Mass Shooting in Whiting

Jerry Banik

August 2020

For several decades prior to World War II, playing marbles was a borderline obsession for kids all across the country.  It’s said that each spring in the 1920s and 30s, upwards of two million kids across the U.S.A. vied for their hometown championships.  And when it came to shooting marbles and producing champions, Whiting and Robertsdale were arguably unsurpassed by any small town in America.

It’s 1925, and at the Community Center playground, a young mibster, having already dribbled from the scratch line, knuckles down.  The game is on.  Lofting his favorite, agate taw at his opponent’s clearies, he bobs the foe’s first duck out of the ring, drawing excited oohs and aahs from the growing crowd of spectators who’ve come from Whiting, Robertsdale and Roby; from Goose Island and Stieglitz Park.  There will be no hunching or histing today. No fen dubs, no fen roundsters.  Today’s matches will be deadly serious.  Today Whiting will crown its city champion.

In the Roaring Twenties, marbles’ lingo and rules were complex, and often differed from one neighborhood to the next.  The sport itself might be called marbles, mibs, migs or megs.  The preferred game might be Ringer, Bullring, Knock Out, or any of a dozen or more others.  Ducks might be doogs in the next town, hoodles in another.  The material of which a marble was made could deem it an agate, a purey or cleary, a commie, a steely, a glassy or some other colorful moniker.  One thing, though, was constant:  The Whiting/Robertsdale community maintained a fervor for the game, turning out state champions and national title contenders.

In 1923, when its new Community Center was dedicated, the Whiting Community Service organized and managed a city-wide marbles tournament.  That same year the owners of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain organized and sponsored a national tournament. They invited winners ages fourteen and under from contests all over the United States to participate. Qualifying tournaments would be sponsored by newspapers or city recreation departments.  Sponsors would pay the way for their state champs and adult chaperones to get to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they would compete for the national championship on the beach off the city’s famous boardwalk. The Whiting Community Service built three official marbles courts on the Community Center playground, and Whiting was chosen as the host city for the 1925 Indiana state championship tournament.

As in many towns, Whiting’s schools ran the first level of competition in the city-wide tournament, winnowing multitudes down to manageable herds. Herschel Winsberg from Saint John the Baptist School won the 1925 city crown. He followed that up by winning the Indiana state championship, which earned him a trip to Atlantic City to compete for the national title.

In 1926, South Side School’s champion, John Hegedus, won the Whiting city title, then also won the Indiana state tournament, which that year was held in Bedford.

A group of public-spirited local citizens donated to a fund to assure John could make the trip to New Jersey for the nationals. John was eliminated in what was described as one of the closest matches of the tourney.

The Times of Hammond reported that he and chaperone John Sharp from the Community Center occupied a suite of rooms in the famous Palace Hotel, one of the finest in Atlantic City (click images to enlarge).

Hat trick! After winning the Indiana state tournament two years in a row, Whiting’s boys were by no means done.  In 1927 thirteen-year-old Joe Tapajna, from Saint John the Baptist School and pictured below, won the Whiting championship and then the state championship, which was played at Harrison Park in Hammond.  One of just thirty-seven boys from across the U.S. to make it to Atlantic City, Joe was eventually eliminated by a contestant from Saint Louis.

Fun fact: By 1929 the Community Center’s annual tournament was such a popular event that bleacher seats were erected around its marble ring to accommodate the crowds.

In 1933 the Hammond Times reported that the tournament format had a new twist.  The top four players from Whiting’s grade schools, Benedict Kusbel of St. John the Baptist School, John Fetzko of George Rogers Clark, John Zrenchik of Immaculate Conception, and Charles Dickens of Whiting Public School, advanced to compete in the Greater Chicago Marble Tournament, held at the Chicago’s “Century of Progress” world’s fair.  Had one of them won in Chicago, Whiting would have once again been represented in the national tournament finals in Ocean City, NJ.  

In 1935 the Whiting Public School champion, Robert Coppage, was one lucky youngster. One of the prizes he was awarded when he won the Whiting city tournament was a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth.

At the end of the 1930s, Joe “Steiny” Ihnat, the Saint John the Baptist school champion, dominated the Whiting marbles scene, winning the city tournament four years in a row: 1937, 1938, 1939, and 1940.

Joe’s daughter, Robertsdale’s Carol Vargo, still has her dad’s 1937 Lake County champion’s trophy and a collection of his shooters and ducks.

A box of agates, circa 1930.  Agate is a colored variety of quartz.  Because they are denser than most other marbles, agates are a favorite of many players, especially as shooters, because that density makes it easier for them to knock an opponent’s marble out of the ring.

Clay marbles are the most common of the old marbles. They were easy to produce and millions still exist.  Some accounts say that clay marbles were used as ballast in the keels of ships that sailed to America from Germany, and were then removed and sold in this country.

And finally, a word about good, ol’ cat’s-eyes.  The Peltier Glass Company of Ottawa, Illinois is considered to have made the first true cat’s-eye marbles in the 1930s. They had curved, colored forms inside of a clear base and were sometimes called "bananas" because the yellow variety looked like a banana in a marble.