The year was 1931. People were looking for an affordable escape from the bleak landscape of unemployment, endless breadlines and hard times. At seven balls for a penny or 10 balls for a nickel, pinball games offered an inexpensive few minutes of fun and amusement. It was the beginning of the heyday of pinball machines.

Young entrepreneur Raymond T. (Ray) Moloney just happened to be at the right place and in the right time to take advantage of this booming craze. He founded Bally Manufacturing Company on Jan. 10, 1932 as the manufacturing arm of parent company Lions Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago to develop a small, but highly profitable, pinball game called the “Ballyhoo.”

By the mid-1930s, the success of the Ballyhoo and other pinball games like the “Goofy,” the “Airway” and the innovative “Rocket” and “Bumper” pinball machines propelled Moloney’s Bally Manufacturing Company to the forefront of the rapidly growing amusement game industry. In April 1935, Moloney would move his expanding Bally Manufacturing organization to a modern plant at 2640 Belmont Avenue in Chicago. For the next 48 years, that singular address on Belmont Avenue would be home to Bally Manufacturing Company and its worldwide operations.

While the ubiquitous pinball game would form the backbone of Bally Manufacturing’s success those early years, it was

Moloney’s decision to enter the slot machine business that would forever change the fortunes of his company. Although Moloney did not invent the modern three-reel slot machine (that distinction goes to Bavarian-born Charlie Fey of San Francisco), he nonetheless became one of the most successful manufacturers and distributors of the immensely popular gaming device.

Ironically, however, it was the overnight success of Bally’s “Reliance” automatic dice machine, created in 1936, that catapulted the company into the gaming business. That same year, Bally introduced the first of what was to be a long line of highly successful and innovative slot machines. Called the “Bally Baby,” this little tyke of a slot machine measured just five inches by seven and a half inches and weighed only 8 pounds. It predated its earliest competitor, the Mills Vest Pocket Bell, by 2 years. The overwhelming success of the Bally Baby convinced Moloney to extend his company’s manufacturing line into slot machines, a course that he pursued with great vigor and imagination.