Alameda pinball museum has the will but is still seeking a way – San Francisco Chroniclehttp://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/Alameda-pinball-museum-has-the-will-but-is-still-11245936.php[…] the Alameda museum has a board of directors led by pinball collector Zartarian, a concrete mission for education and preservation, and an unrivaled collection of 1,300 games that span the entire 80-plus year history of the art form. At the center is museum founder and director Michael Schiess, who has collected an army of the most talented tinkerers and artists in the region, and persuaded them to work for free. “Now we’re at this point where the collection has grown so big, it’s like this giant souffle that could collapse if we don’t have the financial support to keep it going,” says Zartarian, who works in wealth management as his day job. Historically, the Pacific Pinball Museum has operated like a game of pinball, with unexpected bounces, elated victories and out-of-nowhere rebounds into disappointment. The museum started in 2002 as Lucky JuJu pinball, a collection of friends playing and fixing less than a dozen pinball machines in the back room of a store on Webster Street, Alameda’s second-biggest drag. Schiess was an artist/engineer repairing exhibits at San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum, and he quickly learned to admire the rugged indestructibility of pinball machines. Schiess can show the colorful artistic backglass of any of the 90-plus pinball machines currently on the museum floor and point out 10 things people would never notice at first glance. Schiess knows the history of every machine, whether it was confiscated by Oakland police in the 1940s, or spent time in Herb Caen’s living room. The museum eventually leased the storefront adjacent to the original back room speakeasy and opened as a nonprofit. […] the museum’s greatest physical asset may be its volunteer base, a group exemplified in the museum’s Monday fix-it night, where some volunteers drive from three counties away to work for pizza. Start with “Google Mike” — Mike Harris — a 32-year-old software engineer who spent hours hot-wiring the sound chip on a “Back to the Future” machine, just to add Michael J. Fox’s voice to the soundtrack. Schiess’ wife, museum curator Melissa Harmon, even enrolled in paralegal classes at the local community college, so the museum could save money on lawyers. The museum leased a larger warehouse on the old Alameda Navy base, with hopes of luring corporate clientele who would pay big money to host events and retreats — and maybe be inspired to become a corporate angel backer for the museum’s future plans. The expo space looked glorious, with twinkle lights, movie-screen-size artwork slung from the rafters, and experimental art made out of pinball parts and musical instruments. Children flocked around a hands-on science exhibit breaking down pinball components into their simplest scientific terms. Casual fans who came to play the modern machines gravitated toward a 1930s baseball game that used no electricity, learning from a staffer a little history and mechanical engineering. Museum officials say they learned that the last-minute exhibition permit they received for the expo wouldn’t be immediately duplicated. “All this time we’ve been occupied acquiring games, restoring games or having fun playing the games and sharing them with the public,” Zartarian says. Alameda City Manager Jill Keimach sympathizes, even as the museum and city are occasionally at odds over permits involving the warehouse (it has since received another one-time permit for a May 3 pinball-and-beer event) or details surrounding the Carnegie Campaign, a long-simmering attempt to turn the city’s Carnegie Library into a pinball museum. “It sounds corny, but for me I do not like our throwaway culture,” Schiess says, raising his voice over a cacophony of bells and bumpers in the room. Two new exhibitions opened at the Pacific Pinball Museum this month: “Art Stenholm Retrospective,” on the pinball artist, and “That Conceptual Life,” photo collage narratives from artists Pons Maar and Ilene Segalove.