A Century of Luxury & Legacy
From the Detroit Riots to Apollo 11: Memories of a Remarkable Decade
Published: Jul 19, 2026
A Boy, a Jewelry Business, and a Decade That Changed America
When I look back at the 1960s, I realize just how much was happening around me.
Of course, as a kid, I didn't understand most of it.
I was born in 1958, so the late 1950s and the 1960s were really the years when my earliest memories began taking shape. America was changing. Detroit was changing. Our family was changing. And our jewelry business was changing right along with all of it.
Looking back now, nearly seven decades later, I can see how many of those experiences shaped the way I think about family, business, resilience, and even getting older.
A New Generation Takes Over
One of the biggest moments in our family business happened right at the end of 1959.
My dad and my uncle officially purchased the jewelry business from my grandfather, Arthur Meadows.
My grandfather would have been about 56 years old. My dad was only 29.
That really caught my attention when I started putting the timeline together.
Today, I'm 68, and my son Joseph is in his mid-thirties. When I compare that to my grandfather stepping away and turning the business over to his sons at 56, I have to laugh a little.
I'm still here.
I'm still enjoying it.
And at this point, I really don't see myself retiring anytime soon. I'm having too much fun.
My grandfather, on the other hand, had already moved to Florida by the time I was old enough to remember him. I'm still trying to piece together exactly when he moved and what brought him there.
But one thing I do know is that moving to Florida didn't mean he stopped being a jeweler.
He worked for a jewelry manufacturer and later did service work for a retail jewelry store.
I can remember being very young and seeing Grandpa working at the bench. One day I looked at my dad and asked something along the lines of,
“Isn't Grandpa getting too old to be doing this?”
My dad gave me an answer I've never forgotten:
“As long as he can fix his mistakes, he can keep doing it.”
There's a lot of wisdom in that.
As I've gotten older, I've learned to leave more of the physical bench work to the younger jewelers. I can still offer the experience, the advice, and the years of knowledge I've accumulated, but there comes a point where you realize other people may be better equipped to do certain things.
Years ago, I heard a very successful jeweler say that he always tried to hire people who were better than he was.
I've always liked that philosophy.
There is wisdom in knowing what you're good at—and knowing where somebody else may be better.
As Clint Eastwood famously put it in Dirty Harry, “a man’s got to know his limitations”.
For many years, our philosophy around the shop was:
We can fix anything. Except Broken Hearts & Timex Watches.
And I still believe we can fix an awful lot.
But age and experience have taught me another question.
Can I fix it?
Probably.
Should I fix it?
Well… that's a different question.
Sometimes wisdom is knowing when to say no.
Moving from Detroit to Northville
In 1963, another big change came for our family.
We moved out of Detroit and into Northville.
I was five years old.
My dad was only 32.
I remember my mom and dad looking for a house, and if my memory serves me correctly, my dad basically gave Mom the job of finding one.
Her budget was around $10,000.
The house she found was certainly no mansion.
It was a fixer-upper.
But to a five-year-old boy, it might as well have been paradise.
We were at the end of a dirt road—the last house on the right.
Behind us were woods, hills, valleys, swamps, and seemingly endless places for a kid to explore. Go a little farther and there was a country club and golf course. Not too far away was a gravel pit that became our swimming hole.
It was an incredible place to grow up.
We spent plenty of weekends working on that old house, although at five years old I wasn't always allowed to “help” nearly as much as I wanted to.
Now that I've been a father myself, I understand why.
I also remember moving day.
My Uncle Ron, on my mother's side, owned a fencing company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had one of those big flatbed trucks with removable sides.
We loaded all kinds of things into the back, including our swing set.
And because apparently nobody thought much about safety back then, some of us rode in the back of the truck.
I still remember going through one traffic light where the front of the truck made it through the yellow light…
…and the back of the truck went through the red.
Different times.
Somehow we survived them.
The Detroit Riots of 1967
Then came 1967.
I was nine years old.
That summer, the Detroit riots broke out.
As a kid, I didn't really understand the larger social and political forces behind what was happening. I simply remember the things I saw and how they felt at the time.
One memory that has always stayed with me is watching my dad take the guns down from the gun rack at our house.
