When Debra Stanley-Lapic knelt down and shot her first marble into a ring, it changed the trajectory of her life.
Two years after picking up that tiny glass ball, Stanley-Lapic was crowned winner of the girls division in the 1973 National Marbles Championship.
She went on to coach 18 children from Reading and beyond to national championship victories and win numerous adult tournaments.
“I have seriously devoted 50 years of my life to promoting the game and putting Reading on the map in the world of marbles,” she said.
The Shillington woman, 64, plans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of her achievement this month in Wildwood, N.J., at what is being billed as the 100th National Marbles Tournament.
She will be joined by her husband, Stephen Lapic, and their daughter, Whitney, also a national champion.
Held June 19 through 22 at Ringer Stadium on the beach, the tournament is the official national competition for boys and girls, ages 8 to 14.
More than 1,200 games of marbles will be played during the four-day event.
To qualify, the children must win one of several local tournaments held throughout the U.S.
Stanley-Lapic qualified for the nationals in 1972 and 1973 after taking the championship in the girls division of the Reading tournament.
Encouraged after placing in Wildwood her first year, she determined to up her game. Using a book of instructions, she taught herself the rules of the game and new skills. She honed them by practicing for hours a day on the concrete ring her father, Ed Stanley, poured behind their South Sixth Street home and trophy shop.
The study and practice paid off.
“Everything just came together for me in 1973,” she said. “I took the girls championship in Reading and went on to win the national championship.”
Keeping it going
For decades afterward she was instrumental in running Reading’s tournament.
Begun in 1923, the same year as the national competition, the city tournament was sponsored by the Reading Times and, later, the Reading Eagle from 1929 until 2008.
The city took the sport of marbles very seriously, Stanley-Lapic said. Most other city and district tournaments stopped or took a break during the World War II years, she noted, but Reading’s did not.
“During those years, pictures of the Reading Marbles Tournament winners were prominently placed on the front page of the Reading Times, right next to the war news,” she said. “Marbles were that important to both the youth and parents of Reading. “
With the city recreation department’s help, Stanley-Lapic kept the tournament going full-scale for a few years after the newspaper pulled its sponsorship. But without long-term support, it fizzled.
“We still run it on a super-duper low scale,” she said, noting students from one to two of the city’s elementary schools participate, a far cry from the years when nearly every city kid played marbles.
She’d like to revive the event, Stanley-Lapic said, and could do it with sponsorships of just $4,000 to $5,000 a year. That amount would cover the local costs and be enough to send the city champions to the nationals in Wildwood.
Cherished reminders
The childhood thrill of her victory there 50 years ago remains fresh and is recaptured each time she watches the crowning of a successor champion.
She cherishes the dozen or so snapshots taken of her own crowning and of her wearing the crown in the moments afterward.
To help celebrate the anniversary of that triumphant day, Stanley-Lapic and her daughter drove to Wildwood this month to recreate one of the photographs taken in 1973.
In the original, snapped by her parents, Stanley-Lapic stands on the sundeck of Wildwood’s Rio Motel, 4906 Ocean Ave. She is wearing her crown, a T-shirt emblazoned “Reading PA,” and the trendy oversized wire-framed glasses and colorful knee-high socks popular in the mid-1970s.
“I had gigantic holes in the knees of my jeans from playing marbles,” she said, “and put on these orange shorts that my mother had in her bag. Then, I looked down and thought, ‘Oh my God, I have on red, blue and black striped, knee-high socks.’ ”
Stanley-Lapic still has the crown and the glasses, but not the socks. She used strips of colored bandage tape to recreate the bright stripes and, wearing a duplicate T-shirt and orange shorts, posed at the much-changed motel site.
Making history
She won’t be wearing the fragile crown and striped socks when the tournament starts Sunday, but she will be there just as she has been every year since her memorable win, with the exception of 2020 and 2021 when it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The most exciting, Stanley-Lapic said, was 2002 when she coached Whitney to a championship victory in Ringer Stadium.
The mother and daughter are the first multigenerational winners and only parent-child winners of the National Marbles Tournament. Both were inducted into the National Marbles Hall of Fame in Wildwood.
Both also won the women’s division of the US Marbles Championship in Cumberland, Md., Debra in 1994 and Whitney in 2019, on the 25th anniversary of that tournament.
Stanley-Lapic continues to coach, give demonstrations and lecture on the sport.
And she still plays.
There are those who snicker when she tells them about her passion for the game.
“It doesn’t bother me,” she said, “but I do tell them that marbles is not just a kids’ game.”
Source: Berkshire mont