Shyvers

Shyvers Manufacturing Company was a pinball producer of the 1930s with an unusual geographic footprint — the company operated from both Seattle, Washington, and Chicago, Illinois, at various points in its history. Founded by Kenneth C. Shyvers, who also designed games for Mills Novelty Company, the company produced twenty-three titles between 1933 and 1937, straddling the Pure Mechanical and Electromechanical eras.

Kenneth Shyvers was one of the early pinball industry’s peripatetic designer-entrepreneurs, a figure who moved between companies and cities as the young industry sorted itself out. His firm’s catalog included games like Spirit of America (1933) and later titles such as Kickers (1937), produced during the period when Chicago’s amusement manufacturing cluster was pulling talent and companies toward it from across the country. The Shyvers name appeared under multiple corporate entities — the Shyvers Coin Automatic Machine Company and the Shyvers Manufacturing Company — reflecting the informal, fast-moving corporate structures typical of Depression-era amusement firms.

Shyvers ceased production by 1937, one of dozens of small manufacturers that emerged during pinball’s first explosive years and disappeared before the medium reached its mature form. The company’s brief catalog is notable primarily for the connection to Kenneth Shyvers himself, whose design work across multiple firms — including his credited games at Mills Novelty Company — places him among the early industry’s more interesting itinerant figures.