Cathy Runyan: Got Her Marbles

The Banana Sculptor, the Purple Lady, and the All-Night Swimmer
by Susan Sheehan, Howard Means

(Page 3 of 3)

Cathy Runyan lives with her second husband, Larry Svacina, and a million marbles in an underground house built into the side of a hill in Kansas City, Missouri. She built the house in 1982 while married to her first husband because she was unhappy in their previous conventional suburban house-with-lawn.

"Some people spend their whole lives taking care of their lawns," she says. "I like dandelions. So I bought ten acres and moved further out in the country where the seeds from my bright yellow dandelions wouldn't take flight and bother anyone else's manicured lawn."

All that can be seen from the road is her double-car garage and front entrance door, but the gravel of the driveway outside the entrance to Runyan's energy-efficient house is mixed with marbles. The license plate on her car also proclaims her passion: MARBLS. "The license plate reassures first-time visitors that they've come to the right place when the '92 Ford Taurus clunker is in the driveway," she says. "It would read MARBLES if the state of Missouri allowed more than six letters on a vanity plate, as the state of Kansas does."

Visitors have two options after entering at ground level through the front door. They can walk down a flight of eighteen steps or sit and slide down on an adjacent eight-foot slide "We needed a wide entrance to avoid a claustrophobic feeling and I thought the slide would be fun." Sliders land on two beanbags placed on a large inflatable rubber tire at the bottom.

Runyan, a dynamic blonde in her late forties, uses the word "fun" often, both as an adverb and as an adjective. In 1985, she self-published a booklet called "Knuckles Down!" Its subtitle is "A Fun Guide to Marble Play."

Runyan was one of five children. When she was growing up, her four brothers and their friends were not keen on having her play basketball, baseball, or football with them. "Marbles was the one thing I could get in on," she says. "At eight, my grandfather gave me marble-shooting lessons. I was good enough to beat the boys. I still have the shooter — the eight ball of marbles — that belonged to my paternal grandfather." She amassed a wealth of milkies, cat's-eyes, and black beauties from the boys in the neighborhood. She was an ardent collector of the vividly colored and intricately designed marbles until her early teens, when she started high school and put them away.

She married in 1972 at the age of twenty before completing college, gave birth to three girls and two boys between 1973 and 1982, and had little time to think about marbles. She chose to stay home with her children but was a den mother, Brownie leader, and room mother, and was active in the La Leche League. Runyan, a Mormon who tithes, also served in lay positions in her church: as a pianist, chorist, and member of the Women's Relief Society. In the early eighties she supplemented the family income by caring for a neighbor's child before and after school and waitressing at a friend's restaurant evenings when her husband was home.

One day in 1983, when her oldest daughter had to do a fifth grade report on a game her mother had played as a child, Runyan took part of her marble collection out of storage. Her daughter did a presentation about marbles at her school, Runyan was asked to do another presentation for her daughter's class, and other classes started calling. It troubled her that her children knew nothing about the games she had enjoyed during her childhood, and that she had forgotten so many of them.

A search of the Kansas City Library system turned up just a short paragraph about marbles: like tag and leapfrog, it is one of the oldest games children around the world have played. There wasn't a single book on how to play marbles, and when Runyan telephoned all the toy stores she could think of in Kansas City she discovered they hadn't sold marbles for years. Youngsters, it seemed, were primarily playing video games and watching television. It also bothered her that marbles appeared to be near extinction.

Runyan began to research her book. By then she was waitressing part-time at a Days Inn, and she asked the older guests there, as well as residents of the nursing and retirement homes where she was a volunteer, to recall the marble games of their youth. "Knuckles Down!" was the result.

The booklet explains various marbles games (like Picking the Plums, Black Snake, and Ducks in the Pond) and marble terms like knuckling down — "This refers to the most important rule in marble play and describes the correct way of shooting with the knuckles to the ground until the shooter marble leaves the player's hand" — and fudging — "This is the polite way of saying a player is cheating because he has let his hand advance over the ring or taw line before shooting. The penalty is one lost turn." It introduced the game to a new generation and drew Runyan back into marble collecting.

She bought big jars of marbles for a dollar at garage sales or antique stores, went through them, kept a few, and gave most away. She spoke about marbles at Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs. For ten summers she was a referee at the National Marble Tournament in Wildwood, New Jersey. While there, she bounced along the boardwalk wearing a pair from her collection of "moon" shoes — fad footwear from the nineteen-sixties that have two metal spring coils attached to the heel and toe and give walkers the appearance of walking on the moon.

