Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 23, 1993 TAG: 9308210027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By NANCY NUSSBAUM ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CLARKSBURG, W.VA. LENGTH: Medium
Hardy, 43, has spent much of the past 24 years on his knees in these hills about 120 miles south of Pittsburgh, searching for marbles and glassware discarded by the defunct Akro Agate Co.
"They all thought I was nuts doing this," says Hardy, an antiques dealer.
The factory and its employees dumped many imperfect, and perfect, marbles and glassware around town from 1914 to 1951. Many employees were allowed to take home samples.
But what was once trash is now treasure. A marble that once sold for a penny can fetch $20 or more and a single large Akro agate in its original packaging is worth $800.
Hardy's modest, eight-room home is crammed with "a million" marbles, original boxes, signs, salesman's sample boxes, children's dish sets, advertisements, historic photographs and even Akro's molds. His collection is valued at more than $200,000, he says.
Now Hardy wants to convert Akro's rusting factory into a museum to house his collection and chronicle the city's history in glass.
"I've spent a lifetime collecting it, and I just don't want it to be sold," he says.
Akro opened in 1911, the brainchild of two entrepreneurs who made marbles in Akron, Ohio, and sold them in a Main Street shoe store there. Sales shot up, and the business was moved in 1914 to Clarksburg, where quality sand was plentiful, natural gas was inexpensive and a railroad was more accessible.
The plant employed 130 people at its peak in the early 1940s. It produced 2 million marbles a day and held 60 percent of the world marbles market, Hardy says.
"Of all the marble companies, Akro was the best," Hardy says. "They had everything. They had designs different than the rest. They had colors that were different."
The pattern of Akro's Corkscrew marble has yet to be duplicated, and the formula for coloring its oxblood marbles remains a secret.
"Akro did an awful lot of experimentation," says Albert Morin of Dracut, Mass., who prices Akro pieces for Schroeder's Antique Price Guide, a periodical. "It just seems like there's so much different stuff and that's what people like.
"Even the same color marble is different than the next one because of the coloration that was added to the glass."
Fierce competition among marble companies kept Akro from patenting its processes and some of its secrets died with its employees, Morin says.
Hardy's wife, Claudia, says the old Akro plant was a gold mine for marbles.
"When we first started going over there in 1969, there were marbles on the ground because people didn't care," she says.
In 1992, the Hardys received city permission to use heavy equipment to dig beneath cement. They found broken marbles, plenty of glass shards, and misshapen glassware.
The Hardys' discovery of perfect marbles puzzled them until they talked with former employees.
"When something messed up on a run, it was easier to just dump that run than to sort and size those marbles," Hardy says.
The Hardys hit the mother lode in Anna Oliverio's back yard.
Oliverio, 88, daughter of a coal miner, worked 24 years at Akro with four of 12 brothers and sisters. She started at 35 cents an hour packing marbles and worked her way up to secretary.
The Oliverio children brought boxes of glassware to their parents' home near the factory, where Oliverio still lives.
In what would prove to be treasure for the Hardys, Oliverio's father used boxes of Akro glass as fill when holes developed in his back yard due to coal mine subsidence.
Years later, Hardy unearthed boxes of Akro glass, much of it unbroken, still in its original packaging.
Gary Dolly, 50, of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., known to many as the king of marble collecting, once had the largest collection of Akro boxes, but he has since sold his Akros to Hardy.
During the Depression, when a penny would buy a handful of marbles, they were the toy of choice for many. In the '50s, television and electronic toys knocked them out.
However, marbles is still played today at national and international competitions and in some summer recreational programs.
Hardy hopes to save Akro's former factory, which is owned by the city. He has asked the city to give him the 10,000-square-foot building, now used for storage, so he can seek grants to renovate it.
City Manager Paul Schives says he does not know how much the building is worth.
"The only thing I've had an estimate on is tearing it down," Schives says. "I don't think it has any value other than to the Hardys."
by CNB