Spring Break
Toy and Miniature Museum celebrates 25 years
Emily Iorg
Issue date: 4/23/07 Section: Culture
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Grandparents and children watch marbles travel down Minnesota artist Jeffrey Zachmann's floor-to-ceiling, stainless-steel marble run, propelled by gravity and clanging through the kinetic sculpture of ramps and chutes. On the south wall, a honeycomb of glass cases filled with marbles resembles a candy store's offerings. A complete set of sulphides, marbles with animals or human figures encased in them, reveals the face of each United States president up to Bill Clinton.
The museum added 12,000 square feet in 2003 partly to accommodate the more than one million handmade and commercially made marbles; one of four donated collections that forms the nucleus of the museum. Collections manager Mary Wheeler said it is probably the world's largest.
The $2 million addition brought the mansion to 33 rooms, which offer a home for donated miniatures, toy trains and cars, dolls and dollhouses, games, model schoolhouses - more than can be viewed in one trip. The marbles belong to Larry and Cathy Runyan-Svacina, who donated the collection to the museum in 2002.
"If we got money for [the collection], there's nothing we could buy for the community that someone else with money couldn't buy. What's one thing we have that nobody else could give to the community? This is it. And all ages can enjoy it," Runyan-Svacina told The Kansas City Star in March 2002.
Larry and Cathy, both marble aficionados since childhood, married in 1994.
"They met and married through their love of collecting marbles," said Jamie Berry, director of the museum.
How the museum began
Museum cofounders Mary Harris Francis and Barbara Marshall, lifelong collectors like the Svacinas, sought a place to accommodate their passions.
"The museum is founded on the premise that while collecting is marvelous, sharing the collections with others is best of all," a museum pamphlet quoted Francis.
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