By Leslie Kellylkelly@soundpublishing.com

Mark Fessenden remembers playing marbles when he was a young boy, some 50 years ago.

So imagine his surprise when, as a member of the Saints Car Club, he was told that the club was going to sponsor a marbles tournament during the celebration of Port Orchard’s 125th anniversary.

“I didn’t think they were serious,” Fessenden said. “I remembered playing marbles as a kid. But my kids never did, and most kids nowadays all have cell phones in their hands, not marbles.

“But with some organization, and the help of the Port Orchard Library and MegaFun USA, a maker of marbles, it’s all a “go.”

Fessenden discovered playing marbles today is quite different from when he was a boy.

“We use to take a stick and draw a circle in the dirt,” he said. “If you knocked the other guy’s marble out of the circle with your marble, you got to keep his marble.

“But now, there’s two pages of rules to the game. They’ve taken something that was simple and it’s become a professional sport.”

Although the tournament in Port Orchard is not a sanctioned tournament, car club members are hoping that children of all ages will show up at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 5, at the Port Orchard Library, 87 Sidney Ave., to try marbles. Prizes will be awarded. Throughout the summer, the library has been giving kids marbles as part of its summer reading program. When a child reached his or her reading goal, he or she would get a bag of marbles to practice for the tournament.

The Mega-Marbles were donated to the program from MegaFun USA, a marble company in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.

According to Jennifer Walker, spokeswoman for the company, they’ve been making marbles for 90 years. Most were made in Mexico, until about 1992, when production and distribution came back to the U.S.

“We do try to help out any tournaments in the U.S. by giving out marbles,” Walker said. “We like to support bring back visibility to marbles.

“It was in the early 1990s that the company saw a rebirth in the sales of marbles.

“People were coming back to the classic games, like marbles,” she said. And our sales have increased steadily since then.”

According to the National Retail Association, sales of marbles in toy stores have increased by 40 percent in the last decade. And there’s been a renaissance of hand made contemporary marbles, handcrafted by modern glassmakers. Marbles have been in existence for the past 3,000 years. They have been found in Egyptian pyramids and in North American Indian mounds. An annual marble tournament has been played in Tinsley Green, England on Good Friday for at least the past 300 years. And the United States National Marbles Tournament is the third weekend of June in Wildwood, New Jersey.

The first marbles were round stones, nuts or fired pieces of clay and pottery. Glass marbles were introduced about 1860. Almost all antique handmade glass marbles were produced in Germany from the period 1860 to 1920.  Stone marbles were produced in Germany in the early 1800s. In 1905, Martin F. Christensen of Akron, Ohio used a machine to produce “perfectly round spheres.”

By the mid-1920s, the Germans were effectively out of the marble-making business. Almost all marbles were made by machine in the United States. Large marble makers of the time began to compete with each other to produce more unique designs and more colorful marbles each season. By World War II, Master Marble Company and Vitro Agate Company entered the marble market. Akro Agate Company failed in 1951 and Vitro Agate Company and Marble King became the largest U.S. manufacturers, but faced stiff competition from Japanese imports of cats eyes. By the 1960s, virtually all marbles were made in the Far East. During the 1970s, marble playing saw a steady decline, as video games became more popular and readily available. Marble making shifted to Mexico, with Vacor de Mexico becoming the largest marble manufacturer.

Then in the 1980s, marbles made a resurgence in the U.S. and there was a return of hand-made marble making by a few American craftsmen.

The first official marbles tournament in the U.S. was in 1922, at Jersey City, New Jersey. It was sponsored by the city’s parks department.

The 92nd anniversary of the National Marbles Tournament will be June 20, 2016, in Wildwood, New Jersey. Fessenden said the Saints Car Club is sponsoring this event because of its great relationship with the city of Port Orchard.

“The city does a lot of us,” he said. “They always make sure we have what we need when we have our car shows. This is our way of giving back.”

To find out more, or to register, go to www.portorchard125.com.