60 Second Stories From Cal

When I was a kid I lived on many military bases. That allowed me to grow up with a feeling of safety and I loved nothing better than exploring any new surrounding I would find myself in. One day, early in the school year I was walking around after classes and just stumbled across what would become one of my all time favorite places.

In the town of Lahr, were the army people shopped, there was an ice rink/curling club that we always went to to play ice sports. As much fun as those activities were in that building, it shared facilities with an all ages club. The cool old school arcade games and vending machines that occupied one side of the complex was the real attraction for us.

In the days before stand up video games, they had the first examples of 'PONG' and the earliest shooting games. I learned how to hustle people by becoming really good at playing most examples in their vintage pinball machine collection. No toy could resist being mine when I was working the claw.

As cool as the games were, the greatest thing about this complex was the row of vending machines they had. Most any type food you can imagine was made right in front of you by mechanical hands. The baby donut maker and the french fry vendor were popularly used machines.

None of these machines, however, were more fascinating for me to watch than the pizza maker. From dough, to the addition of toppings and watching the cooking process (which took about 15 minutes) it was a show better than anything I had ever watched on TV up to that point in my life.

This is an more modern, English language version of the pizza vending machine. I would love to see it in action today so I could discover if the pizzas tasted as good as I remember they did.