Collectors tout nostalgic hobby at Northwest Arkansas marble show
Flip Putthoff, The Morning News
At $6,500 for his most expensive marble, the glass orbs of children’s games aren’t kid stuff to collectors like Bill Cokenower.
He drove from Illinois to Northwest Arkansas to sell and show his collection Saturday with 34 other aficionados at the Ozark Marble Show.
Other marbles at the event cost as little as a dime, and a feast of color for the eyes was available at no charge to the steady stream of browsers who attended the show at the Springdale Holiday Inn.
Taunya Kopke of Fayetteville, who organized the show, said, to her knowledge, the event was the first of its kind for the region.
“Marbles are fun, and everybody needs a little fun,” said Kopke, who guessed her collection contains 30,000 marbles.
“The nearest marble show is in Tulsa,” she continued. “It’s hard to find marbles in this area, so a couple of other collectors and I got the idea to have it.”
Marble collector Sam Davisson of Sedalia, Mo., wore a leather top hat and a tie-dyed T-shirt while he hawked marbles at his booth. One table held hundreds of mass-produced marbles he sold for a few cents each. But the ones he is most proud of are the marbles he made himself.
“Machines spit out 3,000 to 4,000 marbles an hour. These are handmade,” he said, gesturing toward another table with marbles as big as softballs. “I spit these out at about 2,000 to 3,000 per year.”
A glass-blower by trade, the marbles Davisson makes range in price from $8 to $250.
So what determines the value of a marble?
“Eye appeal is number one,” Kopke said.
Marbles that are old, rare and in mint condition can bring high dollar at marble shows, she added.
Kopke got into collecting when she found some old marbles while walking along the shore of Beaver Lake when the water was low.
“I used to play marbles as a kid. I’d given my marbles to my brother and he lost them the first day,” she said.
When she found the marbles along the shore, she kept them on her desk and found herself mesmerized by the colorful glass balls.
“They just worked on me,” she said. “I bought a jar of marbles at a flea market and I was sifting through them when my husband came home. He told me had a jar of marbles in the closet.”
Kopke said she used to play marbles when she was a kid. Now she wouldn’t think of playing with her collection and risk diminishing its value.
Playing marbles may not be as popular nowadays as collecting the colorful globes, but Kopke said national and international marble tournaments are held that have pages of official rules. And people still make up their own marble games, she said.
Jeff Hale of Joplin wasn’t interested in selling any of the marbles on his table. They were for display only. He said his exhibit had at least one representation of every type of marble ever made.
Collecting marbles “is a rapidly growing hobby that is somewhat new,” Hale said.
“Think back years ago. What did we have? We had comic books, we had baseball cards and we had marbles,” Hale said. “Somewhere along the line, collectors started scarfing up all the baseball cards and comic books. But for some reason they forgot about marbles.”
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