Irving Mann: An Extraordinary Life

MANN’S JEWELERS FROM THE BEGINNING PART I

INTERVIEW BY MARY STONE

An ExtraOrdinary Life

When an 18-year-old Irving Mann found himself in the English Channel, shoulder-to-shoulder with other officers, he was carrying a 30-pound radio strapped to his back with no idea where he was going or what he was about to face. Soldiers like Irving wouldn’t know their destination until President Franklin Roosevelt’s voice boomed over the ships’ loudspeakers. Irving remembered the president’s words in a 2005 interview: “‘You are now about to embark on the greatest campaign, the greatest adventure of your life,’” Irving recalled. “We’re going to the beaches of Normandy.’”

As the troops approached land, Irving could hear the din of U.S. weapons, the cannons on U.S. ships, destroyers and aircraft carriers. Shells whined overhead. When Irving saw the landing nets deploy he turned to his captain. “I have a problem: The rules say I cannot go down those landing nets until I can learn to swim, but I never got to that!” Irving said. “What do we do now?”

With his rifle, side arms and the radio on his back, Irving would have sunk like a stone before he reached shore.

The captain looked at him and said: “Mann, a bit of advice. Don’t slip.”

Irving never did learn to swim. But the founder of Mann’s Jewelers survived that day and the battles that would follow. He was awarded the Purple Heart and in his civilian life went on to start Mann’s Jewelers with his wife, Gertrude. He met Gertrude in Toronto while studying watchmaking after the war and married her

mere months after their first date.

Irving died in 2015, just shy of 90; Gertrude, his wife and business partner, died in 2007 at the age of 80.

D-Day was an extraordinary day in Irving’s extraordinary life. A member of the Greatest Generation, he was born in 1925, between the Spanish Flu pandemic and the Great Depression. At 10, he began working at the jewelry store his father started, near the Liberty Pole in downtown Rochester. He ran errands for his father and got to know the jewelers and customers. After he returned from the war, Irving would become an eighth-generation jeweler at his own business on 158 South Clinton Ave.

But it was at the store’s current location on 2945 Monroe Ave. that I sat down with Irving, then 80 years old, to write about his business for a Rochester publication. The conversation lasted nearly three hours and stretched over his epic lifetime and beyond to the origins of the family trade in 1830s Russia. Irving was a superb storyteller, and the testament he gave to the World War II battles he fought I knew was invaluable. So, I kept the recording of his interview for 17 years on a dusty external hard drive. The audio file was so old, the format was no longer recognizable by today’s technology. In 2019 and again in 2020, I scoured the internet for ways to read the file and hear Irving’s amazing story again.

This year, on the 75th anniversary of the business his children Nancy and Robert now run, I looked again and as if by magic—or help from the great beyond—I heard Irving’s voice, clear as a bell, and the historic experiences he recounted came to life again.

A condensed version of that conversation follows and serves as the first in a two-part article to be published now and later this year, celebrating Mann’s Jewelers’ 75th anniversary in Rochester. It also serves as a testament to the fortitude, the integrity, courage, the deep human goodness the Greatest Generation embodies. Irving was an emblematic example.

Irving: Our family comes from a history of jewelers. We go back about 200 years in the jewelry business. We are ninth generation jewelers. My children are the ninth generation.

My father, his father—my grandfather—and his brother had a jewelry store in Buffalo, N.Y. back in the 1920s, and through a series of family tragedies, my uncle who was 25 years old at the time, and part of the firm, died. The firm was called Louis Mann and Sons. He contracted some sort of pneumonia, and he died at the age of 25, leaving three children.

