Transcript

Location:  Mark Jewellers (on 1205 Caledonia St, La Crosse, WI)

Mark Doolittle: Paul had owned Paul’s Jewelry on the north side of La Crosse, on 1205 Caledonia, had given me a call and wanted to know if I wanted to come work for him. I thought, “Well, I wasn’t really interested” because I was very happy where I was. A few days later, Paul called me back and said, “How about I sell you the jewelry store?” This really piqued my interest, and I thought, “Well, all in all, that sounds pretty plausible.” So, I took him up on that back in 1962 when we talked about this. He wanted a great sum of $1000 as a down payment on the jewelry store. I, uh, I had to put my car in hoc to get the thousand dollars! But we worked it out in 1963 I took over from him and started my own venture in the jewelry business.

I ended up in-actually in the old Nelson Clothing building. So, I’ve been in there ever since I think we moved in there in 1967. When we moved into the old Nelson building, we decided to change the name from Paul’s to Mark, so I wanted an outside sign that said “Mark Jewellers.” We got the sign company online to have it made, and everywhere along the steps someone would call me and say, “We got this proposal, but there’s two Ls in jewelers? Is that right?” And I said, “Yeah, I want two Ls in jewelers!” It’s sort of the English spelling of jewelers where they put two Ls in that. It created a lot of questions as to “Is there really two Ls in jewelers?” They finally got the sign done, and I went out and looked at it, and they had it two Ls -ery, and I said, “That’s not gonna work!” And they couldn’t believe they had screwed it up so, so they had to remake the sign again. 

I’m Mark Doolittle, just a resident of La Crosse, worked at Mark Jewellers for over 60 years.