Suddenly, something that had been happening “in Detroit” felt much closer to home.
At the same time, my dad and uncle were right in the middle of moving their jewelry business out of downtown Detroit and into Plymouth.
They had already moved nearly everything out of the Michigan Theatre Building.
Everything except the safe.
Then the riots happened.
Curfews were put into place, and they couldn't simply go back downtown and retrieve it.
So they waited.
Thankfully, the building wasn't damaged, and eventually they were able to complete the move.
I have moved my own business more times over the years than I'd probably like to count, and I know firsthand how disruptive moving a business can be.
Everything changes.
Your bench changes.
Where you keep your tools changes.
Where the steamer sits changes.
Where the ultrasonic is changes.
The little movements you make automatically throughout the day suddenly aren't automatic anymore.
It's just like moving into a new house.
It takes time before the new place feels normal.
My dad and uncle got through the riots.
They got through the move.
And then, just when things were beginning to settle down, something else happened.
The Fire
In January of 1968, a massive fire broke out right next door to their new location in Plymouth.
There was an old theater nearby with a small restaurant squeezed into the space beside it. Some work was being done inside, and somehow a spark got into the wall.
Before long, the buildings were burning.
My uncle owned the building where their jewelry shop was located. Their shop was upstairs, above a Sherwin-Williams paint store.
And Sherwin-Williams had recently received a huge shipment of turpentine stored in large drums.
Needless to say, the fire department had a very strong incentive to keep that building from catching fire.
It was January in Michigan.
High winds.
Bitter cold.
Water everywhere.
And almost immediately, that water turned to ice.
I can still picture it.
Across the street was the post office, and there was a tree outside that became completely covered in ice from the mist of all that firefighting water.
The fire trucks themselves became surrounded by ice.
Ice covered the streets.
Ice covered the roof of my dad and uncle's building.
There was so much weight on the roof that the fire department eventually determined the building wasn't safe for them to occupy.
Once again, their business was displaced.
They had to climb through a window under supervision from the fire department, retrieve what they could, and relocate temporarily into the basement of a bank down the street.
Of course, as a kid, I thought the bank basement was fantastic.
Little rooms.
Gates.
Cubbyholes.
All kinds of cool places to explore.
To me, it was another adventure.
But looking back as a business owner, I see something completely different.
I see two young men trying to support their families.
They didn't have some enormous financial reserve sitting in the bank.
They had bills.
They had families.
They had customers.
They had work that needed to get done.
And suddenly, through absolutely no fault of their own, their entire business had been disrupted.
Again.
What did they do?
They figured it out.
They found another place to work.
They kept serving customers.
They kept paying bills.
They kept going.
That's what small business owners do.
Chipping Ice Off Firefighters
There's another memory from that fire that tells me a lot about my dad.
A gas station about half a block away opened its doors as a warming area for the firefighters.
My dad went over to help.
The firefighters would come in covered in frozen water, and their jackets would be so coated in ice that they couldn't even undo the fasteners.
My dad would chip the ice away so they could get their coats off, warm up, have some coffee, and then head back outside.
Years later, when my dad told me that if I ever became a firefighter I should do it someplace warm, I understood exactly where that advice came from.
He had seen Michigan firefighters working a major fire in the dead of winter.
No thank you.
Then Came the Tigers
Thankfully, 1968 wasn't all fires and hardship.
That fall, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series.
I was ten years old.
And I was a fan.
I remember saving my money and buying a little transistor radio so I could take it to school and listen to the games during recess.
There's something funny about childhood memories.
You may forget a hundred ordinary days, but certain little things stay with you forever.
That radio is one of those things for me.
I can still remember the excitement of being a ten-year-old kid in Michigan when our Tigers won the World Series.
After everything else that had happened, it was something the whole area could celebrate.
Watching Apollo 11 Leave for the Moon
Then came 1969.
Apollo 11.
My Uncle Art and Aunt Jan were visiting Michigan from Florida with their daughter Julie. Uncle Art was a firefighter, and somehow every summer he managed to trade shifts, combine days off, use vacation time, and work the system so he could take a nice long break.
