I was a teenager visiting my grandparent's house where my Mother grew up in New England and she found her old childhood marbles in the attic. She gave them to me, this was around the mid 1980s. I admired the different styles and colors, and back home we frequented an antique store and I had to go since I was still a teenager. The store owner let my family browse while I checked out his display case full of marbles behind his desk. He was a big husky guy named Sarge, hair everywhere out his shirt and from under his floppy fishing hat. He taught me what to look for (good colors and lots of them). He let me buy some nice Akro corkscrews for a price befitting a young teenager with no job and a genuine interest. He kept my interest fed and before long I somehow got a Grist's book on marbles. It was a thin and small book, and mainly focused on handmades with a few peltiers and akros in the back under the minimal machine made section. I still have that book. I was in middle schooI with no job, but picked up bicycles from the dumpsters at the end of the road and bought unclaimed ones at the police auctions every year and fixed them to resell and used some of that money to buy marbles when I could find them at flea markets and yard sales. I would ask every vendor that looked likely if they had marbles. I had an old samsonite travel case that I kept my marbles in, all sorted in cardboard jewelry boxes with labels telling what was in them. The swirls and other stuff were just in those big round Christmas cookie tins. Every time I found one that was in the book, it topped my fuel tank with enthusiasm until the next find. I graduated from High school and got busy finding my way into a career and marriage and still had marbles on the radar but didn't hunt them much. I knew nobody else in the entire world that collected them at that point and thought it was just a weird thing I did and nobody else cared. I was never into the internet or any of that, always working and fishing and being outdoors. One day I discovered how much stuff really was on ebay and looked for marbles and was amazed at all the handmades that I had held in such high esteem for so many years. Then I found this board, AAM, and LOM and a few others... wow, there were other people who were really into marbles! I got to looking and found that many of the machine made marbles had ways to be identified, so I started catching up. Then the big digs at Alley happened and I was instantly into learning swirls. I went about that route for many years until I got invited by Ron S to dig Heaton. And it has been doing nothing but steadily gaining momentum since then, digging multiple sites and meeting many people, most of them pure gold. Still constantly learning and finding new things, and that's what drives me. The best hobby ever and I've pursued many through the years alongside mibology. It's the one thing I haven't lost interest in over time.
