The American Mibologists

Mibology: The study of marbles. ‘mib,’ is the Latin word for marbles, ‘ology’ is Latin for ‘the study of.’

Manfred “Fred” G. Wright - The original "Mibologist"

Of all the people I’ve met, besides my co-author Brian Graham, the one who helped me the most with this history was the late Manfred “Fred” G. Wright of Kokomo, Indiana.

While researching this history it soon became apparent I was not the first to travel down this road. And, I was not the first to research Mr. Christensen and his old marbleworks. In the 1960’s a man named Manfred G. Wright of Kokomo, Indiana came to Akron researching the history of marbles. Luckily I was able to meet with Mr. Wright who shared in the wealth of information he discovered 30 years prior to my own efforts.

While researching The M.F. Christensen & Son Company, I came across a couple of interesting letters in The M. F. Christensen & Son Company Collection. M.G. Wright wrote them in 1964 and 1965 to my landlady seeking information on Martin F. Christensen. It seems someone had been down this same path I was now traveling. When I asked my landlady about these letters she remembered a fellow coming to her door and inquiring about Mr. Christensen. She said she turned him away and put his letters with Mr. Christensen’s papers. Then she informed that Mr. Wright passed away many years ago (a familiar theme of hers.) As it turns out, almost everything my landlady knew about The M.F. Christensen & Son Company came from Mr. Wright.

Later, when researching Samuel C. Dyke “father of the modern American toy industry,” and going through the papers his family graciously allowed me to study, I came across other letters written by Mr. Wright dated in the 1960s. Other “Wright” letters and papers were found with the Leighton family papers and at the Massillon Museum in Massillon, O. It seemed like everywhere I looked I stumbled across Mr. Wright letters. Those instances were great finds for me, reassuring I was on the right track.

Seeking to find some information on the late Mr. Wright, I sent a letter to the Kokomo address appearing on those 1960’s letters. I explained my research project and asked for information on Mr. Wright. There was no reply. A few weeks later, I called long distance information in Kokomo, received a number and dialed. A man answered the phone – it was Mr. Wright.

Mr. Wright was wonderful. Clearing up the confusion caused by my landlady, he assured me I wasn’t talking to a ghost. He explained he was planning to write back to me, but didn’t know where to start. It’d been almost 30 years since he’d been poking around in Akron for marbles and history – his idea of a blissful vacation – and he hadn’t thought seriously about marbles for more than two decades, until I wrote.

Over the next couple of years we talked on the phone, corresponded often and Mr. Wight visited me in Akron a number of times. He was always happy to talk marbles and answer questions – he sent me copies of the files he’d put together on the major players and companies. Since I was following in his footsteps I’d already had a lot of the information he had – publicly available stuff like newspaper articles, city directory notes and the likes. What I didn’t have was the opportunity to sit down and talk to many of the people who worked in the old marbleworks around Akron and in West Virginia. These interviews were well documented by Mr. Wright and the extras, the little personal remembrances – the familiar Cuban cigar poking out from under Mr. Christensen’s white mustache - brought the subject to life for me in a way old corporate records and newspaper articles never could.

Of course, I had an advantage of living in the town where all these primary research materials existed and had easier access to a lot of things Mr. Wright hadn’t discovered back in the 1960’s. Mr Wright never knew of Mr. Christensen’s corporate records for one. This added a lot to our conversations.

One of Mr. Wright’s best contacts in Akron back in the 1960s was Carl H. Pockrandt, the head of the Summit County Historical Society. Mr. Pockrandt was born in Akron in 1884 and was the original Akronologist. There was hardly a subject about his city’s history didn’t know well. He was the leading expert on Akron’s history and was always interested in others’ research on his favorite subject. Karl Grismer, in his history book of Akron and Summit County, remembers Pockrandt as follows, “As an amateur photographer, Mr. Pockrandt has taken hundreds of pictures of Akron scenes and for years has collected photographs which were taken by some of the town’s first photographers . . . His hobbies are photography, stamp and coin collecting, travel and the collection of historical relics.”

