Artistry for Adverse Times

Mediapolis, IA – Mike Lamm could sit around in his wheelchair and complain about the economy.  It’s practically a national pastime these days.

After all, he has a wife, two kids and a new jewelry business in small-town Mediapolis.  But he’s a quiet man, not the type to either complain or boast.  He could do both because he’s been thrown a few curve balls in life and had the guts not to bail out.  That’s a businessman.

Lamm was a strapping 17-year-old junior athlete from Donnellson who gladly accepted his destiny of working at the grain-milling plant like his father and brother.  On a snowy December, 1980, he was in a car accident, damaging his spinal cord. 

He couldn’t walk anymore.

“I could have sat around and collected a (disability) check,” he said.  “I decided I needed something to do from a wheelchair.”

He needed to think differently, learn a trade he would have never considered.  He heard about fixing watches.  By 1987, Lamm graduated from Gem City College in Quincy, Illinois, and landed a jewelry repair job in a Keokuk shop.

Along comes Tracey.  She liked him, said he was a kind, understanding man, not a loser like the college boys she’d been hanging around.  He liked Tracey enough to ask her to marry.

Then he promptly quit his job, decided to build a house in Donnellson and run a home-based repair shop.  “This is great,” Tracey Lamm says.  “No job, we’re building a house and the flood of 1993 is happening at the same time.”

That’s gutsy.

Lamm  got better at repair, increased his knowledge of gems and metals, and realized his hands, these thick, wonderful hands that once held a baseball bat, now wielded artistry. 

In the years that followed, there were lean times.  What he needed was a niche.

Finding Inspiration
One day  five years ago, he was inspired.  Lamm saw a woman with her husband’s wedding band on her middle finger.  He knew it meant her husband had died.

What if you take that band, which so many widows cherish and wear on their fingers or on a chain, and make something special? He tossed the idea to his wife’s aunt, Jane Wellington. Wellington, of Pleasant Hill, had been married 38 years.  She and her husband bought matching wedding bands, too broke at 18 to afford any diamonds.  It was nothing fancy but meaningful to her since he died that year in a car accident.  She slipped it off her middle finger and gave it to Lamm.

“When he brought it back to me it was a feeling I can’t explain.  It was turned into a heart shape and put on a chain.  It meant everything to me.

“I wear it now and it’s a part of me.”

It was the start of many widows coming to him, entrusting him with the memories of their spouses.  Many were left in a drawer of keepsakes and became slender hand-made hearts, each one original.

Lamm called them Heart of Remembrance.

Out of the tragedies of people’s lives, out of his own, came beauty. I like to see the smile on their faces,” he said.  It makes me feel good.”

People began bringing in more stuff.  Gold from grandpa’s teeth, an uncle’s old opal stone or a husband’s Masonic ring.

One man had his wife’s ring made into a key ring.  “She had cancer,” Lamm said.  With each piece of jewelry he heard a story.  The quiet bench jeweler listened and saw what he could do.  He saw their tears.

But along came another flood, this time in the summer of 2008, hitting nearby towns heavily.  Along came the troubled economy.

Taking a Leap
Lamm could sit there and complain.  Instead, he bought a store last June.  A longtime local institution in nearby Mediapolis, Rhodes Jewelry, was announcing big sales, its owner looking to phase out the business. 

Alice Thie’s father, a jeweler, had retired in 1979 and she took over his inventory.  She made the place work.  It was a part of his legacy  But when Lamm approached her, it was the right time.

“He is extremely conscientious and I was always very particular about the quality of my merchandise.” Thie said.  “I wouldn’t let him come in and use my name if he wasn’t top notch.”

Although she still owns the building and they share ownership of new merchandise, it’s now Lamm’s business.

“This is probably the biggest leap he has taken,” Tracey Lamm said.

With gold prices up, the economy down and little retail experience, he wheeled into the store, a former lone wolf now with three part-time employees.  He is scared.  “What I do here is a luxury,” he said.  People don’t need jewelry to survive.”

Making it Work
Small towns are made up almost entirely of such small business dreams, say Iowa economic development experts.

Often, the successful small businesses are those that offer a service, said Dave Swenson, and Iowa State University economist.

Lamm’s service is repair and designing jewelry, a rarity in a small-town shop.

While sizing and re pronging rings, repairing chains and remounting stones, he waits for the economy to pick up new jewelry sales and for Mediapolis families to dig into their boxes of family history.  He waits for them to pull out grandma’s old ring and let him transform old sorrows and tender memories into a heart.

He pulls his wheelchair up to the half-dozen precise machines, his jeweler’s eyeglass strapped to his head.   “I feel good,” he says.  “It’s something they can pass down from generation to generation.”

That could be Mike Lamm’s enduring lesson in one shape – heart.

By Mike Kilen, as appeared in the March 29, 2009 edition of The Des Moines Sunday Register, IowaLife section.