The Marble Dealer
Welcome to a page dedicated to bringing the marble collectors in the nation with current and real marble stories. Anything that I find I will add it here with the exact date of the piece along with the author. If you wrote something at one time in your life and it was published feel free to email or mail me the writing and I will include it on The Marble Dealer page. My email is always open mikesmarbles@yahoo.com (Update: Check below for a new article and enlarge the images when you click on the thumbnails. Use your mouse pointer with one click on the image to enlarge it again using Netscape, Internet Explorer, or Firefox.)
Marbles players shooting for a tournament win by Michael Donahue Tuesday, November 20, 2001.
Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 may be the games of choice among most teenagers but Tyrus Kearney, 15, prefers a simpler kind of fun. All the Memphis, Tenn., teen has to do is draw a circle on any surface concrete, sand, dirt or clay and the game begins. Kearney's passion is marbles, a game that hasn't changed much since Kearney's father, who also plays was a boy. "When I'm doing this I have to use my mind, use strategy and get the clay to work," said Kearney as he demonstrated some thumps on a ring beneath a big blue and yellow tent at the recent Marble Festival, during International Goat Days in Millington, Tenn. Kearney, a high school sophomore, began throwing marbles when he was 6 or 7.
He is a member of the Memphis Thumpers marble club and a three time champion of the Memphis Marble Association. He likes to spend his prize money which sometimes is as much as $50.00, on clothes. Thomas Mead, Kearney's father, is president of the Memphis Marble Association, a group of 12 marble thumpers who compete in tournaments. A game of marbles is played with at least four people. There are 13 marbles in the middle of the ring in a "T" or cross formation. Each player has a "thumper" or marble that's used to knock out seven of the 13 marbles. How many marbles each player knocks out determines who is the winner and the runner up. The game is similar to pool, Mead said. "You're using your thumb and hand and your concentration. You're just doing it with your hand and not with a stick and a hand." Mead explained how to thump or "shoot," as it used to be called in the old days.
"You put it (the marble) between your thumb, your index and your point (middle) finger. You get it set between that point finger and index finger with your thumb behind the marble. And then you use thrust power from your thumb. "The thrill of it is to make perfect hits. I have seen some thumpers take a marble and make it just automatically hit the marble, (make it) bounce back to another position and just sit there." The game of marbles has been around some time. In "Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things," Charles Panati writes, "It is clearly displayed that many games played today were enjoyed by children 500 years ago. And several of those games, one being marbles, were part of the daily play of Egyptian children 4,500 years earlier." And, he writes, "On the Greek island of Crete, Minoan youths played with highly polished marbles of jasper and agate as early as 1435 B.C. And it is the Greeks, from their term for a polished white agate, marmaros, who gave us the word 'marble."
Marble playing is growing in popularity, said Jim Ridpath, president of the National Marble Club, based in Myrtle Beach, S.C. There are about 1,100 members from the United States and nine foreign countries in the club. Ridpath, 79, began a class on how to play marbles and "it grew beyond my imagination," he said. "We started teaching kids how to play marbles who didn't have the opportunity to learn. When I was growing up, we always learned from older kids. But those kids are not really playing that much today 'cause they don't have the space. There used to be an empty lot on every corner. You don't find that now, at least in the larger metropolitan areas." The secret to being a good marbles player is to practice, Ridpath said, adding that the game of marbles is like the game of life. "It teaches you how to win and/or lose. If you can't lose right, you can never win right. It teaches you how to act on your own. It's not like playing football. If you fumble the ball, you've got 10 guys trying to cover for you. In marbles, if you make a mistake, you've got to live with it."
SUNDAY, JUNE 12, 2005 SECTION B * THE PLAIN DEALER
Young rollers go old school at tournament Before PlayStation, or even TV, marbles were all the rage
James Ewinger
Plain Dealer Reporter
The gentle click and snap of childhoods long past floated into Akron's present Saturday morning as two dozen boys and girls competed in a marbles tournament. This was the diversion of summers without air conditioning, a contemporary of jacks and hopscotch, tag and steel roller skates, of a country with only one major sport — all pursuits that favored open air and daylight. "Keep that hand Super Glued to the ground," advised Michael Cohill, borrowing modern language to train a new generation. The game of marbles was once so pervasive that it generated terms still with us, though cut off from their roots. "Knuckle down" would have been the admonition that Angelo Ciavarella heard when he "played for keeps" back in the 1930s. He provided hushed play-by-play and color commentary Saturday as his granddaughter, Lea, tried her hand in the tournament, which was at the city's Lock 3 Park. Lea, 9, goes out for "every sport that conies up," her grandfather said with pride. But that doesn't give her the time or the devotion he had as a boy. "When we went to school we always had marbles in our pocket," he said, and they played along the way. That gave them better aim and power than today's players, he said.