One of the subjects Mr. Pockrandt took a personal interest in was Akron’s role in the history of marbles – his interest dated back to the 1890’s when he was a young mibster knuckling down “for keeps” with Akron’s finest marbles up for grabs. One of Mr. Pockrandt’s collections of “historical relics” was the most extensive collection of Akron-made marbles ever assembled. Mr. Wright told me Pockrandt had boxes and boxes of old Akron marbles, each box carrying his hand-written labels identifying those marbles to a specific Akron marble company. There were thousands of marbles all together, as Mr. Wright explained.

Mr. Pockrandt shared with Mr. Wright how to identify all these different Akron-made marbles and Mr. Wright obtained from Mr. Pockrandt numerous and excellent examples of each company’s marbles. Mr. Wright kept these marbles in separate boxes, all labeled just as Mr. Pockrandt kept them. Mr. Wright once suggested I find out what happened to Mr. Pockrandt’s collection, as we both figured it was the most valuable collection of American marbles in existence.

I learned that all of Mr. Pockrandt’s collections of “historical relics” were donated upon his passing to the Summit County Historical Society. When I contacted the Director and told him of this collection, they conducted a search – turning up a small handful old German Swirls. It seems that successive employees of the Historical Society hadn’t realized the importance of this collection and allowed volunteers to use them for their children’s programming, for children to play games with them. By the time I inquired, well . . . I’m glad Mr. Wright obtained part of that collection, which provided me with the some of the same knowledge Mr. Pockrandt shared with Mr. Wright.

The conversations I had with Mr. Wright about proper identification of marbles went something like the following. I showed Mr. Wright a pair of small, badly misshapen, hand-made glass marbles I found on the banks of the canal at the site of the old American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company. They were obviously rejects that never made if off the property. I was quite pleased with myself for being able to ID this highly collectable type of marble collectors call “banded transparents,” to a specific company. He smiled, pulled out a gorgeous hand-made glass marble the size of a tennis ball, in pristine condition; a type collectors call Indians and said, “Yes, they made those and these too.” He then proceeded to define the all the diagnostic traits allowing the proper identification of the glass and clay marbles made at the American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company.

Mr. Wright passed away on December 22, 2000. The quality of information in this book and others to follow are in many ways the result of Mr. Wright’s early and groundbreaking work in the field of mibology.

It is interesting to note that when Mr. Wright was in Akron doing his own research on the history of marbles back in the 1960’s, he soon discovered that he was not the first to travel down this road. Just as I had come across letters written by Mr. Wright asking for information on marbles, Mr. Wright discovered the letters of Dr. Henry D. Watson written in the early 1940’s, asking for information on marbles.

Henry D. Watson, M.D.

Henry D. Watson, M.D, of Binghamton, New York was a serious “art collector and over the years had built up several valuable collections . . . One of his collections of marbles – the youngsters’ playing variety – is in the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine Fla.” (Binghamton Press, June 20, 1950.)

Dr. Watson was not merely interested in collecting marbles he was also interested in their origins. Seeking information he wrote to Mr. J.E. Albright of Ravenna, Ohio. Mr. Albright owned a marbleworks in that nearby city and was the nation’s last manufacturer of ceramic marbles, or “commies,” as a regular production item. Mr. Albright’s father played an important role in the history of marbles dating back to the 1890’s, back in the days when Akron was the “Toy Marbles Capital of the World.” Mr. Albright was able to give Dr. Watson a great deal of first hand information about the subject. He also put Dr. Watson in touch with others like Albert Hise then director of the Massillon Museum, in Massillon, O. who led Dr. Watson to others living in Navarre, O. who where able to provide information about a marbleworks in that village. Needless to say, Dr. Watson left a paper trail of his quest, one that Fred Wright discovered in the 1960’s and one I’ve stumbled upon myself in my research.