My grandmother grieved to such an extent that in two months she also contracted this disease, and she also passed away. That left my grandfather and father. My father was a watchmaker, my grandfather was also a watchmaker. Within a year, my grandfather also passed away. So that left my father, Alexander Mann. He lost his father, his brother, his mother, and now he had a two-year-old son and a wife. He was overwhelmed and disposed of the business. He sold off Louis Mann and Sons, paid off all his debts and began looking for a job. Because he had relatives here in Rochester, he was persuaded to come to Rochester and look for a position, and he did find one. He found a fellow at the corner of Main and Clinton, and my father went in and asked for a job. He had to repair some watches and report back to him, which he did. My father asked: “Did I get the job?” He said, “That depends. Sit down on this watchmaker’s stool.” My father sat down on the stool. The guy goes and takes out a tape measure, and he goes behind my father and measures across his back. My father said, ”What has this got to do with my job?’ And he said, “It just depends whether you get the job or not. Hold still.” My father told the story so many times. The guy measures across his back and says,

“Well, you got the job by an inch and a half.” My father thought, this guy is wacko. He found out the guy wasn’t such a wacko. The guy had a very small store, as I said, and a very small window. And what he did was he shoved my father into the window, with a little board in front of him, which became his watchmaking bench. And my father sat facing the street, and if he hadn’t fit into that little space, he wouldn’t have gotten the job. And so for more than a year, my father sat facing folks.

I remember as a two-year-old going by with my mother and saying, “There’s Daddy.” And people were stopping all along

Clinton Avenue, looking at this fellow fixing watches. That’s how he started in Rochester as a watchmaker, exposed to the Clinton Avenue traffic. And that’s how Mann’s Jewelers began, in a very peripheral way, with my father in that window 6-feet wide and a working space no more than 3 feet. He had less than an inch on each side to maneuver in.

AL THE WATCH DOCTOR

After about a year, my father left and opened up his own store, in the area where the Liberty Pole is now. My father opened up in there under the trade name, Al the Watch Doctor. I was the errand boy, and I knew all of downtown at that

time, from West Main Street to East Main Street. You name the building, they were all filled with craftsmen: jewelers, watchmakers, designers, engravers.

So I got to know the personalities of all of these jewelers. I’d walk in, they’d hand me some candy or some gum, we’d talk awhile. This was in the 1930s.

By 1935, ’36, ’37 I was already being utilized. Being in the store, I could hear what was going on. I began to acquire information about the industry from many different facets: from the standpoint of the craftsmen, from the standpoint of the customers who were walking in. I used to stand around and listen to what the jewelers were saying to the customers. So, it all stuck, way back in there someplace. It’s been a treasure of information I’ve relied on through the years.

DIPLOMAED AND DRAFTED IN THE SAME WEEK

I graduated from Franklin, in the class of ’43. Franklin was a phenomenal school at that time. From there, I was very fortunate to receive a wonderful letter. They handed me my diploma with one hand and my draft notice with the other.

At that point, I had learned some watchmaking and thought that I was going to be involved in repairing and working on military aircraft and tanks and things of that nature—with instruments, which is what they told me I would be involved with. Instead, they sent me to infantry basic. And so, I became an infantry man and got my training and maneuvers and all that done in Mississippi.

However, they had promised me that once I completed my basic training I would go to officer candidate school in the field of military instruments, until one day the captain pulled me in and said, “Mann, you’re going to the next level of infantry training, amphibious training.”

He said we were preparing for something big, and they were taking everyone out of training.

Next thing I knew I was on a boat to England, where in the South of England we practiced assaulting beaches for invasion work. We did that for three months, and by June of ’44 I was on a boat in the English Channel.

I never saw anything like it. You felt that you could virtually walk from one ship to another. All the ships were that close together and that many in the English Channel. Coverage of aircraft was constant.

We had no idea where we were going until President Roosevelt came over the loudspeaker on all the ships and said, “You are now about to embark on the greatest campaign, the greatest adventure of your life, and we’re going to go to the beaches of Normandy.”

Q: How did it feel?

