Marbles on a Roll Again, but Few Children Know Aggies From Glassies : Games: Enthusiasts use tournaments, displays to woo young recruits away from computers and television sets. Many who start playing get hooked.

Before Nintendo, before skateboards, and even before television, the marble-take-marble world of commies, steelies, aggies and glassies kept children hunkered in the dirt and out of trouble.

Marbles are again on a roll, this time almost as a foreign game, in the same American playgrounds they once dominated.

“There are very few children today across the United States who know how to play marbles,” says Michael Cohill of Akron, Ohio, owner of the American Toy Marbles Museum.

“Now, we get a Cub Scout troop together or a church group or a school group and basically sit them down, tell them about the game and the history of it, and tell them how to shoot. They learn how to do it and they have fun.”

The marbles faithful are using a new series of museums, tournaments, traveling displays, and even books to rekindle the game.

“It’s just the simplicity and the accessibility to every child that makes marbles so wonderful,” says Cathy Runyan, of Kansas City, Mo., an author on marbles games.

Runyan, 38, a homemaker who owns hundreds of thousands of marbles, travels the country teaching children how to play.

Marbles once went with reading, writing and arithmetic for most elementary schoolchildren who would hunker down in a cleared-out patch of dirt to play marbles games like potsies, chasies and poison.

The fear of losing a favorite commie, a handmade clay marble, was usually outweighed by the chance to take an opponent’s prized milkie, a translucent white marble.

Pieces like commies and milkies made marbles as varied as the players. Aggies, often made from agate, are usually prized shooters and clearies were often translucent clear glass or solid colors. Steelies, not surprisingly, are remarkably like ball bearings.

But it wasn’t a playground bully, but technology that sent marbles spinning the way of jacks as children were parked on blacktopped schoolyards and discovered television and Little League baseball.

“All of a sudden, they lost the place where they played,” Cohill says. “Today, you have to put some effort into providing them with a surface.

“Traditionally, it was just an effortless game that cost nothing to get into. Fifty cents could buy you more marbles than you could use--or lose--in a year.”

Cohill, 36, became fascinated with marbles in 1989 after he moved a fledgling toy company into a former marble factory in Akron. He opened his museum on the site last December and has a traveling museum currently in San Francisco.

More and more, marbles tournaments are rolling into malls, parks and schools.

A national tournament that dates to 1923 has been held every summer for the last 30 years on the beach at Wildwood, N.J., attracting youthful, but still steel-eyed, shooters from across the country.

Most champions come from Appalachian marble centers of West Virginia, the Maryland Panhandle and Western Pennsylvania.

“Those three areas in the past years have been the real hotbeds,” says tournament director Gene Mason of Cumberland, Md. “Those areas have people that have sort of taken an interest through the years and have stuck with it.”

Local champions compete for a chance at two championships and $2,000 scholarships. This year, more than 70 boys and girls are expected for the four-day tournament that begins June 24.

But it is a young person’s game. The top age for competitors is 14, and once you’ve won a tournament you are ineligible for further competition. Maybe one day they’ll have a senior’s circuit for those who still want to stay in the game.

Games and variations by the dozen differ from region to region. But the champions play “Ringer,” a game in which 13 marbles are placed in a cross within a 10-foot circle. The first player to knock seven marbles out of the ring wins.

West Virginia has fielded 16 champions, including current national boys champion Carl Whitacre, 13, of Ridgeley.

“It’s fun and it’s easy to do,” Whitacre says.

Laura Brader, director of the marble tournament in Reading, Pa., since 1977, became engrossed with the sport late in life for someone interested in marbles.

“I was told part of my job would be to escort the city winners to the national tournament and I knew I wasn’t going to like it,” Brader says. “I hated sand and sun and wasn’t particularly fond of children. In 1977, I brought home the girls champion and after that I was hooked.”

The Reading tournament, which draws more than 800 youths a year, fielded the 1990 girls national champion, 11-year-old Alison Reber of Fleetwood, Pa. Her brother was the 1987 national champion.

“I didn’t think too much of it as a sport when they first started,” says her father, Ralph Reber, 41, who never played marbles as a child. “But now that they’re involved, what they gain out of it is pretty great.”

Marble King Inc. of Paden City, W. Va., which sponsors the national tournament, is one of five U.S. companies that make game marbles as well as marbles for chic interior decoration in vases and bowls.

Owner Roger Howdyshell, who died this spring at the age of 67, devoted his life to marble-making and wanted to reacquaint children with the game.

“When I grew up, it was the greatest thing we had,” Howdyshell said. “That was the first competitive sport that I ever played. When you went to school, you went with a bag of marbles.

“I have never seen a child who doesn’t like marbles. They don’t know what to do with them until their parents or grandparents get down on the floor and show them what to do. But the interest is still there.”

Ida Jean Hopkins, 53, of Cleveland, who won the national marbles tournament in 1951, says she is all for a return to the basics.

“It would be nice to see kids playing in the dirt again, rather than sitting behind a computer,” she says.