You never know the kinds of things people will collect. Google "large collections" and you will find all sorts of items people decide to collect. One guy has over 11,000 "Do Not Disturb" signs from hotel doors. He really doesn't want to be disturbed. An older couple has collected nearly 7,000 chicken related items. Maybe they own stock in KFC. Then there's the girl who has amassed almost 3,000 rubber duckies, each one different from the last. That one quacks me up! For Kathy and I, our taste turned to Precious Moments figurines. They started producing those figurines right around the time we got married in 1980 and each one was stamped on the bottom with "Jonathan & David" which was the name of the new company. But we only got those figurines that meant something to us and represented an event or significance in our lives. I actually have about a dozen that are significant to me that are displayed in my room.
One of my first elephants
Those of you who know me know that I once amassed a large collection of elephants, initially against my will. In the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday a unique elephant was delivered to me by someone in the Lincoln church. And once that initial collection was known to those in the church, the elephants kept coming. Everyone tried to outdo the others until I had an almost bizarre variety of elephant items. Stuffed elephants, beanie baby elephants, elephant notebooks, elephant pens, elephant lunch box, elephant mugs, and elephants of every sort of material filled the shelves. At one point the "collection" reached over 400 different items, a far cry away from the more prolific collectors but way more than the two I had sitting on my desk before the elephant invasion commenced.
Intertwined trunks to represent married love
When I asked why they picked elephants, I was told they saw my collection and wanted to add to it. My collection? The only elephants I had were the two small ones I bought on our honeymoon. Why did I even get those two? Because of the large quartz elephant my parents had in the living room since I was very young. That's how I eventually ended up with a large elephant collection. But along the way there were some elephants that meant a lot to me and those are the ones I still have. For instance, the pair of jade elephants from China that Jon bought me during one of his college summer trips. Or the handmade wood elephants from Africa with real ivory tusks. I'll always treasure those.
The majority of my elephant collection now fits on one shelf
I had a few watches during my teen years. The most memorable of them was the LED digital watch for my high school graduation. It was a dress gold watch, not the plastic kind that came later with Timex. It eventually gave way to a Seiko digital watch and then a great many cheap Walmart watches during the church building program. They never lasted long. There was a time we all wore watches because that's how you knew what time it was. Once the cell phone came along, it replaced the wrist watch as a time piece. The favorite parking location for a cell phone is in the pants pocket, and you'll see many pulling it out just to tell the time. When I ask different ones why they don't wear a wrist watch they look at me like I'm from an alien planet as they say, "why would I wear a watch when I already have the time on my phone?" To that I say, "why wouldn't you?" but to each their own.
Like other things that happened in my life, a series of unrelated events came together to introduce me to various kinds of watches and I started to collect them. The great thing about it was that I also got to wear my collection every day. I didn't spend much money on these watches but the collection grew to over three dozen over time. I also joined a watch group and eventually was asked to be a moderator on their online forum. I got to know numbers of the other members and also bought, sold, and traded watches with some of them. I sold the ones I could make money on and bought others that were cheaper. I narrowed the collection down to one of each kind. One with a Valjoux 7751 movement, one with the Valjoux 7750 movement, one with an ETA 2824, one with a meteorite dial and so on. One of this color, one of that color. You get the idea. Now I have less than twenty but they all have meaning for me. Then the forum shut down, I was no longer a moderator, and the collecting bug disappeared.
But in the end, this story about watches is about another momentous event as much as it is about collecting watches. It was following our son Jared's high school graduation that we asked him once again about what was next in life for him. Did he want to go to college? Did he have a life's vocation in mind? He asked if it would be alright if he just worked for maybe a year to figure out what he wanted to do. He got a job at Dominos and worked full-time making pizzas and delivering them. A year later, he was all excited as he came to me and said he knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. The "what" was learning to be a jeweler. The "where" was Gem City College in Quincy, Illinois. Turns out he had seen a documentary on jewelers and it had looked interesting to him, to the point he wanted to make it his vocation. Having spent a couple years in Quincy I knew exactly where that was. He asked if I would go with him to check it out, and one sunny April day we headed out for Quincy.
Part of a tray of 100 different original rings
We went straight to the school as we had called ahead to make an appointment for that day. Someone met us at the door and took us down the hall to show us the first big display in two huge glass cabinets. This showed some of the projects that students would learn in jewelry design, including the requirement to design and fashion 100 different rings over the course of the class. They also taught ring resizing, ring repair, metal polishing, and setting stones among the various subjects that were all part of being a jeweler. He still seemed interested, though creating all those rings gave him pause. He did not think he was very creative. And then we went on to the next big display.
Watchmaker desks lined up for watchmaking classes
I don't know about Jared, but I hadn't known that the other part of Jewelry Design was Watchmaking. I remember thinking, "now you're speaking my language!" When he walked down to that display he wanted to know what it was all about. There he got a crash course in what it took to open up and take apart a watch, clean all the parts, and then reassemble them in the proper order to rejuvenate or restore a watch. He was much more excited about this display and the school representative said that many who went through the Jewelry and Watchmaking process often started with watchmaking. The idea was that watches and jewelry were usually offered for sale in the same store and therefore the person who became a jeweler/watchmaker could be kept busy by doing repairs for both parts of the equation.
Jared signed up for the Watchmaking classes, which took just over a year, and then decided that he liked the structured process of taking apart a watch and putting it back together over the creative process of designing jewelry. He skipped the Jewelry classes and promptly got a job at Illinois Watch Company working under Craig Stone and learned a great deal about the real world of watchmaking. He went on to AWCI (American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute) for certification courses. After five years with Craig he found a job in Louisiana as a Rolex watchmaker. He's been to Rolex headquarters in Pennsylvania a couple times for some more training and finds great fulfillment in his career. He also works on Omega, Hamilton, Tag Heuer, and Seiko watches. He enjoys that immensely.
An Invicta Subaqua Noma IV with the Valjoux 7750 chronograph movement
We'll never know if my interest in watches made a difference in which path Jared took, but it's one of those points of convergence in a father's and son's life that will be remembered. We still talk about watches and watchmaking in great detail during some of our marathon multi-hour phone conversations (I know what you're thinking: gasp! you actually TALK on the phone?) and it's been a common interest for over ten years now. I expect it will continue to be a common point of interest for us for years to come. Well, that and cars, as we can talk hours about those as well. I guess you could also say we can just talk and talk and talk quite easily.
Arktander
(aka David Andreasen)