Irving: As we got closer to the beaches we could hear our own weapons, our own ships, the large cannons aboard the ships, the destroyers, the aircraft carriers. It was a constant din of shells whining over your head and hitting the beaches just ahead of us

and that kept up all the time. We started to climb down the nets. I had never learned how to swim—to this day. And part of the instructions to the officers that since they were going to be an amphibious force was that everybody had to learn to swim, do so many laps, and so on. Well, I was involved at that time with radio work. That was a specialty that they assigned to me for this project. And I carried a 30-pound radio on my back where I kept communication with our outfit as well as with artillery and other companies. Once I knew we were going down the landing nets, I said, “I got a problem.” I said, “The rules say I cannot go down those landing nets until I can learn to swim, but I never got to that. What do we do now?” And he looked at me and said, “Mann, I have one bit of advice for you. Don’t slip.” With that 30-pound radio on my back, carrying a rifle and side arms and all the rest, had I slipped off that boat I would have sunk like a stone. Other outfits were going ahead of us and “I was standing on top of the machine gun watching the water come up higher and higher, hitting the beaches first. We were in the third wave hitting the beach. It was getting to be quite dark as we went down the landing nets, and there was a Jeep waiting for us in the landing craft. The lieutenant and his driver were ahead of me, and I was sitting in the back of the Jeep with a manual 50 caliber machine gun. We got to be about 150 yards from the beach, we came down and right into a shell and I thought, ‘I’m hole. The shell hole had to be about twice the size of this room and we were in the middle never going to make of it. Amphibious Jeeps are supposed to float, it to the beach.’” but we were in this hole, and the water kept going up and up and up. And we weren’t going anywhere. The lieutenant and the driver, they both knew how to swim. I was standing on top of the machine gun watching the water come up higher and higher, and I thought, “I’m never going to make it to the beach.” Fortunately, what happened was that an amphibious tank came by us and saw that we were in trouble. The fellow who was manning the tank jumped out of the tank, went into the water, tied his tow chain around our bumper, pulled us out of the hole, and we were able to go forward onto the beach with him as our guide. That was the beginning of D-Day for us. There was a little town that we had to meet at, which was a town called Sainte-MèreEglise; it’s become quite well-known in D-Day history. (On June 5, 1944, Sainte-Mère-Eglise was the first French city liberated by American paratroopers.) “Paratroopers had landed at Sainte-Mère-Eglise ahead of us, and when we got into Sainte-Mère-Eglise and got up there eventually, there were the paratroopers hanging from their parachutes, they had been machine gunned and bayoneted while they were still hanging from the trees.” We lost a lot of people there. But after that, after we got through, we then were able to regroup with a number of our Army divisions. Our objectives were taking very small towns.

UNDER GENERAL GEORGE PATTON

And we continued on, we lost a lot of people little by little. And we were transferred from the company that was being run at that time by Omar Bradley who was our general. And then when we hit a certain level, we were transferred over to General Patton. So, he became our leader. He had his orders. And regardless of how many men that took, he was going to take the objective. Over a period of time, we ran into a number of incidents. I could go through various wars and battles that we went through.

THE TRENCHES

One major one happened two weeks after we landed. In Normandy, the hedgerows grow, you know, they’re about 7 feet tall. And they’re big blocks of mounds of Earth. They separate various areas for wine and that kind of thing. But the hedgerows are wonderful from the military standpoint because if you hide behind one, nobody can see you. Of course, you can’t see them either. But it was mostly hedgerow country that we were working through.

We were still pretty fresh. I was in pretty good shape physically. So we hit in an area where suddenly there were Germans up ahead of us on the other side of a series of mountains. And we couldn’t go any further. They were laying it into us with all kinds of weaponry and mostly they are ADH, which are guns that are so fast—the best weapon they ever had. Boom. It hits before you hear the sound.

So they were letting us have it, and we got the word to dig in. So I had my little shovel, and if you ever saw a dog going after a bone, I dug into that mound as fast as I could. I dug myself a goodsized hole in a very, very short time. One that I could actually crawl right into. And I had this one guy I went through basic training with who wasn’t that ambitious. He was a lot bigger than I am. I was 5’6” and he is about I’d say maybe about 5’10”, I don’t know, maybe 6’. He was big and broad. And we were buddies.