My brother Donnie and I ended up going back to Florida with them.
And because we were there at just the right time, Uncle Art took us to Cocoa Beach so we could watch Apollo 11 launch.
I was eleven years old.
Think about that.
A kid who had grown up playing in the woods behind a fixer-upper house in Michigan was standing in Florida watching three men leave Earth to go walk on the moon.
Uncle Art had one of those old movie cameras that used actual film.
And for reasons I still don't completely understand, he put me in charge of filming the launch.
I did my best.
I pointed the camera.
I watched the rocket climb into the sky.
And when it was all over, I looked down…
…and somehow all the film was coming out of the camera.
So much for my career as a cinematographer.
I didn't manage to preserve the movie.
But I preserved the memory.
And maybe that's the better souvenir anyway.
Looking Back at a Remarkable Decade
When I look back now, the 1960s almost seem unbelievable.
Our family business transferred from my grandfather to my dad and uncle.
We moved from Detroit to Northville.
Detroit erupted in riots.
My dad and uncle moved their business to Plymouth.
A massive fire nearly destroyed the building next door.
The Tigers won the World Series.
And men walked on the moon.
All of that happened before I turned twelve years old.
At the time, I was simply a kid living through it.
Today, I see the lessons.
Life changes.
Businesses get disrupted.
Things happen that you never planned for.
Sometimes you move voluntarily.
Sometimes circumstances move you.
Sometimes you lose something.
Sometimes you start over.
And sometimes you find yourself standing on a street in Florida watching a rocket disappear into the sky.
Through all of it, my family kept going.
My grandfather kept working.
My dad and uncle kept building.
And somewhere along the way, that little boy watching all of this eventually found his own place at the jewelry bench.
Today, as we celebrate 100 years of our family in the jewelry industry, I'm increasingly grateful for these stories.
Not because everything went perfectly.
It certainly didn't.
I'm grateful because they remind me that a legacy isn't built by avoiding difficulty.
It's built by continuing through it.
By learning.
By adapting.
By helping one another.
By being grateful for the good times.
And by trusting that when the unexpected comes along, somehow we'll figure out the next step.
That's certainly been true for our family.
And after a century of luxury and legacy, we're still moving forward.
When I look back at the 1960s, I realize just how much was happening around me.
Of course, as a kid, I didn't understand most of it.
I was born in 1958, so the late 1950s and the 1960s were really the years when my earliest memories began taking shape. America was changing. Detroit was changing. Our family was changing. And our jewelry business was changing right along with all of it.
Looking back now, nearly seven decades later, I can see how many of those experiences shaped the way I think about family, business, resilience, and even getting older.
A New Generation Takes Over
One of the biggest moments in our family business happened right at the end of 1959.
My dad and my uncle officially purchased the jewelry business from my grandfather, Arthur Meadows.
My grandfather would have been about 56 years old. My dad was only 29.
That really caught my attention when I started putting the timeline together.
Today, I'm 68, and my son Joseph is in his mid-thirties. When I compare that to my grandfather stepping away and turning the business over to his sons at 56, I have to laugh a little.
I'm still here.
I'm still enjoying it.
And at this point, I really don't see myself retiring anytime soon. I'm having too much fun.
My grandfather, on the other hand, had already moved to Florida by the time I was old enough to remember him. I'm still trying to piece together exactly when he moved and what brought him there.
But one thing I do know is that moving to Florida didn't mean he stopped being a jeweler.
He worked for a jewelry manufacturer and later did service work for a retail jewelry store.
I can remember being very young and seeing Grandpa working at the bench. One day I looked at my dad and asked something along the lines of,
“Isn't Grandpa getting too old to be doing this?”
My dad gave me an answer I've never forgotten:
“As long as he can fix his mistakes, he can keep doing it.”
There's a lot of wisdom in that.
As I've gotten older, I've learned to leave more of the physical bench work to the younger jewelers. I can still offer the experience, the advice, and the years of knowledge I've accumulated, but there comes a point where you realize other people may be better equipped to do certain things.
Years ago, I heard a very successful jeweler say that he always tried to hire people who were better than he was.
I've always liked that philosophy.
