American Beauty

American Beauty is an electro-mechanical pinball machine manufactured by Westerhaus Amusement Company of Cheviot, Ohio in March 1945. It is a Flipperless conversion, adapted from two earlier Bally titles -- 1940's 'Attention' and 'Mascot' -- a common wartime-era practice when manufacturers reworked existing cabinets and playfields rather than tooling entirely new games amid material shortages.

As a Flipperless game, American Beauty predates the flipper (introduced industry-wide starting in 1947) and instead relies on skillful plunging, playfield tilting, and target placement to direct the ball's path -- the standard gameplay approach for pinball machines of the early-to-mid 1940s.

Little further detail survives about the machine's specific scoring rules, artwork, or theme. Its earliest known advertising mention appeared in a March 1945 distributor ad, with the manufacturer's own promotional ad following the next month describing it as a new 'revamp.' As with many wartime conversions, American Beauty remains a sparsely documented but historically interesting artifact of the period's resourceful approach to pinball manufacturing.