We don’t need reminding that we’re all mortal, but as we grow older the frequency with which old friends disappear becomes disconcerting. I have already commented in this column previously how the ranks of wrinklies in the industry are becoming thinner.
I am grateful to Bob Burnett, who goes back a long way in the coin machine industry in South Wales, for letting me know of the passing of Dave Young. I can almost hear everyone saying: “Dave Young? Rings a bell somewhere…”
We of the older fraternity need no reminding, and certainly not at InterGame - the masthead designs for the magazine and its sister publications came from the ingenious mind of Dave Young and his wife, Christine.
Dave, we learn, has died at his home in Tenby, South Wales, after an illness. He had a lifetime in creative design work, notable for producing the artwork for Ace Coin Equipment advertisements in the company’s heydays of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
But his studio did much more than that, both inside the industry and across the rest of the business community in South Wales. Dave also designed the huge Ace stands which for some years dominated ATEI trade shows from Alexandra Palace to Olympia to Earls Court.
We drafted in Dave and Christine when we launched InterGame in 1994 to help us with the design work for the covers and his masthead design for our name has become an immediately recognised logo within the games and gaming industry all over the world.
I remember Dave so well as a man of infinite patience. He had to be, working for the volatile and mercurial Morris Collings, who founded the original Ace company. Dave made Morris’s huge cigar into a familiar symbol of the company and who from those days could forget the ads in Coin Slot where Morris would be wearing a coronet and ermine and be dubbed “the Count of Monte Carlo” (Monte Carlo was the name of the first AWP machine to revolutionise the industry).
Working with Morris was something of a trial for Dave – and indeed, everyone, for Morris was a tartar, but he built a hugely successful company. Dave’s quietly spoken and impeccably mannered ripostes belied the stresses that must have been there.
Dave went on to work for several companies in the industry, notably JPM when Jack Jones, the Parker brothers and John Monks founded it, later to be joined by Ernie Beaver.
In latter years, Dave and Christine retired to Tenby. I hope that those later years were peaceful and gratifying for a man who was, in short, a gent.