There is wisdom in knowing what you're good at—and knowing where somebody else may be better.
As Clint Eastwood famously put it in Dirty Harry, “a man’s got to know his limitations”.
For many years, our philosophy around the shop was:
We can fix anything. Except Broken Hearts & Timex Watches.
And I still believe we can fix an awful lot.
But age and experience have taught me another question.
Can I fix it?
Probably.
Should I fix it?
Well… that's a different question.
Sometimes wisdom is knowing when to say no.
Moving from Detroit to Northville
In 1963, another big change came for our family.
We moved out of Detroit and into Northville.
I was five years old.
My dad was only 32.
I remember my mom and dad looking for a house, and if my memory serves me correctly, my dad basically gave Mom the job of finding one.
Her budget was around $10,000.
The house she found was certainly no mansion.
It was a fixer-upper.
But to a five-year-old boy, it might as well have been paradise.
We were at the end of a dirt road—the last house on the right.
Behind us were woods, hills, valleys, swamps, and seemingly endless places for a kid to explore. Go a little farther and there was a country club and golf course. Not too far away was a gravel pit that became our swimming hole.
It was an incredible place to grow up.
We spent plenty of weekends working on that old house, although at five years old I wasn't always allowed to “help” nearly as much as I wanted to.
Now that I've been a father myself, I understand why.
I also remember moving day.
My Uncle Ron, on my mother's side, owned a fencing company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had one of those big flatbed trucks with removable sides.
We loaded all kinds of things into the back, including our swing set.
And because apparently nobody thought much about safety back then, some of us rode in the back of the truck.
I still remember going through one traffic light where the front of the truck made it through the yellow light…
…and the back of the truck went through the red.
Different times.
Somehow we survived them.
The Detroit Riots of 1967
Then came 1967.
I was nine years old.
That summer, the Detroit riots broke out.
As a kid, I didn't really understand the larger social and political forces behind what was happening. I simply remember the things I saw and how they felt at the time.
One memory that has always stayed with me is watching my dad take the guns down from the gun rack at our house.
Suddenly, something that had been happening “in Detroit” felt much closer to home.
At the same time, my dad and uncle were right in the middle of moving their jewelry business out of downtown Detroit and into Plymouth.
They had already moved nearly everything out of the Michigan Theatre Building.
Everything except the safe.
Then the riots happened.
Curfews were put into place, and they couldn't simply go back downtown and retrieve it.
So they waited.
Thankfully, the building wasn't damaged, and eventually they were able to complete the move.
I have moved my own business more times over the years than I'd probably like to count, and I know firsthand how disruptive moving a business can be.
Everything changes.
Your bench changes.
Where you keep your tools changes.
Where the steamer sits changes.
Where the ultrasonic is changes.
The little movements you make automatically throughout the day suddenly aren't automatic anymore.
It's just like moving into a new house.
It takes time before the new place feels normal.
My dad and uncle got through the riots.
They got through the move.
And then, just when things were beginning to settle down, something else happened.
The Fire
In January of 1968, a massive fire broke out right next door to their new location in Plymouth.
There was an old theater nearby with a small restaurant squeezed into the space beside it. Some work was being done inside, and somehow a spark got into the wall.
Before long, the buildings were burning.
My uncle owned the building where their jewelry shop was located. Their shop was upstairs, above a Sherwin-Williams paint store.
And Sherwin-Williams had recently received a huge shipment of turpentine stored in large drums.
Needless to say, the fire department had a very strong incentive to keep that building from catching fire.
It was January in Michigan.
High winds.
Bitter cold.
Water everywhere.
And almost immediately, that water turned to ice.
I can still picture it.
Across the street was the post office, and there was a tree outside that became completely covered in ice from the mist of all that firefighting water.
The fire trucks themselves became surrounded by ice.
Ice covered the streets.
Ice covered the roof of my dad and uncle's building.
There was so much weight on the roof that the fire department eventually determined the building wasn't safe for them to occupy.
Once again, their business was displaced.
They had to climb through a window under supervision from the fire department, retrieve what they could, and relocate temporarily into the basement of a bank down the street.
Of course, as a kid, I thought the bank basement was fantastic.
Little rooms.