In 1987, she called around to see where marbles were still being made and went to several marble factories in Ohio and West Virginia. The industry that had flourished in the region in the thirties and forties was barely hanging on. Champion Agate Company, one of the surviving companies, had a warehouse filled with old marbles. "They cut me a deal," Runyan says. "Their floors had caved in under the weight of the marbles. They let me have them. All I had to do was pay for the shipping. The ten pallets of marbles, a bit over a million marbles according to poundage, were pretty common clearies or puries — translucent glass of various colors — and Chinese checker marbles, which are solid colors. I've used them as my gravel giveaway marbles for kids, like groups of Cub Scouts, who come to the house. Over the years I've helped five thousand Cub Scouts earn their marbles belt loops and marbles physical fitness pins. If ten Cub Scouts come to the house and each takes fifty marbles, there go five hundred. I periodically toss out a fresh supply."

Roger Howdyshell, the owner of Marble King, another company in West Virginia, gave Runyan two special marbles. One, smaller than the candy sprinkles used for decorating cakes, was among the five hundred smallest marbles ever made. They were originally intended for a NASA expedition and experiments on spheres. When NASA told Howdyshell he couldn't have them back, he kept them all — until he met Runyan. His second gift to her was a peewee ("a marble one-half inch or smaller") white lutz, handmade in Germany in the late nineteenth century.

Before Howdyshell's death, Runyan had decided to give away "kindness" marbles. "The idea is to put a kindness marble in your left pocket in the morning and do something kind during the day," she explains. "That can mean letting a person who has only one item [go] ahead of you in the checkout line at the grocery store, or thanking a mailman for the steady service he provides. When you do something kind, you may transfer the marble to your right pocket. I try to have a kindness marble in my right pocket every night. I gave Mr. Howdyshell a kindness marble. He was buried with it in his right pocket when he died in 1991. Roger's widow and I put a few more in the coffin."

Because Runyan gave children marbles, they named her "the Marble Lady," as that was easier for them to remember than her name. In 1991, the Marble Lady became the first woman ever allowed to play in the National Rolley Hole Marble Championship in Clay County, Tennessee. In some places, like Kansas City, Missouri, there are tennis courts in public parks, but in towns like Celina, Moss, and Livingston, Tennessee, marbles is virtually the only game in town, and grown men play on dirt marble yards seven nights of the week nine months of the year.

In 1992, Runyan went to Tinsley Green, England, home of the British World Marble Tournament, as an alternate player on the American team with six men, all of them from Tennessee and Kentucky. The team won. "No one got sick, so I didn't play, but my way over was paid and I refereed in tournaments in which the American team wasn't playing," she says. "I was the first woman to referee at a world championship. While I was in England, I shot marbles at Stonehenge and in Trafalgar Square. I called my children long-distance so they could hear the bells of St. Mary's and the American operator asked if she could please listen in, too. My parents were staying with the children and had to wake them because of the time difference, but they didn't mind. The bells were so beautiful."

In the nineteen-eighties, Runyan started collecting marbles again. She bought primarily American machine-made marbles from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-fifties for between ten cents and five dollars, rather than nineteenth-century handmade ones from Germany, because that was all she could afford. When she went to marble conventions, some of the more prosperous collectors laughed at her.

"It's Cathy with her machine-mades," those buying the high-dollar marbles told her.

"Shoot me, I like them," she said. "I'd learned from years of going through thousands of nickel-and-dime marbles what the rare ones were. The marbles I bought then are worth hundreds of dollars today. I was ahead of the curve."

Runyan kept her household and marbles budgets separate. If she was paid forty-five dollars for giving a marbles presentation at a dinner or earned money from booklet sales, she used it for travel expenses (plane tickets to Wildwood and hotel and food bills), for giving away kindness marbles to organizations for the developmentally disabled and others with low budgets, and for buying marbles to add to her collection. She had formally separated from her first husband in 1990, and divorced in January 1992. "I was afraid my husband would want half my marble collection, although he'd repeatedly called it dumb and I'd bought no marbles with his salary," she says. "I was lucky. He wanted the camper."

As a single mother, Runyan waited on tables, cleaned houses, cared for other people's children, and did substitute teaching. She gave marbles presentations when she was invited to give them, and sold her own blood for plasma "when I really got desperate." She parted with a few "major" marbles "to keep a roof over my children's heads and food in their mouths." She thought for a while she would be single for the rest of her life. "Who was going to take on five kids?" she asked. "I didn't have a dowry. And my kids have always been more important to me than anything. Four out of the five have been high school valedictorians. Four have graduated from college, one is in college. I'll get my degree when I choose a major."

