Realtor mixes business, pleasure
By Steve Kinney, Evansville Courier, 3/7/83
HENDERSON, Ky. – A cacophony of birdcalls greets collectors interested in getting their hands on a slot machine at Woodring Fryer’s real estate office here.
Fryer, 60, a longtime Henderson real estate agent, sells the one-armed bandits out of his Main Street office. He also dabbles in birds: cockatoos, parrots, conures, cockatiels, lovebirds, finches – just about anything that flies.
It would be hard to hit a jackpot and try to collect it from one of the several slot machines Fryer displays amid the bird seed and the sound equipment and the player piano rolls in his office. Chances are an uncaged Scarlet Macaw with a terrifying beak would be looking over your shoulder.
From a cluttered desk in the middle of this menagerie, Fryer explains that Henderson was a hotbed of gambling devices in the 1930s and 1940s. He has always been fascinated by coin-fed machines. Fryer actually requested the city to install parking meters in front of his combination office-home when it built a decade ago.
“This used to be right behind Las Vegas as the slot machine capital of the world,” according to Fryer. “You can’t believe what we had here.” He still remembers seeing the mysterious machines at the Club Trocadero when it opened in 1939. Woody Fryer was a 16-year-old out on the town with his mother then, when a prime rib dinner cost 75 cents and the slots took pennies and nickels.
It wasn’t until Fryer was discharged from the Navy after World War II that he began collecting slot machines. The budding Realtor would often acquire them along with property, and up until 1959 he had a collection of slots in his home.
“All my kids enjoyed playing with them, but I got afraid somebody would confiscate them,” recalls Fryer. Legislation sponsored by Lyndon Johnson in 1951 had made gambling a federal offense, and the number of people holding onto gaming devices dwindled.
Fryer turned his attention to real estate dealing and collecting other machines, like antique automobiles. He still has a 1905 Reo and a 1912 Henderson roadster built in Indianapolis that he believes is the only one of its kind.
Fryer became interested in nickelodeons about five years ago. He’s now the regional distributor for an Alabama company offering a nine-instrument machine (it looks like a player piano, but includes several other automatic musical instruments) for $11,000. There are two new nickelodeons at Fryer Realty, but one is almost hidden under cages filled with exotic birds.
With only two old gambling devices left in a warehouse, Fryer last fall began checking into the legality of collecting or selling legal slot machines. He found that Kentucky’s laws governing such devices were lenient. A letter from state attorney general Steven Beshear reassured Fryer that possession or sale was legal as long as there was no intent to gamble.
Now, if Fryer sells a slot machine, he makes the buyer sign a release saying it will be used for recreational – and not gaming – purposes. Fryer has a distributorship for Bill Harris machines made in Colorado. He also has some used models he advertises locally.
“I get hundreds of calls, but most people are looking for toys, or for slot machines for a couple hundred dollars. Most people can’t afford them,” Fryer says. Right now, his cheapest used model sells for $950. One new machine he offers, complete with a 24 carat gold front, goes for $6,500.
Inflation has affected real estate and birds (Fryer sold a macaw for $2,495 last week) as well as slot machines. Nickel and dime slots are disappearing from the casinos in Reno and Vegas. But modern video games don’t much interest Woody Fryer.
“Number one, they don’t have a payoff,” he said. “Number two, I like mechanical things, not electronic.”