Dr. Watson also “contributed to numerous magazines and hobby publications,” articles on the subject of toy marble collecting and the history of marbles. This is how he came into contact with Otto C. Lightner, the publishing magnate of Chicago. One of Lightner’s publications was Hobbies magazine, which dealt with antique collecting and one of Lightner’s passions was, like Dr. Watson’s, collecting fine art. In the late 1940’s Lightner bought the former Hotel Alcazar (built in 1887 in the Spanish Renaissance style) in St. Augustine, Florida and turned it into a museum to house his collections of art. Dr. Watson kept a winter home in Florida and upon learning of Lightner’s plans in St. Augustine, offered to donate some marbles from his “pretty sizable supply. These vary from ones with the swirl colors and animal figures made in Germany to glass and clay playing marbles made in Ohio . . .” (private correspondence, September 30, 1947, Henry D. Watson M.D. in Binghamton, N.Y. to Otto C. Lightner in Chicago IL. curtsey of the Lightner Museum.)

The Original Marble King

Before Dr. Watson there existed one of history’s all time greatest mibologist, Mr. Berry Pink of Passaic, New Jersey. Pink, doing business as, Berry Pink Enterprises, was without a doubt the most extraordinary character in the history of marbles – he was The Marble King.

Little is known about his youth, his time at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, the US Naval Academy at Annapolis (all which occurred before his 16^th birthday,) or his outstanding military service that can’t easily be independently verified, at this point, due to the possibility these accomplishments occurred while using another name. Neither Princeton nor the Naval Academy has records of a fellow named “Pink” – can you imagine? There are photograph’s of a young Berry Pink in his Naval uniform, so there is little doubt about his military service. All this just adds to the personal mystique of The Marble King.

Any way, the often-told story of how Berry Pink got into marbles – a story he told to the press - went like this; “In the crash and depression his investments went sour. Three years later he found himself broke. “There were plenty of places I could have borrowed money, but I was too ashamed,” said Mr. Pink.” At the time recycling (not a term used back then) iron, tin, brass, aluminum, etc. was a good business. However, there was not a market for a glassworks’ rejects. Never the less, “Mr. Pink moved in and began collecting glass. Old bottles, cold-cream jars, window panes – job lots like that. Being inventive, he sketched out a new machine . . . ” well Pink took credit for a lot of things, but inventing marble machines is credited to others. What he ‘really’ did was, “make glass marbles in huge quantities, cheaply and fast.” By 1938 Berry Pink Enterprises was marketing over 400,000,000 marbles (that’s four hundred million) annually and they weren’t all just playthings for young mibsters either. “Today he has eighty sidelines to the marble business – more than a hundred products, most of them invented or perfected by him. . .” er, well . . it sure sounded good and the press couldn’t write enough about The Marble King. (New York Post, May 12, 1938, B:15)

Mr. Pink was a part owner in The Peilter Glass Company of Ottawa, Illinois and owner of Marble King of St. Mary, West Virginia. Yet even at full production these two plants couldn’t meet the demand for marbles that Pink created. To help fill his needs for more marbles Pink would at times purchased the entire production of small independent marbleworks, which popped up around West Virginia like mushrooms after a summer rain. And, where it not for Pink, the possibility of these marbleworks staying in business was pretty slim. Berry Pink was one of the most successful and most extraordinary marketing men of his time, while most of the world was suffering financially from the Great Depression, he became a millionaire, literally from scratch, or maybe that should be from scrap glass.

The things Pink did to promote his product were as extraordinary as the man himself. He sponsored Marble King Marble Tournaments, which at the time dwarfed the size and scope of the National Marbles Tournament. He’d go to schools and give away packs of marbles to every student who received 100% in their spelling tests that day. He received as much and sometimes even more press than movie stars. And, he loved showing off his skill as a marble player to reporters. Undoubtedly, if you believe everything you read in the press, he was the best marble shooter of his day.

Berry Pink employed two interesting marketing techniques to help promote his marbles. He put together the biggest and finest collection of toy marbles ever assembled and then sent it around the county as a traveling exhibit. The headliners for the show were described as follows. “He has marbles of jade and emerald, of silver and gold. He has one from King Tut’s tomb, another from a crumbled Aztec palace. From England he brought one 1,000 years old, its history duly authenticated. He has an American one dating back to 1781.” (New York Post, May 12, 1938, B:15) And, the reason he deserves a place among the American mibologists - he wrote what might be the very first book about the history of marbles; including their manufacture, games, the mysteries, the lore and the legends of marbles, aptly titled, The Romance of Marbles.

