This jeweler’s name is forgotten today, and at the turn of the 20th century, Hiram Howard was known as the president of the Howard Sterling Co. However, his career in jewelry began long before the founding of this company. The son of Warner and Mary Taft Howard, Hiram Howard was born in West Woodstock, Connecticut, on November 26, 1840.

After completing his schooling in Massachusetts, he began his business career at the age of 18. He moved to Providence, where he began studying jewelry making. Having mastered the craft and after several years of working at a workbench, he moved to the commercial side of the business.
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Thanks to him, elegant American women in the mid-20th century wore authentic regimental awards as jewelry. William R. Agnew, who served in the U.S. Army, was wandering through a Paris flea market one day in 1945, looking for an unusual gift for his fiancée. He found a Napoleonic belt buckle that she might appreciate as jewelry.

She was so delighted that Agnew decided that American women might also appreciate military trinkets. He ended up buying about 80 kilograms of military items, including uniform buttons, buckles, shoulder insignia, and the like, which he sent home and transformed into earrings, pins, bracelets, clips, and belt buckles.
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Well known diamond importer and manufacturer of diamond jewelry, David Sarkin (1905 – 1987) left Russia for the United States at a young age. After settling in Brooklyn, he opened a small store at 589 Sutter Avenue in 1925. Noteworthy, his name first appeared in the press in September 1929, when four gangsters robbed his store.

In 1944, David Sarkin company became a corporation. The firm produced men’s and women’s rings with stones, wedding bands, mountings, men’s and ladies’ stone rings, and diamond jewelry. The corporation became one of the pioneers in popularizing palladium in jewelry.
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Russian-born Henry Lewkowitz (1872 – 1919) arrived in New York in 1888, when he was 16 years old. He later listed 1888 as the year of the establishment of his jewelry business. In fact, he began working as an apprentice in watch and jewelry repair shops in 1888.

In 1892, he opened his own watch repair shop at 106 Eldridge Street, in New York’s Lower East Side. After nearly twenty years of running the shop, he accumulated the necessary capital to open a jewelry boutique at 294 Grand Street in 1911.
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Paul Nettler Lackritz (1872 – 1941), a prominent and successful jeweler of Chicago, left Russia for the United States in 1892. He settled in Chicago, and for six years he worked at the bench. In 1898 he opened Lackritz Jewelers firm on Milwaukee Avenue, and quickly established himself as a skilled jeweller.

Paul Lackritz impressed with his well-timed and witty remarks. At one of the 24 Karat Club meetings, where he was president, he declared that his destiny was to make humanity happy. “The jeweler creates an engagement ring that inextricably binds hearts, and a baby ring that elevates a symbol of love to the brink of marital bliss”.
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A. Sauer & Co was originally established in 1921 in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a leather wrist watch strap maker. In fact, the company’s history is one of constant expansion, acquisition and absorption of other firms during the Great Depression.

Born in suburban Newport, Kentucky, Albert Sauer (1895 – 1954) was a son of one of that city’s prominent pioneer retail jewelers. Albert Sauer Jr began his career at the Cincinnati Times Star as an office boy, and then served as an apprentice for Joseph Noterman Co., jewelers, for about six years.
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The now-forgotten name of jeweler Roy W Johnston (1886–1967) was particularly well known in New York in the first half of the 20th century. The Jewelers’ Circular Keystone first mentioned Johnston in 1911, when he was working for Thomas F. Brogan, a jewelry manufacturer at 16 West 46th Street in New York City.

Incidentally, Johnston later contributed to the JCK magazine as an expert and author of articles on promoting the jewelry business, store management, and successful retailing. A recognized expert in the jewelry retail trade, he also designed and manufactured unique jewelry.
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