Cathy Runyan met Larry Svacina in 1987 at a National Marble Convention in Amana, Iowa. Svacina had played marbles in grade school and had bought marbles from an early age, while going to antique stores with his mother. "If I was good I'd get a handmade marble for a quarter or fifty cents. My grandmother had been given a marble by a farmhand in 1882 when she was two. I'd always seen it — it was a sulphide with a bird inside it. My mother had some sulphides with animals inside them. Kids like animals. That's what I bought. Sulphides are clear marbles with clay figures inside. The air bubbles that form around the figures give them a silvery appearance."

Like Runyan, Svacina, fifty-nine, "got away from marbles" when he went to high school. That was when he "got interested in sports and girls." In 1970, he walked into a small antique store outside Denver and saw a marble with the number 1 inside it. "I'd never seen any with numbers in them," he says. "I bought it for fifty cents and that started the collection going again." Sometimes it was difficult to find the marbles he wanted, so he branched out into buying board and box games played with marbles, paintings with kids playing marbles in them, picture postcards with kids and grown-ups playing marbles, and figurines with marbles in them. In 1993, Runyan says, "Larry discovered I wasn't as young as he thought I was and that I wasn't married. We had our first date with a group of marble collectors here in Kansas City after a big marble auction." They were married a year later.

"At least you know I'm not marrying you for your marbles, because I've got marbles, too," Svacina said.

"Larry had bought some of the marbles I'd sold after my divorce, so when we got married I got them back," Runyan said.

Their friends pointed out that when they married they merged two collections, thereby giving them the largest and the best collection in the country.

"If you spent enough money, you could obtain examples of much of what we have, but not nearly all," Runyan reflects. "Some things are one-of-a-kind, no longer available, or very rare, and some things just aren't for sale by anyone. That's not to say no one has something we don't have. Of course they do. But other collectors tell us no one has the extent and depth and breadth of the total marble and marble memorabilia collection that we have."

The underground house is filled with his, hers, and theirs marbles and marble memorabilia: jewelry, trophies, medals, advertising pieces, and historic documents. The family room and two marble rooms (one with a round marble table at its center) gleam with some of the best spheres in their personal collection of fifty thousand valuable marbles.

The most valuable? "The two birdcage marbles," Runyan says. "Our chicken sulphide inside a half onionskin — never before seen. Our triple cat sulphide. My Vitro collection of Peacocks, Sweet Peas, and Black-eyed Peas. My collection of sulphides with missing parts — a head or major limb totally missing. No one else collects these to my knowledge, so I can usually get them very reasonably because most people see them as defective. I, being the strange person that I am, see them as a fun human connection to people from the past. They connect to real people who were tired on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons, or who were perhaps distracted in their work by problems or worries about their families or finances, and these defective figurines were accidentally inserted into the clear glass marbles.

"My dolphin prototype from David Salazar, one of the outstanding contemporary glass marble artists. My millefiori from the Perthshire Paperweight Company in Scotland. I believe only four of these were made and I received one as a gift. And then there is one large End of Day with Mica — looks like pieces of silver glitter scattered over small pinpoints of every color of the rainbow. Some of these marbles now sell for five to seven thousand dollars apiece.

"We've bought some terrific marbles since our marriage. Wonderful sulphides with figures of eagles, rare sulphides with double figures such as two birds, double human figures — a man and woman dressed in colonial-type clothing with a muzzle-loading gun. And some large gorgeous onionskins, solid cores, swirls, and divided core swirls."

A few years ago Runyan, who continues to buy many of her clothes in thrift shops and to be thankful she lives in a house that is inexpensive to heat and cool, was asked what she would do if that house containing the Runyan-Svacina marble collection were destroyed by fire.

"I said I would mostly be grateful that the experiences and friendships I have gained through my passion for marbles couldn't be burned along with them," she says. "Marbles, in and of themselves, are so pretty. When I look at simple tigereyes, custards, and corkscrews, they make me smile. I get excited when I think about whose pockets were they in, who played with them, what happened to those kids. I sometimes think about where I would roll if I were a marble. I'd like to roll into some of the famous art museums in Europe when there aren't a lot of people around, and just be able to sit down and look at what's on the walls. But the highest value of marbles in my life has been to provide me with a way in which I can be of service to others. I'd like to think that even without marbles I could have achieved this, but I can't imagine a more fun way of doing it.

"Marbles have led me to my wonderful husband and I hope that I will leave this world a little bit of a better place for having been the Marble Lady."

Copyright © 2002 by Susan Sheehan and Howard Means

About the Author

Susan Sheehan is the author of seven books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Is There No Place on Earth for Me? She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1961 and has written for The New York Times and Architectural Digest, where she is a contributing writer. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Is the author of three books, including Money & Power: The History of Business, and coauthor of two other. Until recently a senior editor at Washingtonian magazine, he lives in Bethesda, Maryland.