Roadside Attraction

The Minneapolis shop owned by Kevin Hammerbeck and Paul Panser is a slice of 1950s life, where passionate collectors bond over antique slot machines and lovely old Wurlitzers.

Kevin Hammerbeck loves watching customers' astonished faces as they descend into the 1950s from an undistinguished entrance beneath a nondescript Kilroys sign in Minneapolis' Warehouse District.

The basement showroom is awash in sound and color. A disembodied pirate voice from an Odyssey slot machine hawks gambling games while the Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel play on competing Wurlitzers. Red gleams from Coke coolers, Betty Boop signs and winged Mobil horses.

Antique jukeboxes, neon signs, automated candy dispensers and slot machines sit side-by-side with reproductions of 1950s malt shop stools in candy apple red.

"It's such a neat walk back in time," says Jesse Bohnsack, 33, of Burnsville, who operates a backhoe for Bohnsack & Hennen Excavating firm. Kilroys is one of the best sources of vintage tabletop slot machines, called trade stimulators because players swapped bar winnings for smokes or a drink, he says.

More than that, however, Bohnsack and his wife, Tamra, 40, love the welcome extended by Hammerbeck and Paul Panser, his partner in the Classic Malt Shop Supply Co. That's the 1950s-replicas segment of their stock, which is neatly integrated with Kilroys' antiques.

Visitors from all over the country mingle with the quirky and deliciously diverse mix of local regulars, from rich CEOs to bikers who might drop in weekly to see what's new. Give them a couple minutes to look around and soon they're taking turns playing pinball and trading tips on their shared obsessions.

"It's like Cheers, where everybody knows your name," says 14-year-old Ricky Harr, a ninth-grader at Valleyview Middle School in Edina, who visits with his dad.

For Hammerbeck, 51, of St. Louis Park, Kilroys is a study in human nature, not unlike the innards of machines that yield to patient observation, he says. "We're dealing with the kid in each of them."

"Kevin and Paul are two of the most genuine people I've ever met. And the antique Coke machine is always open for a soda," said Ricky's father, Scott Harr, 50, who chairs the criminal justice program at Concordia University St. Paul. Harr likes the way Kilroys exposes his kids to an earlier era of entertainment.

"It's as much a history lesson at Kilroys as it is discovering ways of having fun beyond constant TV or video games."

Hammerbeck and Panser are low-key types who would hate it if a customer left with a purchase they later regretted. Of course, there are hazards in waiting. Lance Black, 42, of Eden Prairie and his 10-year-old son were disappointed on a recent Saturday visit that the funhouse mirror Black had his eye on had been sold. Such mirrors are hard to find, Panser says, offering to pass Black's phone number to a former supplier.

Kilroys grew out of Hammerbeck's passion for all things mechanical. Its name was inspired by the ubiquitous World War II slogan, "Kilroy was here," painted by an inspector on ships that showed up in Africa, Italy and Germany. But the larger business -- Hammerbeck says it works much like a cooperative -- was born of friendship.

The business started in 1975 with Hammerbeck selling Wurlitzer jukeboxes. By 1990, when he no longer had time to do outside repairs, he offered his friend Steven Nault, a collector and repairman of antiques, a bench in the Kilroys workshop for his Pop's Coin-Ops.

Hammerbeck met Panser through his dad, Mike Panser, who co-owns Northland Jukeboxes & Restoration Co. In 1994 Hammerbeck and Paul Panser, 36, of Champlin, started Classic Malt Shop Supply. Panser runs it, spending hours on the phone and scouring the Internet for hard-to-find items, such as velvet movie ropes or the black-and-white clapstick slates used to document the start of a filmed scene.

Hammerbeck says that he "grew up around a table saw" in Little Falls, Minn. His "mechanical genius" father brought home discarded engines, pinball machines and jukeboxes. After harvesting the motors, he let his kids tinker with the remains.

By the time Hammerbeck was 16 he had a part-time job at the Charles A. Lindbergh museum at a time when the famous flier's boyhood home was being restored. One day Hammerbeck was in the basement, trying to figure out the antiquated plumbing system, when Lindbergh and state historical society officials dropped by. Lindbergh gave him a tour, pointing out the bullet hole behind a kitchen door caused when a hunting rifle accidentally discharged.

To the initial dismay of Hammerbeck's parents -- who worked hard to afford new stuff -- he dragged home treasures from farm refuse piles and secondhand stores. Soon, however, his father helped him build his own shop, where Hammerbeck restored Model T cars.

Now in Kilroys' back room Hammerbeck has assembled a floor-to-ceiling collection of odd parts -- old clockworks, jackpot handles, slot machine gears -- dating to turn-of-the-century machines for which there are no repair manuals.

Rare specialties that Hammerbeck "can't bear to part with" sit cheek-to-jowl on the shelves of his cluttered shop. Next to a 2-foot-high wooden Dutch Boy with articulated limbs is a South American automaton once used to hawk coffee. Its eyebrows wiggle as the figure pours from a pot and raises the cup to oversized lips. It arrived broken, its eyebrows stuck and pitching coffee over its shoulder. "I had to open him up and do brain surgery," Hammerbeck says, chuckling.

The store is also a window on the past, with signs expressing sentiments that would be considered racist today. One World War II-era sign features a Japanese caricature and the words: "You think war end soon? ... GO ahead, TAKE DAY OFF!" Another that Hammerbeck has hidden away warns: "NO DOGS, NEGROES OR MEXICANS."

There's also a coin-operated shock machine that promises to cure rheumatism, a mid-1930s WCCO microphone and a sign with a creepy bearded hillbilly peddling hootch.

Hammerbeck is as reluctant to name a favorite machine as a parent is to name a favorite child. But he does love the 1936 Ray's Track slot machine that he has been restoring for 20 years. It's a rare piece worth more than $15,000. He inserts a nickel and metal horses lunge forward in a row. Payouts come from a wooden box that is hidden in the front because it was made in an era when gambling was illegal or operated within a gray area of the law.

There are mysteries about what some of Kilroys' oldest machines actually do. So Hammerbeck has become a sleuth. He tracked down the man who did recordings for a Zoltan fortunetelling machine -- inspiration for the magical arcade machine in the movie "Big" -- and learned that a Romanian supplied the voice. Feed Zoltan a quarter and the swami promises romance ahead.

Much of the fun for Hammerbeck is figuring out how the machines work, what has broken and, by deduction, how to fix it.

"I can listen to an antique slot machine and tell you what's wrong just by listening to the clicks in the machine." Customers have called, frantic about a broken slot machine. He's had them hold the receiver to the machine and diagnosed the problem long-distance.

"It's like solving a puzzle. Everybody loves a puzzle. It's fun. When you're done, it's man over machine and you won."

Hammerbeck spends so much time at Kilroys, surrounded by machines he loves and friends he has made, that it feels like home.

What: Vintage and new slot machines, games, automated soda and candy machines, furnishings and signs Where: 219 N. 2nd St., Suite B100, Minneapolis (Kilroys showroom is located in the basement. Look for the small maroon awning.)