Humble Ottumwa earns galactic fame

By Gary Sawyer

OTTUMWA, Iowa – Walk down Main Street in this southeast Iowa town and you’ll pass a shoe store, a men’s clothing shop, a hamburger joint and the world’s most famous video arcade.

That’s not a misprint.  This quiet town of 30,200 people is home to the Twin Galaxies Arcade, which has been declared by many to be the most famous video arcade on the planet.

In fact, this town is considering calling itself The Video Gaming Capital of the World.

HOW did all that come to pass in a town whose only previous claim to fame was being home to M*A*S*H’s Radar O’Reily on television?

Well, the credit goes to Walter Day, owner of the Twin Galaxies Arcade, and his invention, the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard.

Day, who looks and dresses as if he works in a bank, is a man who does unusual things in a big way.

For example, several years ago he began collecting old newspapers.  He now has 7 million copies.

ANOTHER of his projects is collecting the high school yearbooks of famous people.  In an effort not to miss anyone who becomes famous in the future, he’s trying to collect every high school yearbook published in the United States.

So it really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that he’s the owner of the famous video arcade and the originator of the scoreboard, which lists the world’s highest scores on the most popular video arcade games.

But Day’s not stopping now.

His current projects include setting up a video game shootout between the best players in the U.S. and Japan, establish the Video Game Hall of Fame at his Ottumwa arcade, and setting up a new scoreboard that will numerically rank all video game players.

DAY, who once held a video game record, talks excitedly about his ideas in the snack bar in front of the arcade.  He interrupts himself frequently to find a book or magazine article that will help make his point or to answer a phone call from a potential record-holder.

Although Day dresses in a suit and tie, most of his customers sport jeans, T-shirts, and jogging shoes.  They all call him Walter and usually stop to chat for a few minutes before heading back to the games.

The arcade looks like any other Players – called gamers by those in the know – crowd around the 20 machines lined up against the two walls.  The gamers are usually young, but a few businessmen apparently forsake three martini lunches for a hot dog and four games of Pac-Man.

ON WEEKENDS and during the summer, Day said, video gamers from across the nation come to visit the world’s most famous video arcade.

“Some of them come to try to set records; others come because they’ve read about us in a book or magazine,” he said.

In fact, in “Defending the Galaxy, The Complete Book of VideoGaming,” there is an entire section on how video gamers can get to Ottumwa.

The Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard – which started all of this – came about one afternoon last February.  There had been an extremely high score on one of the Twin Galaxies’ video machines and Day wanted to find out whether it was some sort of record.

After a few calls he discovered that such records weren’t being kept.  After a few more calls, the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard was born and the calls started coming in to Day.

DAY NOW receives about 20 calls and 20 to 25 letters a day for the International Scoreboard.  His scoreboard is now recognized as the official clearinghouse for high scores on video games.

“It’s really funny,” he said.  “Once we started doing it, everyone wondered they why hadn’t been doing it all along.”

The scoreboard is not a moneymaker – but then it doesn’t cost a lot either.  He pays postage on the scoreboard poster he sends across the country, but the arcades buy it from him.  At best, he breaks even.

His ideas have a way of falling in place:  “You just have to do them.  You say them.  And they happen.”

And the whole point of them, for him, is to make life “More interesting and less boring… A lot of people can do these things I’ve done, but I’ve made a habit of finding a different angle on these things, bringing them out in a different way.”

How does that happen?

For Day, it involved growing up “clean and righteous” in California and then moving as a teen-ager to “rough” Lynn, Mass.

“Too rebellious” to participate in high school athletics, Day opted for weightlifting and, along the way, was “enfused with the desire to achieve and enjoy a lot more in life.  And to have fun.”

His college years – “quite a few of them,” because he interspersed study with travel – were in Massachusetts and Switzerland.  He was in Haight-Asbury during the 1960s, losing weight and his health.

That life ceased about 12 years ago when he took up transcendental meditation, “the base, the bottom line, for a lot of the ideas I have.  I can’t stop them.  And they’ve all been fun.  A lot of it’s just setting down and getting the rest and the clarity of thought.”

Along the way, Day was also composing and playing ragtime piano and buying and selling old newspapers.  Between the ones he owns and markets for others, the collection new numbers around 7 million.  The high school yearbooks came later and include ones featuring the youthful faces of Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, John Wayne, James Dean and Bob Dylan.

In 1978, he came to Iowa to “check out” Iowa State University and Maharishi International University in Fairfield.  He didn’t enroll in either school, but settled in Fairfield because, he says, he loved Iowa’s “pace.”

He’s stayed single:  “I take marriage very seriously and I don’t want to be married twice.  I’m the marrying type, but not the hasty type.”

Also on his serious checklist; “Honesty, virtue, concern and being healthy personally and encouraging it in others.  That sounds romantic, but we all are; we just don’t let that trait show very much.”

He’s not too romantic to enjoy the flash and blips for a video arcade, however.  In addition to all his other avocations and pursuits, Day found time one day to sit down at the “Make Trax” video game and run up a score which still stands as the world’s record.

Source: Quad-City Times, Dec. 15, 1982, page 6