Steph

Well Happy Birthday! Awesome cake! Ingenious!

Is there any glass you won't melt?

This one is sorta interesting. Unusual colors for a torchmade.

Not necessary! The search is its own reward. Thanks for the thought though.

I feel shy talking about handmades. Usually wait awhile. Almost thought I oughta be able to give an ID from looking at the pic. But not brave enough to take a chance. so I watch.

So sad. (lol funny but sad) That wasn't actually M.F. Christensen. That was Charles, of "& Son" fame. Martin had passed away in 1915. Charles died in 1922. I do not know how the divorce case turned out. Never saw a notice of it being finalized. But haven't searched public records or the Akron paper. ??? In AMMM it says that he passed away before everything was settled with closing the corporation. Says his sister Jessie "took over full responsibilities, including seeing to it that Charles wife and daughter were taken care of throughout their lives." ooh, reading AMMM some more and just learned that Jessie "played a significant role throughout the life of the company". Girl power!

Alan estimated the 1930's for the 100 count box. I tried to research the Reg'lar Fellers date options and came up with a very tentative 1939 - 1941 based on an article in the June 1938 Playthings Magazine. The 1938 article said the comic strip author Gene Byrnes was launching a series of tie-ins and spin-offs of his comic strip, the details of which would be announced soon. And then of course 1942 would not have been a good year for marbles from Japan. Maybe Japan couldn't break into our market well in the 1930's. Either because of tariffs or because our makers were making good marbles cheaply enough here. Canada and South America would have had more need for imported marbles, right? I can't remember offhand what I've read about the tariff situation in those years. But we did have some very protectionist eras in the past. The marble makers in the 1950's were hoping to bring some of that back to save their businesses from the cat's eyes. But the U.S. gov't said no. It was in the government's interest to have Japan selling toys to us rather than whatever they might have been selling to the Soviet bloc.

I'd also suggest Japanese as a possibility. For some reason that hasn't been a popular idea. There's "made in Japan" packaging, but it has been argued that it was the box which was made in Japan, not the marbles. To me that doesn't seem consistent with the purpose of country of origin packaging laws. But I'm an amateur, so ? The mibs below aren't an exact match for yours but maybe similar enough to give pause. First a novelty box marked Made in Japan. The marbles here were listed as 11/16". (extra pix, click to enlarge) Second is a box of "Bolitas" which says "Industria Japonesa", which to me indicates Japanese manufacture, possibly intended for sale in South America. From a Marblealan auction. He said they measured about 1/2". (sorry, no clicking, wish the pix were larger but this is what we got! :-)

Green and black really work don't they.

Kewl! Thanks for the pix! But how does it work?! . .

Which colors? I think I see the three on one of them, but not sure of the shades. Dark blue, light blue and yellow on one?

Ya kill me, Rich! Ya wanna melt history?! We're still learning from it. lol

In 1913 in a German pricelist the peppermint with mica was called "Union mit Sternen" (union with stars). I don't know how long the name had been around before that. (That's all I got! lol. back to watching!)

Busy bee! The last one is intriguing.

She's obviously one of them.

So which one is the mystery green which seems/seemed only to be associated with the moss agates found at Alley? Is this it, Ron? The one near the top center of this pic?

LOL. See me trying to see both sides? I WANT the marbles to be Alley. But I'm trying to see other explanations. I'm trying to see where the blue and gold cullet could have come from and why it would be found in abundance in the Alley dump. Here's an example of marbles I wanted to have be Alley. Lizzy posted these a year or two before the Alley patch finds were posted. She said they had been ID-ed as Vitro. But there still seemed an air of mystery in the ID. I asked her if it was a sort of default ID after everything else had been ruled out. And it seemed as if that might have been so. So when the possibility of Alley patches came to light, I wanted that to be the answer. Whaddaya think? Was the original ID right? Vitro? I SO wanted them to be Alley.

That's what I thought. Some contemp makers are able to use busted up Jabos to make new marbles. But they're able to control the glass somewhat. How would that work if they were throwing them all into a pot? Wouldn't that be muddy? But if indeed the cull was shipped into Alley and if mostly the blue and gold ones are still being found at Alley maybe that explains why. Maybe the blue and white marble cull (for instance) could be used okay and most of it got used up. But the blue and gold cull turned muddy so it got left behind.

It might be the code you are using rather than the image extension. First, I guess I could ask what the extension is. Are they .jpg's? But in case it's about the code, make sure that you have a single [img] in front of the web address and a single [/img] on the other end. [img=http://usera.imagecave.com/marbdog/Wirepull-copy.jpg] If that doesn't work, we'll try it again! -s

Nice! I'm kinda hoping somewhere along the line someone sees fit to add pix of those special Texas giveway mibs to the thread. hint hint hint. (ya know, the ones Beri Fox gave out at the Texas show?)

One more reason I really really wanted Alleys to be in Rosenthal boxes - and really thought they could be - was Berry Pink being an executive at Rosenthal at the same time that he was Alley's partner in Sistersville. Would he buy marbles from his competition? (if he could avoid it?) Check out this Rosenthal box BJ sold. The story with it was that it was given to a boy at his 5th grade graduation in 1931. (4-vane cat a later addition of course.) I know some think that Rosenthal boxes had Masters in them, but with Berry Pink being a partner at Alley and the sales manager for Rosenthal, would they buy Master marbles for their boxes? p.s., which shade of green was the one which was not easily associated with other factories? Is that the one in this box?

This is another idea I've been wondering about:

Oh perty. I am sooo on the fence about these. Here's one idea I'm playing with currently. Why were those machines busted up in Ravenswood? Could it have been patch-making machines? Would swirl machines have been enough to bring in lawyers or cause such ire? Patches were the new thing. Maybe that's the patent/investment which someone was trying to protect. Could it have been? I liked being able to potentially credit Alley with some of the oddballs which paraded by. I'll hunt a couple of those up. You know - the kind which looked they were made by 3 different companies in turn. Maybe started out at Vitro, but using Akro glass, and then someone else went and added an extra stripe of color just to throw us off the scent. You know the ones I mean! lol And I really wanted some of the mibs in Rosenthal boxes to be Alleys. Supposedly there's an odd shade of green on one of the moss agates from Sistersville. It's mentioned in AMMM. At the time of that writing it was not known to be associated with any other company. I so very much wanted Alley to have made patches. :-)

I'm still working on getting more of Ron's up. In the meantime you might enjoy these which Sandy and her family dug from the Alley dumpsite in Sistersville. (click to enlarge)