So he dug, but he only dug a shallow trench. And when the artillery kept coming pretty heavy, he realized he didn’t have that much protection. So, he saw that I was in this cocoon I dug for myself, he comes in and he jumps on top of me. I said, “Tony, get the hell off of me; you’re squashing me.” He said, “Shut up.” He said, “They’re going to kill me out there.” I said, “Well, why don’t you dig a bigger hole?” He says, “Stay down there.”

So I’m crunched down into the hole, and then they started with mortars. Mortars are locked, and they only had us focused in so they were starting the shells hitting on top of the hedgerow and coming down.

I could hear “zoom, zoom,” the shrapnel coming very, very close to us. So we couldn’t move. And suddenly, a section of the 82nd airborne paratroopers started to come to our position, and they drew the fire of the Germans toward them because they were running pretty fast.

We got the whistle to retreat, get back to our own position.

So I said, “Tony, let’s get the hell out of here.” And you know, I’m shaking. He’s just lying there. I said, “Let’s get out of here.” No response. So I’m trying to get out of there. “Come on, Tony. Stop screwing around. Let’s get out of here! They’re going to start to zero in on us again.” No motion. So finally, I worked my way out, flipped him over, and he fell back. And the back of his head was gone. The shrapnel came down and sliced it. That would have been me. No question. That probably would have been me. The question that remains with me and remains with me today. Why him and not me? It’s a fundamental question; it’s a philosophical question. But here he was maybe a little older than me, but maybe if he would have stayed in his own hole… maybe who knows. I thought about maybes quite a while after that, because that really shook me up. But that was one event that I’ve never, ever forgotten. And the question always remains. Here I am, 80 years old, still around and here he is, killed somewhere in France. These are things that stick in your mind because they were really momentous changes, both in your life and in how the war went. I think back from time to time, but not as much now as l used to of some of the events that occurred.

WOUNDED IN BATTLE

“But that was one I lasted up until three days before the Battle of the Bulge, and then I got hit. event that I’ve never, And what they did is they took me to an aid station. They took one look at my leg and said, ever forgotten. And “You know, we’re going to try to save the leg.” Then they sent me to another more advanced the question always hospital like MASH. Very much like it. But we didn’t have any Alan Alda there to help us. remains. Here I am, 80 years old, still around and here he is, killed somewhere in France.” They immediately loaded me on a plane and they flew me to England. That I could remember. Q: How did you feel at that point? Irving: In some way relieved, because when you get hit after you’ve been in combat as long as I had been, I was the very last one left in my squad. I had seen replacements come, die off, get shot and leave. And it was just a question of when you got hit. Not if you got hit, but when you got hit. Was it going to be a wound that would remove you from the combat or were you going to get killed? And so if you got hit, it becomes very traumatic. After I left the service, I had a year of psychiatric help because I would hear a car backfire, and I would be ducking for cover. It’s automatic. You can’t control it. At night thunderstorm, lightning. Middle of the night you’re sleeping, suddenly lightning strikes, the first thing I knew I was under the bed. That’s how you survive. When you’re trained that well, and if you want to stay alive, you act instinctively without thinking. It took a little over a year to get me to the point where I was able to function in a more normal way. And then after I got out of the hospital, I had to learn how to walk again. So that took four months of learning how to walk and throwing away the crutches and throwing away the cane. They were able to save my leg. I got a pension from the U.S. government. It was a big pension. Don’t laugh. I was getting $25 a month. So they’ve raised it now. You know, the pension still comes. I donate it to charity, but I still get the pension. After I was no longer combat-worthy (and it’s called limitedduty outfit) they gave us a choice. They said, “If you would like now that you’re back here in France, if you would like to have as

a bonus,” I guess, they call it. “You could have 10 days in Paris, courtesy of the U.S. government.” But we had liberated Paris. And it was wild. Let me tell you.

Q: Oh, tell me about that.

Irving: Oh, well, everything was open to the GIs at that time. The French girls couldn’t do enough for you, and the men were bringing out wine that they had buried in the ground waiting for the Germans to leave. And Calvados (a brandy made in Normandy).

