lhboudreau posted a photo:

The goal in the game of marbles is to use a larger "shooter" marble to knock smaller marbles out of a drawn circle. Crucially, the children are playing "for keeps," meaning a player gets to permanently claim and keep any marbles they successfully knock out of the ring. As you can see in the illustration, the young girl is winning the game, having already collected a bulging bag of marbles from her defeated opponents.

During the early 20th century, marbles was considered a boy's game. It was played in the dirt, requiring competitive grit and calloused thumbs. Girls of the era were culturally conditioned to play quieter, more sedentary games indoors that preserved their cleanliness and "ladylike" decorum. Seeing a girl not only participating in a rough street game but absolute dominating the neighborhood boys completely flipped traditional childhood hierarchy on its head.

Norman Rockwell moved from New York to the rural community of Arlington, Vermont, in 1939. "Marble Champion" was one of the first major pieces he created there. For the boys, Rockwell cast local children, and to find the star of the painting, he drove around local Vermont farms looking for a freckle-faced, red-haired girl who knew how to shoot marbles. He found exactly what he was looking for at a local farm: an 11-year-old local girl named Ruth Skellie.

For Ruth Skellie (later Ruth Skellie McLenithan), posing for Norman Rockwell at age 11 became a cherished, defining thread of her long life. She lived a quiet, community-centered life in the region, passing away in 2018 at the age of 90. Her memories of working with Rockwell, and how she engaged with her legacy later in life, reveal a deep affection for the artist and the fame the painting brought her. She became an accomplished, highly sought-after local seamstress, famously sewing intricate bridesmaid and wedding dresses for families in the area. For the rest of her life, she remained a local legend. Neighbors noted that if you saw her walking down the street and hollered, "Hello, Marble Shooter!", she would invariably turn her head, wink, and flash her trademark smile.

[Source: Google Gemini]