BY SKYLER, DEB & TIM SMITH
The first interview I did was with Wendy Kuhn and it’s still one of my favorites. She gave me an idea that will drive the direction in which my column will be steered in the two upcoming weeks . . . more about that later.
Wendy and her husband, Tim, are the owners of A Touch of Gold which is a jewelry store at the 4-corners of Mendon. In addition to a wide variety of jewelry they also have a lot of very cool antiques on display.
This was one of my few interviews that included a business transaction, actually two of them. Here’s a story that goes back a few decades for you. Dad and Deb explained to me a dating ritual from when they were in high school which was that if a boy really liked a girl and wanted to “go steady” with her, the tradition was that he would ask her if she would wear his ID bracelet.
This concept sounded a little overbearing to me. “Why didn’t you just brand her?” I thought. Well, I guess parents will be parents.
But I suppose when you compare bracelets to branding, the bracelet approach is a little less permanent. That being said, there is a semi-obvious problem with the bracelet concept; guys’ wrists are usually bigger than girls’, so left unaltered the bracelet would slide off. What Dad and Deb told me the kids did was that the girl would use yarn to tie off a few links of the bracelet, thus making it smaller. I am a little incredulous about this story because I have never seen a girl in my school wearing a boy’s bracelet tied off with yarn.
But the week before our visit to the jewelry store, Deb pulled Dad’s old ID bracelet out of her jewelry box, and sure enough, the 40-year-old yarn was still there and none the worse for wear.
So Dad gave Deb permission to have A Touch of Gold remove four links from the bracelet. This apparently seems to mean that they are very serious about each other and have taken this “go steady” thing to a whole new level. They say when you sacrifice your bracelet links to a girl you’ve pretty much passed the point of no return.
The other transaction at the jewelry store has a much shorter story. Dad and Deb have a Disney figurine from The Little Mermaid that has a seashell on the base which had come loose. A Touch of Gold reattached their seashell for them also. For both of these jobs the bill was only $8.00 total, which I thought was a pretty good price.
I timed this week’s article to dovetail with Halloween because next week I’m going to begin a segment I call, “The Hauntings of Mendon”. This is the theme I mentioned earlier and it shows why I was lucky to have Wendy be my first interview. Next week she’ll set the stage for some Halloween Hauntings.
To quote local historians Diane Ham and Lynne Menz, please come back next week and join us for some “Murder and Mayhem in Mendon”.