It was like drinking floor polish. It’s a bit rough. When Calvados is aged, I guess, for a while, it’s drinkable. But they had been making Calvados, and it was flowing like water. And how you stood up, I don’t know.

I never drank, and I don’t drink today. But the complete enthusiasm of the French people no longer having the Germans telling them what to do… it was just unbelievable. That was wartime.

A FATEFUL BLIND DATE

RE-ENTERING CIVILIAN LIFE

Beauvais at one time was the playground of the rich. It is a phenomenal town. And a lot of the people who escaped the Germans kept going toward the coast, which is the Spanish French border, and they would either hide out or whatever, but found things for themselves to do.

It’s very much like Morocco. When you come down from the high ground into Beauvais, you see the villages, the housing and these cottages are homes.

The U.S. government took over all these cottages and brought in professors from various universities of the U.S. So there I took my English 101. I took my social studies. I took enough courses in that period of time to get a full term’s credit when I entered college. And that was really a worthwhile thing because you were being taught by very knowledgeable professors who were there to help us to sort of get back on our feet again as a civilian.

Beauvais American University was a very, very wonderful idea of the U.S. government.

So after that was all over with, I got back to the States.

I was discharged in February of ’46. I continued on to college. I attended on the G.I. Bill, all with a pre-med concept.

And then I took a look one day and I said, “Look how old I am.” At that time, at that age, life has passed you by. You spent all your years in the service. And I said, “You know, for me to continue with this medical career, I’ve got at least another seven or eight years of school because if I’m going to go into medicine, as I anticipated, I’m going to have to get into a specialty.” So I’ve got four years for a specialty… and it all seemed to be a long road. As I look back on it now, I sometimes regret not having completed it.

WATCHMAKING SCHOOL

Q: Tell me about how you met Gertude.

Irving: OK. My cousin had graduated from a school in Toronto that’s called the Horological Institute (English translation)

watchmaking school. So I said, if I’m going to go back to the jewelry business, I want to go not the way the old-fashioned people, my relatives and ancestors did it, where uncle so-and-so sits you down at the bench, and tells you: “Do this and do this, and don’t ask why. Just do it the way I tell you.” At this school, you couldn’t touch a watch, for example, for six months. Theory, theory, theory. The physics of this, there’s a chemical reason for that. So once you learned it, you knew more than just how to put two pieces of material together. You learn the “why.” I was very fortunate. I had relatives in Toronto. And I came over under the G.I. Bill. I became a student of the Horological Institute to study watchmaking. And I lived in the home of one of my relatives. I was looking to associate myself with some young ladies. And I had a relative who was my age—my first cousin. So whenever I wanted to go someplace, I would say, “Gussie, how about going to the movies? Gussie, how about going to a dance?” She had a girlfriend named Gertrude. She called up Gert and said, “Look, I have this cousin of “She had a mine—I’m his companion at movies and whatever.” And she says, “How about taking girlfriend named him off my hands? Do me a favor.” So, we went out and had a hell of a Gertrude. She called good good time, really roared. And I had such a time, so I invited her to go out again. up Gert and said, We met in February. I gave her an engagement ring in May. We were married

‘Look, I have this in August in Toronto. But my wife came from a very cousin of mine... impoverished family. That’s the best way to put it. They had come from Europe in 1930. How about taking And my father-in-law was a tanner in the old country, and when he tried to do tanning him off my hands...’” work in Toronto, he purchased a defective boiler, which blew up in his face. My wife at the time was in her early teens and she spoke English. Her brother had a difficult time adjusting in Canada and her sister was much younger. And my mother-in-law never spoke English. So Gert really ran the family, and she is a very, very capable and a very “take charge” person. She was a strong woman. And when I met her, she had gone to business school because she needed to help the family. So she dropped out of regular high school in Toronto and went to a business school where she studied typing, shorthand, all that sort of thing. She already had a part-time job by the time she was 15. And by the time she was seventeen, she was working full time with different companies.