The Modern Mibologists

Paul Baumann

In 1970 a young marble collector (with a full head of hair,) wrote a book called, Collecting Antique Marbles, Wallace-Homestead Book Co, Des Moines, Iowa, 1970. In this book Paul Baumann wrote and pictured many of the most desirable antique marbles among collectors – all both of them – just kidding, but it was a very limited number who collected marbles back in those days.

At that time the marbles collected were mainly hand-made glass marbles, believed to originate in Germany between the mid 1800’s and the beginning of World War I. They knew the place these marbles most likely came from was then in East Germany, then behind the Iron Curtain and under Soviet rule. Even if they’d wanted to gain access to primary research documents about the marbles they collected, it would have been an exceedingly difficult task. Regardless, there was little interest at the time in who made the marbles, the names and location of the companies, or a more specific time-line of their manufacture.

What was important at the time was being able to identify the class, type and style of marbles collected. In his book Paul Baumann described all the attributes that would help collectors identify the marbles in their collections. He also set about the task of determining rarity of marbles by taking surveys of his and friends collections. His methodology was complex and extremely thorough. He produced charts stating the sample size used and broke each different type of marble into it’s own classification. At the time Rarity, size and condition where the primary criteria for judging a marbles value. His first book largely set up the framework that the hobby still uses today.

In this book Paul gave mention of the fact there existed machine-made marbles and even named a few of the companies known to exist. This was more an expression of his thoroughness than an attempt to identify and classify this ‘modern’ type of marbles.

Twenty years later, by the late 1980’s the hobby of collecting marbles had grown, but there was still slight interest in collecting machine-made marbles. Most of the collectors looked upon this class of marbles with distain, referring to its inferiority as “West Virginia Trash.” They knew marbles were still manufactured in West Virginia and figured the industry there had a long history. The few machine-made marbles easily spotted in a bucket of “Trash” were blessed with degrading names like; onyx marbles were called ‘slags’ and those beautiful cornelian marbles were called ‘bricks.’ Still many collectors brought buckets of “Trash” to swap meets and the conventions to encourage little children to adopt an interest in the hobby. For a dollar they could sort through the bucket and pull out ten marbles.

In 1989, when I was trying to gain a better understanding of the M.F. Christensen & Son Company Collection, I wrote a letter to a marble collectors club seeking information. I received a reply from Paul Baumann who soon after traveled to Akron to see the collection. It took him about a minute of looking over the collection to inform me that this was an important find. And, with his encouragement I soon found myself neck deep in toy marble history.

Paul Baumann has since written two more books on collecting antique marbles and his last book devoted half its space to the subject of machine-made marbles. Paul’s mibological efforts in the hobby of collecting marbles are among the most important and his work has influenced all.

Larry Castle

One of the few people interested in machine-made marbles, all that “West Virginia Trash” back in the late 1980’s was Larry Castle. I met Larry in 1990 at a couple of toy marble collector’s conventions. This was before machine-made marbles became a ‘hot item’ among collectors and I was buying marbles I knew were manufactured by the M.F. Christensen & Son Company, and other companies, etc. I was able to purchase many of Mr. Christensen’s marbles for 10 cents, some of which today sell for upwards of $100 each.

Larry was at these conventions promoting his new book , Collectable Machine-Made Marbles, Identification and Price Guide, Utah Marble Connection, Ogden, Utah, 1990. Being there was scant information published to date on the subject and being that he was from the relatively marble barren region of Utah, Larry used the techniques common to the hobby at the time to catalog and classify the machine-made marbles he wrote about. He focused his attention on the attributes pf marbles in much the same way Paul Baumann did, taking notice of subtle differences among the marbles in his extensive collection and began to sort them into like groupings. (Later, in at least one case went as far as to have the glass of a marble analyzed in a laboratory to determine its chemical make-up.) Not having access to the names manufacturers gave their marbles Larry blessed certain marbles with new names. And, due to the fact these are small toys, he happily steered away from the Latin, genius, species and variety format. Instead, Larry created and used a fun-loving lexicon.

