ABSTRACT
Shortly before Christmas 1930, a Youngstown, Ohio, carpenter named Arthur Paulin was cleaning out his barn when he chanced upon a board with several holes carved out of it and about 30 nails stuck in it. The board reminded Paulin of the game of bagatelle, a countertop game derived from a billiard variant first played in eighteenth-century France that requires the players to shoot the cue ball up the side of a sloped table to land it in one of several scoring holes guarded by nests of pins. In 1871, an English inventor living in Cincinnati, Ohio, named Montague Redgrave created a countertop version of the game with a spring-loaded plunger replacing the cue stick, and variations on this design achieved modest popularity in subsequent decades. 1 The recent onset of the Great Depression wreaked havoc upon the steel mills that drove the Youngstown economy, and with his own financial situation precarious, Paulin decided to fashion the board into a bagatelle game as a Christmas present for his daughter. The game proved a hit with the neighborhood children, who formed lines around the house to play the game. 2