MANN’S JEWELERS OPENS

We married in Toronto and came to Rochester afterwards, and I worked for about two or three months with my father, and I decided that I would open up on my own. And I found a place at Clinton and Court, right where the telephone company is now, right next to the church. I opened up there, and we had a routine. And my kids never—I don’t think they really appreciated how we started. Gert got a job working around the corner for a silkscreen

company upstairs of a laundry called Deluxe Laundry. We came downtown at 7:30 in the morning. She would go right to her job, and I would open up the store, at 8:00 in the morning.

I didn’t have any customers to speak of at that time. So my father, who took in a lot of trade work, a lot of work from other jewelers, would give me some. I would work on the watches and give them to him, and I’d get a commission on whatever I did. Jewelry was… forget about it. I didn’t have any money for that. So it was watch repair, watch repair, watch repair. But the routine really developed.

The store that I started was in the lobby of an apartment house. It wasn’t really a store until I took it over. It was ten feet long and 10 feet wide. You walked up brick stairs and at the top of the stairs to the left, I put a watchmaker’s bench. So people would walk up the two stairs, turn, and there I would be sitting at my bench. I would get up, take care of them. And then they would then go back down the stairs. And there were no facilities in there except a sink that fit in the corner. A little sink with a closet closing. We browned-bag it every morning, and Gert would come in for lunch during her lunch break from around the corner.

We had a garbage can…and we had a very, very thick Formica circle cut out by a carpenter, and we put that on top of the garbage can. And that became our seat, our chair. Then we would take the same type of Formica and put it over the sink, and that was our lunch table.

And we did that for years. Well, let’s see, about four years, getting the store going. So our routine was work and work and work and try to put a buck aside and we didn’t spend anything that we could speak of.

And then after four years or maybe a little less, Gert quit her job as a secretary and became my secretary, because by that time, I was starting to get people off the street who seemed to like what I was doing. I was getting customers from the Rochester Business Institute. I was doing class rings and things for students. Then I started to make prom favors. I used to take orders for prom favors. And I kept adding more and more things. And every year there was an opportunity to expand, in other words, somebody would empty out an apartment right behind my backdoor. So what we would do is, we’d knock through that one door and take over the apartment that was vacant. And I’d add some more room to the store. Then somebody would give up another apartment.

Eventually, we went from 100 square feet to 1,500 square feet by just taking over these apartments on the same floor. Eventually, before I left, that store was shaped like a right angle. And we sold Sunbeam toasters, Brothers sewing machines and typewriters. Well, you name it and I sold it, if I could make a buck with it. We sold appliances. Oh, and I had a greeting card section in there too.

There wasn’t anything that was beneath the image, because there was no image. I wanted to get as much funds in to make the store and the business grow as quickly as possible, and as much as possible. And so whenever I saw something that I could buy and make a profit at, that’s what I would do. And this kept up for quite some time. Eventually, I was there for 23 years, at which time, as I said, the store grew to 1,500 square feet, and we were quite successful. And that was when Xerox moved in across the street. I grabbed a Polaroid camera, and I went out and I took a picture of the Xerox tower, and I created little keys like the key tabs like I did with my prom favors. It had the pictures of the Xerox towers, and then around it was written Xerox. And then I had 2,000 of them made. I attached them to keychains with the gold or silver finish, but they were base metal. I made them in solid gold for Xerox leadership, and then I gave sterling silver ones to the next level of the administration. And you know what? They suddenly were coming downstairs for their watch repairs. I built up a pretty good following with Xerox. When word came from Urban Renewal that they were going to tear the building down, and “Mr. Mann, you’ve got to get out.” It was one of the most dramatic things that hit us. Here we took 23 years to build this business up, and now they’re throwing us out with no place to go.

A NEW LOCATION ON MONROE AVENUE Q: But you went to the suburbs.