The format of Larry Castles book was basically to place similar marbles on a single color plate and identify them below as “Multi-Color Swirls,” Two Color Opaque Swirls,” “Patched Opaque,” etc. He listed the names of about six or seven companies in the book, noted that a couple of them made some of the ones on a page, but other than those marbles noted as coming from The Akro Agate Company, he generally steered away from identifying the marbles individually to any specific company. He basically stuck to the hobby’s common ideals of identifying a marble by its attributes.

This is also the book in which Larry Castle coined the term “transitions,” known today as “transitional marbles.” There’s an interesting story that describes how he came about inventing this new category of marble. Larry had a large collection of onyx marbles (“slags,” in the old vernacular) and he began to notice something peculiar about some of these marbles. In a number of cases he had to two marbles that were identical in almost every way, except one had a pontil mark and the other was pontil free. He surmised these two marbles were somehow related and the onyx marble with the pontil mark must represent some type of transitional phase in the manufacturing process. It’s a logical conclusion. However, he then stretched that supposition further by describing the type of machinery used to manufacture this peculiar new class of marble. “The first machines that were used to make marbles were rather crude and required several people to produce the marbles. These early techniques left a pontil. . . The different pontils were caused by improvements in the machinery and by various marble makers.”

The transitional marble became an overnight sensation. The next marble author to write picked it up and gave a few more details about the machines that left a pontil on a marble. By the end of the 1990’s authors devoted whole chapters to the subject going into extra ordinary detail about their manufacture, - part hand-made / part machine-made – the companies that manufactured “transitional marbles,” J.H. Leighton, The M.F. Christensen & Son Company, etc. which gave the marbles an approximate date, and they explained how to identify these marbles.

There was only one problem with this – Larry Castle didn’t do any research into the history and development of glass sphere-making technology – he was simply making a supposition about the attributes of a marble. And, as is sometimes the case with suppositions, it turned out to be wrong. First, it is beyond the laws of physical science to place molten glass into the wheels of a marble-forming machine and end up with a pontil. What he was looking at when he saw two similar marbles in his collection was one marble – a 100% hand-made marble - manufactured by J. H. Leighton using his patented technique and the other was a 100% machine-made marble manufactured at one of four American marble companies using one of three different patented machines.

And, the reason this is such an important situation today in the hobby of antique and collectable marbles is due to the fact the hobby now uses a different criteria to value the marbles they collect. Before it was of no importance where a made came from or how old it was, the only thing that was important was the type of marble, it’s size and condition. Today the company that made a marble and its age are the most important criteria for judging the value of a marble. The times changed, the hobby changed, the hobbyists expect more, but those writing and supporting the hobby didn’t keep up. They failed to look at some of the most obvious pieces of primary research materials 1.) the US Patent record, 2.) The Thomas Register (which lists the names, addresses, presidents, etc. of every marble company doing business in the US during the 20^th century) and 3.) Newspaper and magazine articles of which there are thousands. All of these sources are publicly available, all of it at a good public library.

Jeff Carskadden and Richard Gartley

The team of Jeff Carskadden and his co-author Richard Gartley have publish the most scholarly works to-date on the subject of toy marbles. Their research into the ceramic toy marbles manufactured in both the United States and Europe is painstakingly documented, referenced and cited throughout in their works. Their period of expertise takes the history of ceramic marbles up to the point where your authors’ research begins. I can testify to the difficulties of finding and the rarity of materials we’ve available to write our works. However, their research dates back much further and to locate the mention of marbles back that far in history is many fold more difficult that our own research. They also write on the subject of marbles in the archaeological record, which provides additional insights otherwise unavailable to those interested in marbles. These works were also published for the scientific community and greatly adds to the information available to professional archaeologists. Still Carskadden and Gartley write in a style that is not only entertaining and a pleasure to read, but it is at the same time invaluable to others doing research in the same field. The hobby of collecting marbles would benefit tremendously if others were as careful about the histories they write and applied the same scrutiny to the identification of marbles they provide. To date, nothing published for the hobby of collecting antique and collectable marbles comes close to the quality of work exhibited in Jeff Carskadden and Richard Gartley’s publications. The quality of their efforts makes them the top mibologists alive today.

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