A new facet for jeweler Stanley
Posted on Sunday, August 24, 2008
A photograph that a teenage Loyd Stanley snapped from the sidelines of a North Little Rock High School football game earned him three college-scholarship offers, but it would be a career built on restoring the passage of time, not freezing it, that would make him an Arkansas institution.
The 68-year-old Stanley, who recently received the rarely bestowed Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arkansas Jewelers Association, attended Arkansas State Teachers College, now the University of Central Arkansas, in Conway, on a photography scholarship.
But rather than capturing an image with a lens and teasing it into view in a darkroom, it was a different sort of painstaking process that makes the Stanley name the only one that still endures from the business listings in the jewelry section of the 1936 telephone book. (Loyd Stanley noted this with some pride when he asked the salesman who processes the Yellow Pages advertising for Stanley Jewelers to source the 72-year-old page. )
In those days, successful druggists employed a wristwatch repairman to operate from his own counter space within the store. Loyd’s father, Charles, a Beebe native, quit school in the seventh grade and found work in a drugstore, where he learned the clock repairing trade. The skill flourished in the Depression years as people who could not afford new clocks and watches could at least afford to have old ones refurbished.
Eventually, Charles and his wife, Sally, arranged a $ 400 loan — with Charles’ Swiss watch as collateral — to open their own watch repair counter at a drugstore at Seventh and Main streets in downtown Little Rock. Later, the couple moved to a storefront on North Little Rock’s Main Street, where they sold watches and jewelry.
In the early years, when the Stanleys had more glass-front cases than merchandise to fill them, they would guilefully arrange displays to create the illusion of infinite choice. Watches came packaged in two nesting boxes, so they could place the watch in front of its interior box and, behind that, the exterior box.
For their son, who became one of the state’s certified gemologists, puffery is a distant memory.
“I guess I’m starting my 50 th year here about now,” Loyd Stanley said on a recent morning. Stanley learned the craft of jewelry-making from an uncle who was also a jeweler; when his father sent him to the uncle to have rings re-sized, he hovered so closely his uncle finally taught him to carefully carve away a section of precious metal and close the gap. Certified as a gemologist in 1967, Stanley built a reputation for delivering exactly the setting and stones a customer had in mind, even replicating necklaces and rings women would bring in from magazine photographs.
Fifty years in the jewelry business is long enough to remember the woman who visited the store in search of diamonds she could use as a commodity in case she ever needed to flee the country in search of asylum. She had lived through Hitler’s rise in Germany, she explained — her family only got out because they had diamonds with which to barter.
It’s also sufficient time for Stanley to take note of casual-Friday’s seepage into the rest of the week. “That trend certainly has not helped us,” he says of our slouchy era’s impact on the jewelry business. “But I’m afraid I was on an airplane yesterday in shorts.”
But that yesterday wasn’t a day in the store for Stanley, who this day is dressed in his trademark black pants, white dress shirt with French cuffs and red necktie, as if every day were Valentine’s Day. (A good day to be a jeweler, for obvious reasons. Stanley knows his holidays and their patterns; Mother’s Day — not as big a jewelry holiday as one would expect, and “Santa Claus is still our best customer,” Stanley likes to say. ) Another red necktie, identical to the one Stanley already has knotted around his neck, dangles from a doorknob. Stanley leads a tour around the art deco-inspired space off North Little Rock’s John F. Kennedy Boulevard to which the store moved as Main Streets around the country purged their storefronts.
To someone who didn’t live through the era, the chrome pendant lights dangling from the ceiling and the cut-crystal goblet displaying lollipops for dragged-along children might seem like stepping into a scene from Mad Men, the AMC series set, with faithful visual precision, during a time when housewives wore pearls with their shirtwaist dresses.
To someone who did, it would be easy to imagine a woman striding across the store’s nickel-colored carpeting, stooping in her pillbox hat and pointing a gloved finger to a cameo resting on a bed of felt. In the back of the store, Stanley has a framed photograph of himself, visible behind a jagged star-burst punched into the plateglass window of the old Main Street store. A thief had made off with a handful of Bulova watches. The photograph made the front page of the Arkansas Democrat, the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “If he’d gotten shot an hour earlier,” Stanley says, “I wouldn’t have made the news.”
The smash-and-grab was one of a dozen burglaries the store has endured through the years, on top of three armed robberies (including one in which a man dressed as a woman executed the hold-up ), a devastating fire and two employees lost in car accidents. Those hurt the most, Stanley says.
Like diamonds from coal, a jeweler’s perennial role in happy occasions glimmers through the darkness. Engagement ring shoppers — “If they come in together, they usually have a look on their face you can spot,” Stanley says — might eventually come back and ask, “How much is that sterling baby rattle in the window ?”
Bartenders get sob stories; watch repairmen get fob stories. “It’s especially true of old watches,” Stanley says of the nostalgia for which jewelers are repositories. “He thinks we can fix his watch better if he tells us how his grandfather used to wear it.”
The three children Stanley brought silver rattles home to entered the profession: daughter Laura and son Stephen alongside him there in the store, and Caroline, another daughter, first for the Platinum Guild in New York and now for her own jewelry marketing firm in California. (A congratulatory letter Stanley received, in recognition of his Lifetime Achievement Award, held special resonance for Stanley. It was from Stinson’s Jewelers of Camden, a family-owned business which dates to 1847. The store’s slogan is “Jewelers by Birth.” )
As for the Stanley household, no cobbler’s-children-have-noshoes lamentations there. Some jeweler’s wives might yawn over gifts their husbands pocketed effortlessly at the office. Not Mrs. Stanley.
“My wife,” he says, “covets her jewelry.”
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