene heater on his cart, which affected the taste of the pies. So you had an inner spring, with tomato sauce, and a hint of kerosene.
‘‘He sold pasties as well. Half a potato, half-boiled, wrapped in dough. You’d eat one and have indigestion ‘til Tuesday. But people ate them.
‘‘When the footy was over, everyone made a bee-line for the pub before [closing time at] 6, where you’d thump the counter and drink as many schooners as you could before the boys in blue kicked you out."
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