When it comes to Cd'A, Dan Clark's just a gem

COEUR d’ALENE — Dan Clark never imagined himself as a jeweler. But it was a foregone conclusion even as a pre-teen.

“All my dad did was work, so if I wanted to hang out with him, I had to hang out in the store. And if you’re hanging out in the store you’ve got to find something to do. So he sat me at the bench.”

At Clark’s Jewelers on Sherman Avenue, Dan learned how to fashion and repair jewelry while his father, Ralph, a craftsman in watch repair, and his mother, Jean, operated the business.

“Watch-making back then was like computer programming today,” Dan said.

Dan took over the business when his father died in 1986. Over the years he has transformed it into a market for precious gems, specializing in diamonds.

Clark, a 62-year-old father of two and grandfather of three, has traveled the world in search of the finest emeralds, rubies and diamonds and has fascinating stories to tell. But he is happiest in his hometown.

Clark grew up in Coeur d’Alene’s Fort Grounds neighborhood. He remembers when northbound Highway 95 crossed Blackwell Island and the Spokane River on a long-gone bridge and proceeded up River Avenue past his boyhood home adjacent to Memorial Field.

“It came down past about five bars, a sawmill, a box factory and an old brewery. It was kind of gnarly there,” he said. “But we had the park and the river, the lake and Playland Pier. It was quite the place to grow up.”

Clark and his friends made a youthful career of crashing corporate picnics at City Park.

“They didn’t know whose kids were whose. We were the best three-legged racers. We were like professionals,” he said. “Then we’d get burgers and pop.

“It was a different world. The Fort Grounds was like Mayberry. It was little picket fences and kids running around, dogs chasing us.”

As a student at Sherman Elementary School, he remembers watching the buses deliver kids from Cougar Gulch.

“I used to think that if you can’t afford to live in downtown Coeur d’Alene you can live in the Fort Grounds. And if you can’t afford to live in the Fort Grounds you can go up to Cougar Gulch,” he said. “Well, that’s kind of turned around a little bit — like completely.”

Then there was the train rumbling through the Fort Grounds on its way to the Potlatch Lumber Mill, the original Templin’s Restaurant and the Athletic Round Table in the Desert Hotel. And, of course, the Diamond Cup.

“We’d be somewhere on our bikes and we’d hear the first of the hydroplanes fire up. No word was spoken. We just hauled ass to see who showed up first,” he said. “We begged for work from the crews. I got on one year with Miss Bardahl when Bill Muncey was there. He threw me in the back of a limo and drove me around to tell him what everything was. I was his tour guide.”

Clark describes his experience at Coeur d’Alene High School as “the good old days.” He met his wife, Julie, at CHS and graduated in 1973.

One of the highlights was the basketball team winning the state championship his senior year.

“Coeur d’Alene High School was solely responsible for uniting all of the schools in southern Idaho with all of their massive rivalries,” he said with a smile. “We showed up and our guys kicked everybody’s ass. So all those schools in southern Idaho had one common goal and that was to chase us out of town.”

Clark attended the Gemological Institute of America in Santa Monica, Calif., and graduated in 1978. His parents had owned Clark’s Jewelers since 1962.

Prior to that, it was owned by E.L Overjorde as one of Coeur d’Alene’s oldest businesses dating back to 1907.

“He came to Coeur d’Alene because it was a boom town. It was new and it needed a jeweler. He built the store and it was a major deal here,” Clark said. “Back in the day it was the biggest thing going on in the entire territory as far as jewelers.”

Clark said when the Farragut Naval Training Station was running during the 1940s, Overjorde had to lock the door and allow only three or four sailers in at a time.

“There were just so many guys running around,” he said. “The girls in Coeur d’Alene were really popular.”

The business is owned now by Clark’s 33-year-old daughter, Jane, a jewelry expert and craftsman in her own right.

The store itself is a classic reminder of the days when steamboats still plied the water of Lake Coeur d’Alene carrying fortunes from the Silver Valley to the railroads and ultimately to Spokane. Nothing has changed in the building from the tile work to the fixtures to the wooden cases. And the iconic street clock.

Clark is a laid-back, low-key artist and businessman but he’s very high on Coeur d’Alene, though he’s witnessed quite a change from a transportation crossroads and sleepy timber town to an international tourist destination.

But like Clark’s Jewelry, some things about Coeur d’Alene will remain constant, he said.

“There’s this basic underlying attitude that’s been here for a long, long time — the people,” he said. “The people who live here chose to live here and they always have.”

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Know a longtime local we should feature? Send your suggestions to Ric Clarke at clarke_ric@yahoo.com.