45 years ago I was working in a mall store as a pantograph engraver, and literally sitting in a Plexiglas booth with kids tapping the walls trying to make me mess up. I really learned the art of concentration!

On one occasion, I had just finished a really hard job and I passed it back to my boss. I felt I had done the piece justice; the locket looked great, and I knew my boss could never have engraved it as I had. About 10 minutes later my boss called me out of the booth because a customer wanted to talk to me. It was an elderly lady, holding the locket I had just finished in her hands, and she was crying softly. She told me that this locket was her grandmother’s, then her mother’s, and it had been hers for the last 30 years. Next it would go to her daughter, for a time, and then on to her granddaughter. She wanted me to know how grateful she was for the work I had done- It was a simple monogram but I embellished it with a few extra swirls to cover an old scratch, and to make the monogram fit the shape of the piece better.

She told me she had called many shops and none of them would touch this locket but finally one of them said something like “Try going to this skinny kid in the mall- don’t let his boss do it, make sure it’s the kid. If he says no, then you can figure no one can do it, but I bet he’ll say yes, he seems to like the challenging jobs.”

I was just a knuckleheaded kid and I loved working with my hands, I lived to create, and I strove to master this craft of engraving and to be better than everyone else. But the importance of the work I did to the person for whom the gift was meant had never occurred to me. Not until then. It’s like I walked up to meet that lady as a silly child and walked away a young man with a vocation I would take seriously for the rest of my life.

5 short years later I quit my job and Heirloom Engravers was born! We catered to high end jewelry stores as well as mom & pop businesses. If you’ve had engraving done anywhere on the peninsula at a jewelry store, gift or department store, or boutique, it was probably Heirloom Engravers who did the work.