DERRY--No one can accuse Bonnie McBroom of losing her marbles.
For the past five years, she's been gaining more and more of the colorful glass spheres.
For hobbyists like McBroom, what was once child's play has become an adult passion.
A room in her Derry Township home now is devoted entirely to her favorite object--lined with jars and jewelry cases stuffed full of hundreds of marbles, as well as an assortment of related games and gear.
McBroom, who works as a registered nurse, can recall a time when youngsters played for keeps when they competed in the classic game of "ringers."
After knocking each other's standard five-eighths inch marbles out of a ring with larger three-quarters inch "shooter" marbles, "It used to be you got to keep them," she said. "But not anymore,"
Now both players and collectors have come to take their marbles more seriously.
In tournament play of "ringers," the stakes can be high, but not so high as to forfeit one's marbles. Playing "for fair," with all marbles returned to their original owners, is the norm.
Meanwhile, no self-respecting collector would allow her better-quality marbles to be used in a game.
Said McBroom, "All marbles get beat up and chipped if you play with them enough."
Vintage marbles with rarer designs can command hundreds or thousands of dollars on the collectibles market. But McBroom doesn't feel comfortable having some of her older, more time-worn pieces buffed up just to boost their marketability.
She explained, "There's something about a marble that's been used; I hate to change it."
For aesthetic reasons, she had one of her older marbles polished, allowing its colorful design to shine through decades of nicks, fogginess and neglect.
Not a big marble-user herself, McBroom said, "I can remember once or twice in my life playing marbles.
"I wasn't good at it." But, "I always liked them."
She finally pursued that interest several years ago when she began exploring the Internet on her home computer.
To begin with, she sought advice from a seasoned collector, her brother, David Neely of Indiana.
McBroom recalled, "He said, 'Type in something you like,' so I typed in 'marbles.' "
A search of that word linked her to examples of marbles available for sale on eBay and other Internet venues, as well as discussion boards where she could trade tips and queries with other marble fans.
"I thought the marbles were nice, so then I had to go buy a book about them," she said. "That started it all."
She quickly discovered that modern marbles have been rolling along as a combined toy and art object for more than a century.
From the early 1900s, "Kids played with them, but they were made for collecting, too," McBroom said.
Her collection includes examples of older marbles which were fashioned from clay, china or semi-precious stones, as well as a steel version made by crimping a piece of metal into a shape resembling a jingle bell.
Though they lack the eye appeal of multi-colored glass marbles, McBroom indicated the ones made of clay were more durable.
"Clay, when fired, is hard as a rock," she said.
She explained some earthenware marbles, made with a technique similar to molding bullets, "have a distinctive line the whole way around them."
McBroom also has a few early hand-made glass marbles. "Most of the old hand-made marbles come from Germany," she noted.
Among the common hand-made marble designs is the "Latticinio Swirl," which features a colored "webbing" pattern inside a clear glass orb.
Starting with molten glass, McBroom explained, "They made a clear glass rod, wrapped the colors around it and pulled it out to make the lines finer. Then they put the next clear glass layer on, twisted it and filed each marble off."
McBroom's collection of older handmade marbles includes a few "sulphides." Dating from the late 1800s or early 1900s, these larger marbles each contains a small three-dimensional image of an animal or human figure inside surrounding layers of glass.
In addition to German imports, she owns several older marbles made in Czechoslovakia.
They are distinguished by a silky finish and their unique construction--with two halves joined together.
In the beginning decades of the 20th century, machine-made marbles gained prominence in America. Generally, the marbles are made from cullet, excess glass left over from production of other items.
The molten glass is colored with the addition of various oxides. To achieve the correct shape, it is poured through a small opening, cut into equal-sized pieces by automated shears and then is fed through rollers to obtain a smooth, round surface.
Several competing firms have turned them machine-made marbles, each with a distinct line of colors and patterns.
McBroom indicated, "You get little bags of different marbles and compare them back and forth. That's how you start," when learning the many distinctive designs issued by various manufacturers.
"There are ones I'm still working on, trying to find out what they are," McBroom said.
"You can lose your marbles doing it," she quipped.
Just as many glassware manufacturers set up shop in the Ohio River Valley, so did a large number of marble companies.
One of the most well-known is Marble King, which has been operating in West Virginia since 1949.
According to McBroom, the firm has produced "the marbles of the common man. Those are the ones most kids will remember"--such as the "patch," the "stripe" or slightly more elaborate patterns like the red and black "wasp" and the yellow and black "bumblebee."
Other popular marble styles in McBroom's collection include "Popeyes," which feature two solid colors and white glass twirled together, and the "Onionskin," which is striped all around its surface.
One of the products of the Akro Agate company of Akron, Ohio, was the "moonie," a translucent whitish marble made of opalescent glass.
According to McBroom, "If it's a real 'moonie,' it will show red through it when you hold it up to the light."
Akro's moss agate fluoresces on one side, due to a low-level radioactive component. As with the test for a true moonie, "If it doesn't fluoresce, it's not a moss agate," McBroom said.
Her favorite marble producers are the Vitro Agate Company and the Peltier Glass Company.
Vitro Agate, which operated from 1932 to 1992, had been located in Parkersburg, W. Va., but was moved to Washington state with a change of ownership in 1989.
McBroom's particularly likes Vitro's "parrot" marbles, of which she has a handful.
