W.Va. Factory Keeps Old-School Playground Game Rolling

A line of third-graders files into the gymnasium at Ashford-Rumble Elementary School and onto the wooden bleachers. Nearly every kid has a box or plastic bag in their lap, filled to bursting with marbles.

For a couple weeks each March, Ashford-Rumble’s physical education teacher, Jerry Halstead, puts up the jump ropes and basketballs. For the next 10 class periods, his kids are consumed with marble madness. It’s a tradition that dates back to Halstead’s first year of teaching, at this same little school.

“Being a young PE teacher, we don’t have nothing to go by,” Halstead says. “We have to make our own units. I wanted to introduce old-school recess, 1930s type [games].”

He wanted to teach old-school playground games like hopscotch, jacks and marbles. The thing is, he didn’t know how to play marbles. And this being the late ‘80s, there were no YouTube videos to show him how.

So he turned to his uncle, Ray Riggs.

“Everybody knew my Uncle Ray was the man of marbles. And he told me how to play,” Halstead says.

Halstead took what he learned from his Uncle Ray and introduced it to his students. It was an immediate hit.

“I did jacks and they didn’t bite on that. They didn’t bite on hopscotch either,” Halstead says. “But they bit on the marbles.”

I attended Ashford-Rumble Elementary where Halstead was my PE teacher. Thirty years later, I still remember how obsessed my friends and I were with the game. We played it outside gym class, at recess and at home. As with most games of skill, I generally got my butt handed to me. But that didn’t matter — there was nothing more exciting than throwing my marbles into the ring, and playing for keeps. 

Sometime after I left Ashford-Rumble Elementary, Halstead did too. He taught at a few different schools and everywhere he went, he took his marble unit with him. And everywhere he introduced the game, students fell in love.

Eventually he returned to Ashford-Rumble Elementary, only to find a school more passionate about marbles than any he’d seen. 

“They carry marbles all year long. You walk down the hall, you hear their bags rolling,” Halstead says. “They’re always trading on the playground. It got to the point they were driving their teachers crazy.”

These kids enjoy playing, but it’s the marbles themselves they’re really crazy about. Their favorites feature swirls of color and metallic flakes. They’re called “vampires” and “iguanas,” “Milky Ways” and “rainbow bennington leg-breakers.”

I don’t remember any of these fancy designs in my marble rings. We mostly had swirlies and cat’s eyes. But of course, we didn’t have Amazon.

Many of the marbles Halstead’s students now covet are imported. There’s only one factory in the United States still churning out marbles, and they’re the old-school kind I remember.

This factory just happens to be a few hours away on the banks of the Ohio River in Paden City, West Virginia.

This is Marble King, the last remaining industrial manufacturer of marbles in the United States. 

Pulling into the factory’s parking lot, you hear its monstrous furnace long before you see it. Workers feed this fiery beast with buckets of recycled glass shards. The molten glass comes out the front, riding a corkscrew gear that shapes the red-hot orbs into perfect spheres. When it’s fully up and running, the machine spits out a million marbles a day into big black buckets.

“Those marbles are approximately 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit,” Marble King president and CEO Beri Fox tells me. “If we put a piece of paper in one of those buckets, it would actually ignite it.”

It takes 24 hours before the marbles are cool enough to be handled. Then employees hand-check every single one. There is still no replacement for the human eye when it comes to detecting defects.

Precision is important because most of the marbles Marble King produces are now used in industrial or architectural projects. Marbles can be found in everything from washing machines and dishwashers, to NASA air balloons and spray paint cans. Architects work them into fountains and murals.

But the company hasn’t forgotten its playground roots. 

Marble King still makes plenty of marbles used exclusively for fun. The on-site gift shop features playing mats, racing tracks and other marble-powered toys. Kids can pick up a shooter marble emblazoned with the company logo, or fill a leather pouch with a rainbow of cat’s eye marbles — a style of marble that Fox’s dad Roger Howdyshell pioneered.

“My dad actually formulated a process where the cat’s eye is a true eye. When you look in ours, you’ll see four veins of glass in the interior portion,” Fox says.

Howdyshell started working at Marble King fresh out of college. He worked his way up through the ranks and in 1983, he bought the business at the age of 60. He died just eight years later, leaving Fox’s mom Jean Howdyshell to take over. Up until then, she’d been a full-time homemaker. Running Marble King would be her first paying job.

With support from her kids — and the company’s longtime employees — Jean Howdyshell was able to keep the factory afloat and eventually turn it over to her daughter.

Marble King will celebrate its 75th birthday later this year. To mark the occasion, they asked employees to come up with a special edition marble to honor Roger Howdyshell. The result is a beautiful peacock blue marble — featuring the cat’s eye design he invented. 

“[They] turned out beautifully, the ones we’ve made so far. And the guys love…that part of this job: Making the different cat’s eyes, making the unique swirls, trying to do unique things with this glass,” Fox says. “Be a glass artist, do what you want. Here’s the stuff, let’s see what you can make.”

Just as Marble King faces competition from overseas competitors, the game of marbles faces lots of competition for kids’ attention spans. But Fox says the game still holds an appeal.

“A lot of times today, as opposed to it just being an in-school activity, it’s a marbles club. It’s a group. They learn how to play marbles…and they learn good sportsmanship,” she says.

Halstead knows something of the game’s lasting appeal, too.

“You ever see someone like grandpa, 80, and he has a jar of marbles in the attic? Why do they still have them, when they’re 80? Because they won them and they won’t let them go,” he says. “Even though they’re 80, they won’t get rid of them…because they’re trophies.”

While none of his former students are quite 80 — yet — there is a growing chance there’s a grandparent somewhere with a jar full of marbles they won in this gymnasium, under these same buzzing lights.