Steph

Affirmative!

You can practically reach out and touch the marbles.

How sweet is this?! . . Vitro's All Red Line from 1938.

That totally explains it.

(very cool pieces)

The big reveal ...

We missed flower arranging ...

I have to say you nailed it Al. I already figured you had but this nails that you nailed it.

Ad from Greeley Colorado, 1958:

It is said that the white we see on type 4 Tiger Eyes is veneered onto a white base. Less expensive glass could be used for the base that way and the kids still got a nice white on the surface.

Bubba's:

Here's an example of the veneering on early Rainbows (Jeff Hale's):

I've presumed that the white was also veneered for, say, the blue and white rainbows.

The last thing I know about Marble King veneering is that Roger Howdyshell said they stopped doing it in 1965.

I was under the impression that none of the following marbles were done by the process known as veneering. There are colored patches but were they "veneered" according to 1950's marbles manufacturers' definition of the term?

(click to enlarge)

I have some Alley halves I can add when I get my camera back online. I won't feel bad if someone else posts Alleys first though.

Here are some Pelt halves of Carole's.

She showed the other sides over here: Pelt Pieces

A sample:

And here are 3 bennies and a jasper Galen smashed for the cause.

Close-ups here: What Do Bennies Look Like Inside?

Maybe I'm wrong.

Mine glows brightly. It is an Alley shade. It's darker in hand than in the photo. But it is not as dark as the right hand side of these two candidates for pistachio which I asked about in another thread.

Most of the seasoned collectors who voted specifically did vote for the right hand side and I'llhavethat1 voted for even darker. Plus, the darkness of the ribbons was stressed and my ribbons obviously aren't dark.

I think I got fixed on the idea that mine was in the ballpark and I didn't really register who was stressing the darker shades.

Okay, I will stop calling it a pistachio. It's still an Alley though!

But in all actuality i have some Jabos over here that have similar patterns...

I've seen patterns I would call the "same" in at least 4 companies, and at least "similar" in still others.

The "same" ones which I have provenance for are Alley, Champion, Cairo and Jabo.

I forgive you.

It's been IDed as a Jabo before, but so has the Alley. I posted them together the first time. That's when I first heard the immortal phrase, "Buttcracks don't lie".

Then I posted the pistachio in a different thread and got a Cairo ID because of the little eye in back. It is an Alley though. Slam dunk. The dug Pennsboros Ron sent nailed it solidly.

I think this one is a Cairo though.

Two days ago I was leaning uncertainly toward Champion. Then last night I saw something last night in a pic from Alan's site which made me think "maybe Cairo". So that pointed me to the Cairo section of AMMM and got me looking closer than I had before. Got me looking closely into the case on p. 57. And I think I might see a match for my marble. The pic is dark, and the marbles are small, so it doesn't stand out. But I think it could be a match.

Even if that particular one isn't a match, it has strong similarities. I'm seeing more similarities in the Cairos than I've seen in anywhere else.

Here is the Cairo I saw last night. It came from Alan's old site. The colors don't seem to blend as much in mine as they do here but I think the shades are similar. I still don't know where mine is, so I can't doublecheck, but I think it's very close.

If you have AMMM and want to check that case on p. 57, the marble which I think looks like mine is about one-third of the way from the right edge and a little more than half of the way from the top.

I don't think I got it yet. lol

Here are some more Cairo Novelty of varying degrees of crackiness. Dug examples from Alan's old site. The last one may be the least buttcracky but it's the most cheeky!

Doesn't ring a bell. Couldn't say for sure.

There were various pay-per-view sites I landed on and promptly forgot about before I finally decided I had to had to had to see something from a couple of them. I don't recall if any were particularly for ads or for magazines.

But seriously, there have been a few posts on innards. If nothing else we could gather some of the examples from those locations and of course more could be added.

Thanks Al. :-)

Bill, on the one hand, it sure is nice to be able to plug in keywords and jump relatively quickly to any number of papers.

On the other hand, I can't easily "browse" any of these papers online. You might find things which would slip through my best targetted searches. Stuff hidden in ads. Surprising marble-connected topics. Photographs.

What part don't you see, the Alley or the pistachio?

The marble on the left is a Pennsboro Alley. If you can't detect the pistachio shade then my camera washed even more color out than I thought.

Online archives.

Some I stumbled upon. Some I had to get creative with keywords in order to find.

Some were free. Some I paid to see.

So Kevin ... do you have a guess on the mystery mib?

LOL ... any Kevin can answer.

This is overkill, since we already know they were called Marble King marbles by 1940. But it's still cool!

May 6, 1943 -- a big bag of Marble King marbles for free.

And here is a 1938 ad for marbles with Rippled Wheat. Doesn't identify whose marbles but we have a good guess!

Would Jim King say dug if it weren't?

His auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...em=360116026194

Here's two other box pics that I've gotten somewhere - one with Akros and one with Pelts so ....?

Al, it messed with my head for those to be Akros. Then I opened the thumbnail and realized they were MKs and felt better.

A couple more boxes, one with Pelts and one with MKs. The 2nd box was sold by Morphy, who described the set as "Marble King Marbles with Original Box & Bag" but how could Morphy know they were original? and why are there so many marbles in the box?!

(box #1 posted by nickybox)

My guess is that more of those boxes originally came with Pelts than with MK patch and ribbon style rainbows.

Further I think it's possible that none were marketed with MK rainbows in them.

Berry Pink was pushing "Marble King marbles" long before there was a Marble King company.

There is a photo of him in Issue #13 (Nov. 2005) of the WVMCC newsletter. It's from about 1940, taken in conjunction with the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. He is standing with Jack Dempsey and Jim Braddock at a table full of Marble King mesh bags. The caption to the photo twice calls them "MARBLE KING marbles". Once when it talks about promotional materials which will come with packages of MARBLE KING marbles. And once when it says the two fighters are endorsing MARBLE KING marbles. (The caps were in the caption to the photo -- I'm not yelling. )

The 1954 catalog sheet shown on p. 105 of AMMM seems to be saying that the "Marble King" line goes back to 1929. It says "Featured for the past 25 years by leading jobbers." I don't necessarily believe there was Marble King labelling in 1929 but the Sunshine Rippled Wheat bags with this header seem to go back to the 30's.

(marblealan)

And then note that the 1954 ad shows Alley swirls in poly bags, and the only box shown is a Big Value Marble Assortment. with swirls. There's a Marble King "boy" on the ad but he's very cartoonish. Different from the boy we see on the boxes in this thread. Sourlis elsewhere shows a similar ad from 1953. Again, with Alley swirls in plastic bags.

Finally, Rainbows started being made in 1956 or 57. And though the tournament bags from that time frame have a crouching marble player on them, he is wearing different clothes from the boy on these boxes.

(sources: boxes, bag)

My guess is that the box is from the 1940's, even the "Marble King marbles" version of it. And I'm not sure I'd buy leftover versions of it being used for Rainbows when by 1956 Berry Pink was obviously in the mood to update the boy's image.

I suspect that any with Rainbows have been backfilled by people who for obvious reasons thought Marble Kings belonged in them.