Transcript

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

After graduating high school, I started taking a course in Milwaukee at the tech school learning how to repair watches. I had an interest in this because my father, during the second world world, taught himself how to fix clocks. One thing that comes to mind right now, but it was a year that they had bad flooding out in the South Dakota badlands quite a number of people had perished in the flood. Back at that time and actually up until current time is watches that we sold and watches that we repaired we had an identification number that we put in inscribed in the back of the case we would keep a continuous catalog of cards with those numbers on it. A few days, maybe a week or so after the flood, I got a call from the sheriff in South Dakota. They had to recover a body in the flood and the only thing he had on the body was a watch. They had taken the watch to a local jeweler. He had seen the numbers in the markings in the case and contacted the headquarters in Cincinnati and they gave him my store number. He called store and the sheriff called me and asked about the code, and I said, “Yeah that was my code,” and he said, “Well I got this number,” and so he gave me the number and I looked it up and pulled the card with that matching number that I gave him the name and he said, “That matches one of the missing people.” So he says “So that’s our way of identifying who that body was.” That was not maybe what you’d call a highlight, but it definitely was something that is in my mind all the time. 

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