#JOHN DEERE GAME MARBLES FULL#
You put an old glass milk bottle full of blue and green marbles in a sunny window and you have a thing of beauty.” “I try to put most of them in clear glass, so they are visible, and in some cases, they show really well. “The woods must be full of them if you could ever find them.”ĭibblee has had to come up with a wide assortment of containers for his collection. He cringes a little when people tell him about the hundreds they fired off in slingshots. They make people smile and they’ll tell you about the games they played as they wonder what became of their old marbles.” “Marbles are a great source of conversation. Most likely they were mass-produced, machine-made marbles that did not become collectible until the past few decades. His own marbles from elementary school days are long gone, passed on to someone or left behind in one of his family’s moves. They are in demand, so if you find one, you’ll have no trouble selling it right away,” said Dibblee. “Those marbles are pretty hard to come by these days. All have one tiny rough spot, known as a pontil, from where they came off the cane. They were made from long canes of molten glass, snipped into pieces with special scissors and shaped. The first marbles considered collectible were those made in Germany between 1860 and the First World War. His clay marbles include blue and brown Benningtons, which have a characteristic distinctive eye and a salt glaze finish. They were then shovelled overboard or onto the shore to make way for goods coming onboard.” Most of the older German ones are shades of brown and were used as ballast on ships coming across the Atlantic. “I own some clay marbles that are ancient Chinese and others made in Germany. The vast majority of Dibblee’s marbles are glass but he has some made of clay. I did some research and joined a couple of online groups.” As I’d take notice of particular marbles, I’d want to see what I could learn about them. Peltier style marbles display iconic images and trademarks such as superheroes Batman and Robin, Flintstones characters Fred and Barney and the John Deere farm machinery company.Īs Dibblee’s stock of marbles has grown, so has his knowledge. And now that I’ve passed that, might as well go for a quarter-million.” “I had a plan to get to 10,000 and quit, but that took less time than I expected, so I decided to go for 100,000.
He keeps an exact record of what he buys and sells, and at last count, he had 112,000 marbles, down slightly from a pre-Christmas high of 114,000. “I know what I’m prepared to pay and sometimes you don’t get what you want.” He has even been in the odd bidding war over a bag of mixed marbles. If I could get a bag or a jar at a good price, I got them. “I attend a lot of estate sales and auctions, so I just started looking and asking for marbles. They weren’t at all rare but certainly not as common as cat’s eyes, which are clear glass,” he explains.ĭibblee poured his three bags of marbles into an old-fashioned glass milk bottle and took them to his flea market table in New Glasgow, where he sold them the next day to a woman who loved how the light glinted off them. “They are solid colours with other colours in them and you can’t see through them. In this slang language of alleys and aggies, marble fans are known as mibsters.Īs a child, Dibblee, now 60, counted among his favourites the marbles commonly known as pretties or beauties. Other names for lager marbles include smashers, giants, thumpers, bonkers, and toebreakers. “The marbles we called crockies or shooters in Debert or Masstown were called boulders when we moved to Petawawa.” The son of a Canadian serviceman, Dibblee quickly learned the language of marbles varied from posting to posting. With no single game called marbles, children were limited only by their creativity, with most of them “playing for keeps.” We’d play endless games where the goal was to win marbles from the other guys,” he said. “When I was a kid in the 1960s, we all played marbles, all the boys, anyway, at recess and lunchtime. four years ago, memories of his boyhood came rushing back. bought three bags of marbles at a yard sale in Stewiacke, N.S.
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