Game Card Maker

'Marble Lady' turns kids game into global business

Cathy Runyan-Svacina takes her role as the Marble Lady very seriously &#x97; or at least as seriously as anyone can.</p><p>The 58-year-old has been collecting marbles for most of her life. Everything from her mailbox to her front door is decorated with marbles. </p><p>Marbles are her business and serve as her business card. On her website, themarblelady.com, you can see how she&#x92;s keeping busy with appraisals and presentations, and manufacturing cases for other collectors.</p><p> The Kansas City resident has been flown everywhere from Japan to Mexico to teach how to play marbles. She has appraised the favorite marbles of such people as Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, Charles Schulz and Brigham Young, to name a few. </p><p>Her passion grew into a business after she gave a presentation on marbles to her daughter&#x92;s third-grade class. Even though she was a struggling single mom working as a waitress to pay the mortgage, she took the time to write a small booklet on the game to distribute to local schools.</p><p>One day she was waiting on a table of people going to a marble convention. She told them about the booklet she&#x92;d just printed. They bought the 250 copies she had in the trunk of her car.</p><p>Runyan-Svacina said that opened a lot of doors. She was asked to speak at the next convention, which led to a phone call from Reminisce magazine.</p><p>&#x93;They asked if I was the lady known as &#x91;the Marble Lady.&#x92; &#x85; They just wanted to print my name and address for anyone who wanted the booklet,&#x94; she said. &#x93;I got 12,000 orders, which helped me save my house.&#x94;</p><p>She even met her husband, Larry Svacina, at a marble convention. Svacina, a retired physical therapist, runs a physical therapy equipment business from their home. </p><p>When the two married 17 years ago they merged their massive marble collections. Friends describe Runyan-Svacina as an overgrown kid, so it&#x92;s fitting that in 2003 the couple made a long-term loan of their collection to the Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City, where it&#x92;s now on display.</p><p>Their exhibit includes rare marbles and a bevy of related memorabilia: original boxes, jewelry, tournament trophies &#x97; even vintage postcards and dishes.</p><p>Over the past five years, interest in antique marbles has surged, and they&#x92;re now one of the hottest categories in toy collecting. The very best can be worth more than $20,000. </p><p>A good marble is determined by its size, condition, style and producer. </p><p>Laura Taylor, a museum educator, said the exhibit appealed to people of all ages. </p><p>&#x93;One of the things we love to get is grandparents coming in here with their grandkids, talking about playing marbles,&#x94; she said. &#x93;All of a sudden, the kids realize their grandparents are more than just old people.&#x94;</p><p>The marble room is a bright and beautiful place. Runyan-Svacina said she&#x92;s never seen anyone leave without a smile. It&#x92;s a visual playground, with brightly painted display cases housing marbles of every size and color.</p><p>The showstoppers are in a case in the middle of the room, including one of Runyan-Svacina&#x92;s rarest finds. It&#x92;s a black orb the size of a small plum, decorated with colorful swirls &#x97; the largest Indian-style marble on record. </p><p>But she said her favorite of the million marbles she amassed was a simple stone agate her grandfather used to play with.</p><p>There are some things on display you wouldn&#x92;t expect to find in a toy museum, from a marbles-encrusted cane to an old wooden ballot box. </p><p>But ballot boxes have their place in marble history. Taylor said they were sometimes used when deciding whether to let someone into a secret club. A white marble dropped in a ballot box would signify a yes vote, a black marble would mean no. She said getting a box full of black marbles is what it traditionally meant to be blackballed. </p><p>For Taylor, the vintage toys have more than a historic appeal.</p><p>&#x93;People are just mesmerized. There&#x92;s something about marbles that&#x92;s so aesthetic, something so calming,&#x94; she said. &#x93;You look at the different colors, how the light shines through the glass, the feeling of something so small &#x85; it&#x92;s like you&#x92;re holding the universe in your hand.&#x94;</p><p><strong><span class="infobox-head">On the Web </span></strong></p><p>&bull; To learn more about Runyan-Svacina, go to <a href="http://www.themarblelady.com">www.themarblelady.com</a>.</p><p>&bull; To learn more about the Toy and Miniature Museum of Kansas City, go to <a href="http://www.toyandminiaturemuseum.org" target="_new">www.toyandminiaturemuseum.org</a>.</p><p><strong><span class="infobox-head">To the Moon </span></strong></p><p>The Toy and Miniature Museum may be the place to look at marbles in the area, but Moon Marble Co. is the place to buy them.</p><p>Lynda Sproules, a co-owner, said the store started as a woodworking business that made the occasional game board &#x97; but it evolved into a marble shop by popular demand. </p><p>&#x93;People started coming around wanting the marbles we had here (as part of the board games) &#x85; and before we knew it we were in the marble business,&#x94; she said. &#x93;If someone told me 15 years ago that in the future I&#x92;d have a marble store, I would have looked at them like they were nuts.&#x94; </p><p>Sproules said that on any given day you can see license plates from across the country in the parking lot. With Moon Marble&#x92;s online store, she has shipped marbles as far as Brazil and New Zealand.</p><p>She credits the demand to nostalgia.</p><p>&#x93;I think what most people crave &#x85; are the things people can come in here and say &#x91;I played with that when I was a kid,&#x92;&#8194;&#x94; she said.</p><p>Marble-making demonstrations are given from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, when a marble maker is available.</p><p>Moon Marble Co., 600 E. Front St. Bonner Springs, 913-441-1432, <a href="http://www.moonmarble.com">www.moonmarble.

Kobe Bryant Autographs: Art of the Game Fires Back at Panini ...

If anyone is to blame for a possible contract violation over Kobe Bryant's autograph, it's...Kobe Bryant.  So say court papers filed last month by Art of the Game, a southern California based company with kiosks at pro sports venues there including Staples Center.

The motion for sanctions came in response to a lawsuit that Panini filed this spring , claiming Art of the Game had violated the trading card maker's exclusive deal as distributor of signed Kobe Bryantautographs by selling non-licensed and non-genuine signed memorabilia.

Art of the Game is now seeking unspecified damages from Panini in U.S. District Court, saying the suit has caused them "irreparable damage and harm" to the company and the "personal and professional reputations" of its owners, Harlan Werner, Daniel Crosby and Jerald Gibbs.

That original suit was filed after a Panini representative paid an undercover visit to the Art of the Game shop at Staples Center this season and saw several signed Bryant items including artwork, posters and photos for sale.

Panini's 66-page filing made several claims, including trademark infringement, false advertising and intentional interference with prospective economic advantage. The company had signed Bryant to an autograph contract in September of 2009 .

However, Art of the Game, a subsidiary of Sports Placement Services, which represents sports artists and has had memorabilia deals with Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali and Sandy Koufax, says not only did Bryant put his autograph on the items they were selling, he signed affidavits to prove it.  They also say their relationship with Bryant pre-dates the deal he made with Panini.

Art of the Game says Bryant toured Art of the Game's kiosk in November of 2006 and  commissioned a $14,000 painting of his wife and mother from artist Stephen Holland, a Sports Placement Services client.  The court papers originally obtained by Radar Online also state that in 2007, Bryant signed 100 Holland-created lithographs of himself for Art of the Game to sell and that between May of 2009 and January of this year, he signed 65 more items, including 25 dual-signed photso of himself and Blake Griffin, 23 lithos created by noted artist Opie Otterstad and seven Black Mamba movie posters.

They also claim that even after agreeing to the arrangement with Panini, Bryant never mentioned having an exclusive contract that would have prevented someone else from selling autographs.

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