“Eventually we we Irving: Well, what happened was that didn’t know where to go. Here we had a went from 100 square feet to 1,500 square feet. And we sold Sunbeam toasters, Brothers sewing machines and typewriters. Well you year to move out. We looked around. I went to my bank. You might find this interesting. I’ve been dealing with this bank for years. I went to the head banker. They’ve been dealing with me for all these years. I said, “It looks like I found a place to go,” because Gert had found this location here (on Monroe Ave.). There was a shoe store going out of business here, and she happened to come in for the sale. She looked around, saw it, and she said, “You know, this is a good spot to move to.” I came in and took a look at it. And I said, “But there’s nothing out here.” There was no Pittsford Plaza, there was nothing. But there was a Loblaws on one side… and there was a name it and I sold Key Drug on the other side. it, if I could make a Q: Loblaws was a grocery store? buck with it. We sold early Irving: Grocery store. It was like an Wegmans. And they do draw traffic, and appliances. Oh, and they do have the parking. So then I sat down with my paperwork, and I went down with I had a greeting card my customer list that I developed for 23 years. I found a very interesting thing. I found out section in there too.” that, yes, my business was with people who worked downtown. You know, the people who worked in the offices. But their wives, their homes, were in Pittsford, Brighton, etc. Now where do you want to be? Where the women are or where the men are? The banker took 80 percent in collateral in order to get the $150,000 I needed to build out the store. It was a 10-year loan. I said to my wife: “You know, if this thing fails, we’ve got to start all over again.” And after 23 years, I now have a family. Are we really going to take this chance? I signed the note and turned over my collateral, life insurance policies, everything. And in two years, we paid off the entire damn loan.

Q: You must have second guessed yourself a little bit.

Irving: We really spent a lot of sleepless nights, the two of us, when the kids were in bed. Just, you know, what are we doing?

Maybe I should just get a job. You know, I can get a lot of offers for jobs. And, no, we felt this was a turning point. Twenty-three years of building a business. Well, now I’ve been here over 35 years in this place.

And when we first opened it up, it was in where my watch department is, in that corner. That was the extent of the store.

NANCY AND ROBERT

But it continued to build and continued to build up. Nancy was very interested in the business. When she was 6 years old, she was in the store, and my wife was working on the books in the back. Nancy came out and she saw me. She was playing with the keys and opening up the cases, and I was waiting on a customer.

And I was showing the customer a watch. I said, “Is this something that you think you would enjoy?” And I’m going through my regular sales pitch with the watch. And I feel Nancy tug my pant leg. I said, “Yes, honey?” With another watch in her hands, she said, “Mister, don’t you like this watch better?” And she never stopped from that point on. She had a natural affinity for the business, and the courses she’s taken in art history and art and all of the various other things that have gone into her education have made her a very, very good CEO. That was the title I gave her.

My son, Rob was never really that into the business initially. And I said,“Why don’t you come into the store to see how you like it.”

He worked with his sister. Nancy is the artist, and she’s the one who sets the tone and finds all of these manufacturers, designers, etc. This is her thing when it comes to art and taste, etc.

Robert, on the other hand, is now the gemologist and graduated from the Gemological Institute of America.

Robert and Nancy also have learned from my mistakes. They’ve heard all these stories. I don’t know if you’re aware of the fact that in the year 2000 Nancy won the Excellence In Retail award from the Women’s Jewelry Association. She was selected by vendors and jewelers who are peers.

At the event, Nancy got up and told about her background and how she grew up in the industry, how as a little girl she was around the sales floor and all the things that she’d done, and how her father and mother were there to help train her, and how she was happy to work with her brother. She gave a wonderful speech.

IRVING MANN HOMETOWN HERO AWARD

My kids established an award called the Irving Mann Hometown Hero Award. And it was presented to the police officer, the most heroic police officer of the past year. And I was there to help present it. Robert presented the actual physical award.

Robert went through this whole thing about “my father was a hero to us.” I have to tell you I got a little teary-eyed.

Robert said, “He’s been a hero to a lot of people. So that’s why we’re naming this award in his name, in his honor.” So I have to say that that’s one of the high points of my business career.

NEXT ISSUE: PART II - NANCY AND ROBERT SIT WITH MARY STONE