The marbles each feature a patchwork of four different colors, brushed onto the surface of a white base, recalling the brilliant plumage of the tropical bird.
In addition, McBroom said, "It has aventurine in it--metal filings that make it sparkle in the sun."
Similarly, mica often was added to the marble mix to create a sparkly interior.
A marble-related specialty McBroom has begun to collect is jewel trays made by Vitro Agate. Marbles adorn the rim of the small circular trays, which some say were actually intended as ash trays, tip trays or coasters.
A standout in that subset of her collection is a tray commemorating the 1939 World's Fair. "I was very lucky to find it," she noted.
Peltier was founded in Illinois in 1886, initially making such items as shot glasses.
"They really started up in the 1920s, making marbles," McBroom noted.
McBroom owns an example of one of Peltier's rare "advertising marbles" or "comics." Popular in the 1930s, they depicted 12 different characters from the comic strips of the day.
The designs were fired on the marble's surface in graphite, followed by an overglaze. McBroom's features "Sandy," Little Orphan Annie's faithful dog.
According to McBroom, one of her best marble finds occurred when she added a highly desirable "Peltier Peerless Patch" to her collection.
It is distinguished from other "patch" designs by the curved edges of the differently colored patches, which sometimes resemble the letter "S."
Also, with a satiny finish, "It looks like there's nail polish on it," McBroom said.
She got the item at a bargain, to boot: "I spent $11 on a lot of a half dozen marbles and got one that was worth $200. That doesn't happen a lot."
"They're out there," she said of such choice marble designs. "It's just getting one in good shape that's hard. You don't find them 'in the wild' anymore"--that is, at a flea market, where the seller may not realize the true value of what he has.
As with any hobby, marble-collecting has its trends.
Currently, McBroom noted, "catseye" marbles are becoming a hot item.
When they originally were issued in the 1950s, she said, "They used to be plain little marbles. But now people are discovering that companies made them in all kinds."
Copied by American companies from an original design in Japan, the marbles contain colored vanes in the interior of the sphere.
"The catseyes came about when they were looking for ways to make marbles quickly," McBroom added. At its most basic, "You just need a clear marble and one other color."
In addition to the marbles themselves, McBroom has begun to collect related games and toys.
One of her more unusual finds was an older German-made toy called "Gloria Mosaic."
She explained, "They took clay marbles and coated them with foil," giving them a surface which would reflect light.
The marbles then could be arranged in sheets of cardboard with punched holes, creating any number of dazzling patterns.
"It's what they used before they had Lite Brite," McBroom said.
Another of her favorites is a copy of "General Grant's Board," a solitaire strategy game which challenges the player to remove all marbles but one from the board, through a series of jumps.
McBroom, who continues to learn more about her chosen hobby with each new purchase, was not sure why the game was associated with Grant.
Although McBroom could not get the knack of shooting marbles herself, she has discovered that marbles and the games played with them have a universal appeal.
A friend in the service who completed a tour of duty in the Middle East returned with some Kuwaiti paper money which depicts children playing marbles.
Though McBroom mostly prefers to collect older marbles, she also appreciates some of the eye-catching items created by modern-day masters of handmade marble techniques.
Perhaps the most amazing marbles in her collection are miniature ones turned out by contemporary artist Jane Walker.
Inside a petite glass display case, McBroom points to a series of colored specks barely larger than the candy sprinkles used to top a sundae.
Under a magnifying glass, each resolves into a tiny marble, containing even smaller details within its interior. "You can see all the little spirals and corkscrews," McBroom said. "It has to be a labor-intensive process."
McBroom also admires the handicraft of members of the Jim Davis family of Pennsboro, W. Va.
She owns a special set of their handmade marbles, each fashioned by a different family member--Davis and his six sons: Steve, Rick, Mike, John, Mark and Joe.
While McBroom pursues her quest for more marbles on the Internet, she also periodically attends regional shows, as far away as New Philadelphia, Ohio.
Through the hobby, she said, "I've met lots of great people. That's more than half the fun of it,"
"The marble community is a great one," she said, noting most collectors are more than willing to share information on marble varieties.
"I take digital pictures and put them up on the Internet to see if anyone can identify them," she said of her mystery marbles.
As for adding to her holdings, McBroom said, "Sometimes I'll have a marble heyday, and sometimes I won't buy any for months."
On McBroom's wish list is finding a "guinea" marble that isn't a budget-buster.
"I'd love to have a guinea by Christensen," she said, referring to the M. F. Christensen and Son Company, which operated in Akron only from 1903 to 1917.
"They made higher-end marbles," she said, noting a vintage guinea in good condition can fetch upwards of $1,500.
The guinea was so named supposedly because its splotches of multiple colors reminded Christensen workers of guinea hens which lived on the factory grounds.
Collectors who are in the market for such vintage marbles are encountering a growing problem: distinguishing the genuine item from similar-looking modern reproductions.
Some more scrupulous manufacturers have made it simple to tell the difference, by including evenly spaced bubbles in the glass of the modern versions.
But there is another telltale sign, McBroom said. She explained older marbles have prominent pontil marks, left when the finished piece is removed from an iron rod the glassmaker uses to hold it.
A major goal of many collectors is to find a complete boxed set of marbles. McBroom is content with an inexpensive set of 60 Chinese checker marbles.
"They're hard to find," McBroom said of sets. Anyhow, "I much prefer finding a little bunch of marbles, bringing them home and finding out what I got."
