At age 14, two classmates and I were playing pinball machines, the old electrical-mechanical type. I had the fingers of both hands on the flipper buttons on both sides of the machine that I was playing. The sister of one of my classmates, a young woman of 15, came up behind me and dug into my lower rib cage from behind. I desperately kept my fingers on the flipper buttons, as the ball in play was the third of three. In about 20 seconds, she had me laughing so hard that I collapsed to the floor while the third ball dropped away, ending the game.
I was both embarrassed and angry, but everybody else in the pinball arcade was laughing at me as she smiled. I got no sympathy for the lost game. That was in 1964. It was the only time that I was ever tickled in public until NEST forty years later.