Ciavarella gave it up when he entered high school in 1940, the traditional cut-off. Up to that time, it was a natural pursuit for any Akron child because the city was the marble capital of the United States. Cohill, who has become a latter day apostle for the game, said he has found evidence of 32 manufacturers in the Akron area. Now he is the only one, having undertaken the making of the little spheres this year. The peak years might have been the '30s, he said, with a near-fatal decline by the 1950s. In 1931, 60,000 Akron children participated in the local competition. His theory is that the game became displaced by today's more available organized sports and electronics, including TV. Today Mexico City is a marble Mecca, he said. "Keep in mind, marbles is demographically driven because it's so inexpensive." Thus, Mexico generates more marbles in a day than the United States does in a year, he said, and a single plant in Guadalajara produces a billion a day. Cohill's fledgling operation, with two assistants, is good for a few hundred — when the glass-heating furnace works. At 50, "I'm no good," Cohill says of his own skills, but admits he is not a lifetime player. Still, he has acquired the knowledge of many lifetimes, after an earlier toy-making venture got him interested in marbles.
He had a small Akron factory that made plastic outdoor toys in the 1980s, but he found that it had been the site of a marble plant that traced its lineage to the 19th century. Since then, he has interviewed old-timers and immigrants for a truly global view of the game. Moses probably played the game, Cohill said, and they were found in King Tut's tomb. Americans still favor a ring game, in which contestants try to drive marbles out of the ring with a shooter. It was conceived as a promotional device by Scripps Howard, which once published newspapers in many U.S. cities — including several in Ohio. Other forms favored around the world include target games, in which the objective is just hitting something, and hole games, where the objective is to hit or avoid a hole. Saturday's winners were Monica Feltman, 7, of Akron and Steven Randby, 14, of Ravenna. Each won a trip to Disney World.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jewinger@plaind.com, 216-999-3905
Marble terminology
A handful of marble terms:
• Aggie — Marble made out of agate or glass that looks like agate, a natural mineral.
• Alley — Shooter marble made of marble. Short for alabaster.
• Ante — Where players start by placing into the ring an equal number of marbles or marbles judged to be of equal value.
• Bombsies — Dropping your shooter on the target marble.
• Bullseye — Popular design that refers to China marbles and natural-agate marbles.
• Cats-eye — Popular mass-produced marble.
• Commies — Cheap, common clay marbles.
• Flintie — Any stone, natural-agate marble.
• Misting — Lifting your knuckle while shooting. Lose your turn.
• Keepsies — The name of the game: Playing for keeps. Keep all the marbles you win.
• Knuckle down — To have one knuckle of your shooting hand touching the ground.
• Lagging — Similar to determining the break in pool, it's a way of choosing who shoots first. Players roll marbles toward a line in the dirt (lag line). Whoever gets closest without going over shoots first.
• Mibs — Target marbles. Another name: Kim-mies. A mibster is one who plays marbles.
• Milkies — Translucent white glass machine-made marble.
• Pee Wee — A marble no more than V2-inch in diameter. Thought to be the namesake of New York Yankees' Hall of Famer Pee Wee Reese.
• Playing for fair — Marbles returned to owner after the game.
• Playing for keeps — Winner keeps all marbles after the game ("winner keeps, loser weeps").
• Plunking — Hitting targets on the fly.
• Shooter — Marble shot from the hand in game play with the object usually being to knock a target marble out of play. Shooters often are slightly larger than target marbles.
SOURCE: http://www.akronmarbles.com ; http://www.streetplay.com/thegames ; http://www.kidsturncentral.com
The Plain Dealer Sunday, June 12, 2005
MONDAY, MARCH 27,2006 SECTION D * THE PLAIN DEALER
MARBLE MAKER TRIES TO KEEP'EM ROLLING
MICHAEL SANGIACOMO
Plain Dealer Reporter
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