Keeney and Sons

Keeney and Sons was a Chicago pinball manufacturer that grew out of an earlier coin-machine distribution business run by John B. Keeney and his sons, Jack and William, out of Jefferson, Iowa. The family firm moved to Chicago in 1916 and built a nationwide mail-order network that made it one of the largest coin-machine distributors in the country. John B. Keeney retired in 1926, and in 1930 the company built its first pinball game. The Keeney & Sons partnership dissolved in late 1933, and in January 1934 John H. "Jack" Keeney organized a new company, J.H. Keeney and Company, at 2900 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

The new company opened a 30,000-square-foot plant at 2001 Calumet Avenue in 1937 and built electromechanical pinball games for the next three decades. Cover Girl, released in December 1947, was Keeney's first pinball game with flippers. Jack Keeney died in 1948; Band Leader followed in October 1949, and the company continued operating into the 1960s. Keeney was also one of the era's major console and slot-machine makers, building a decades-long line of Super Bell machines alongside bingo games — a business that ran beside its pinball output and outlasted it.

Keeney kept making pinball into the early 1960s, releasing titles including Poker Face in August 1963. Arrowhead, released in August 1964, was the company's last pinball machine, while its vending and console lines continued at least into the mid-1960s.