May 24, 2019 4 min read

We played jacks.

Others in town may have been shooting marbles in a ring, but when my friends and I wanted a hand-eye coordination game, it was with the red rubber ball and the ten pointy metal jacks.

I hadn’t thought about jacks in years. (Do kids even play them any more?) What brought them back to mind is my latest project for public television, a documentary about the game of marbles.

Until my first film shoot two weeks ago, all I knew of marbles was what I’d seen on a repeat episode of “Little House on the Prairie,” the one where Laura tries to woo a boy by making him jealous. The intrigue involved Laura buying off the venal Willie Olson to pose as her boytoy. The bribe was Laura’s prized “aggie,” a marble made of agate stone.

How does someone reach my age without having ever shot a marble? Probably for the same reason of geography that brought me to adulthood without having played “kick the can” or “rundown.” We played outside plenty in that little neighborhood in Finleyville – kickball and wiffle ball and something called “colored eggs” loom in my memory. But I knew nothing of marbles.

I am catching up, though, and finding there’s a whole world of marbles shooters among us. Pittsburgh happens to be the center of the marble universe, an accomplishment with a back story based on the marbles prowess of a family on the city’s Southside. Year after year, champions from Allegheny County place or win at the national finals in New Jersey; next month four Pittsburgh kids will travel there to compete, and have an excellent chance of winning it all.

To a new observer, it’s an unusual game. Laura Ingalls and her gang may have played it on the dirt ground inside a ring made of yarn, but in the big leagues there are painted wooden platforms. Using thumb and forefinger in a contorted arrangement that made me cramp up the first time I tried it, the player shoots a large-ish marble into a field of 13 smaller black marbles arranged in a cross pattern. They are called “mibs.” The more “mibs” you hit, the better the score. If you can hit the black ones but keep the shooter marble inside the ring, that’s even better.

The players are as young as 9, and they age out of the competition at 14. Some have coaches and home-built practice rings in their basements. Thumb injuries happen. The boy who won the county tournament last weekend went home to soak his thumb in salt water. Thumb strength is key, as is an understanding of plane geometry. The best players have a wicked topspin.

We interviewed a coach who has three lucky marbles, all handmade, including one from Germany that’s worth hundreds of dollars. He pulled them out of his front pocket to show us.

Shooting marbles is probably most like shooting pool, with a bit of duckpin bowling tossed in. But that’s just a guess – I’ve never played those games, either.

Funny how some childhood things can slip past us, unnoticed. I tried to explain our neighborhood game of “colored eggs” to a friend who grew up in another state. Someone’s the mom, someone’s the wolf, and everybody else is an egg sitting on a wall, waiting to be chased. We played that game all day, and when the sun went down, we moved inside to play jacks.

Somewhere on another street in another town, the kids were shooting marbles. Who knew?

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.