Gates.
Cubbyholes.
All kinds of cool places to explore.
To me, it was another adventure.
But looking back as a business owner, I see something completely different.
I see two young men trying to support their families.
They didn't have some enormous financial reserve sitting in the bank.
They had bills.
They had families.
They had customers.
They had work that needed to get done.
And suddenly, through absolutely no fault of their own, their entire business had been disrupted.
Again.
What did they do?
They figured it out.
They found another place to work.
They kept serving customers.
They kept paying bills.
They kept going.
That's what small business owners do.
Chipping Ice Off Firefighters
There's another memory from that fire that tells me a lot about my dad.
A gas station about half a block away opened its doors as a warming area for the firefighters.
My dad went over to help.
The firefighters would come in covered in frozen water, and their jackets would be so coated in ice that they couldn't even undo the fasteners.
My dad would chip the ice away so they could get their coats off, warm up, have some coffee, and then head back outside.
Years later, when my dad told me that if I ever became a firefighter I should do it someplace warm, I understood exactly where that advice came from.
He had seen Michigan firefighters working a major fire in the dead of winter.
No thank you.
Then Came the Tigers
Thankfully, 1968 wasn't all fires and hardship.
That fall, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series.
I was ten years old.
And I was a fan.
I remember saving my money and buying a little transistor radio so I could take it to school and listen to the games during recess.
There's something funny about childhood memories.
You may forget a hundred ordinary days, but certain little things stay with you forever.
That radio is one of those things for me.
I can still remember the excitement of being a ten-year-old kid in Michigan when our Tigers won the World Series.
After everything else that had happened, it was something the whole area could celebrate.
Watching Apollo 11 Leave for the Moon
Then came 1969.
Apollo 11.
My Uncle Art and Aunt Jan were visiting Michigan from Florida with their daughter Julie. Uncle Art was a firefighter, and somehow every summer he managed to trade shifts, combine days off, use vacation time, and work the system so he could take a nice long break.
My brother Donnie and I ended up going back to Florida with them.
And because we were there at just the right time, Uncle Art took us to Cocoa Beach so we could watch Apollo 11 launch.
I was eleven years old.
Think about that.
A kid who had grown up playing in the woods behind a fixer-upper house in Michigan was standing in Florida watching three men leave Earth to go walk on the moon.
Uncle Art had one of those old movie cameras that used actual film.
And for reasons I still don't completely understand, he put me in charge of filming the launch.
I did my best.
I pointed the camera.
I watched the rocket climb into the sky.
And when it was all over, I looked down…
…and somehow all the film was coming out of the camera.
So much for my career as a cinematographer.
I didn't manage to preserve the movie.
But I preserved the memory.
And maybe that's the better souvenir anyway.
Looking Back at a Remarkable Decade
When I look back now, the 1960s almost seem unbelievable.
Our family business transferred from my grandfather to my dad and uncle.
We moved from Detroit to Northville.
Detroit erupted in riots.
My dad and uncle moved their business to Plymouth.
A massive fire nearly destroyed the building next door.
The Tigers won the World Series.
And men walked on the moon.
All of that happened before I turned twelve years old.
At the time, I was simply a kid living through it.
Today, I see the lessons.
Life changes.
Businesses get disrupted.
Things happen that you never planned for.
Sometimes you move voluntarily.
Sometimes circumstances move you.
Sometimes you lose something.
Sometimes you start over.
And sometimes you find yourself standing on a street in Florida watching a rocket disappear into the sky.
Through all of it, my family kept going.
My grandfather kept working.
My dad and uncle kept building.
And somewhere along the way, that little boy watching all of this eventually found his own place at the jewelry bench.
Today, as we celebrate 100 years of our family in the jewelry industry, I'm increasingly grateful for these stories.
Not because everything went perfectly.
It certainly didn't.
I'm grateful because they remind me that a legacy isn't built by avoiding difficulty.
It's built by continuing through it.
By learning.
By adapting.
By helping one another.
By being grateful for the good times.
And by trusting that when the unexpected comes along, somehow we'll figure out the next step.
That's certainly been true for our family.
And after a century of luxury and legacy, we're still moving forward.