United Jewelry-A Family Tradition

By: LCGross

This is an excerpt from a 2006 story we did on the Berstein Family who recently celebrated 65 years in business.

In 1908 the future looked bright indeed for the Globe-Miami area. There were nearly 35 mines operating in the area and the “Queen of the Western Mining States” was attracting business near and far. But it was neither the mines nor the business in the area which brought Abe Bernstein out west in the spring of 1910. It was baseball.

Around the turn-of-the Century there were two primary forms of entertainment:
Theater (of which there were five in the area) and baseball. Both packed the house. The mines themselves often sponsored amateur and semi-pro teams. The Globe-Miami Browns were a major contender then in the world of semi-pro teams and games drew large crowds every Sunday as fields filled with spectators and players.

It was here that Abe first met Kathryn Federick who gave him a reason to stay in Globe. He initially opened Bernstein’s Jewelry at 266 Broad and continued to play some ball in the area, but in 1925, when another young jeweler, Ray Bedillion, approached him about combining stores, Abe accepted. At the time, Bedillion had United Jewelry and Loan Company and together Abe and Ray expanded their business to include fine watches, clocks, radios, sporting goods and more.

When the Great Depression hit, the mines virtually shut down. Miami Copper drastically curtailed operations and the Inspiration Copper Company and Old D shut down completely. The Old Dominion never re-opened. It was a bleak time for businesses in the area and over at United Jewelry, there was not enough business to support two families.
Abe, along with hundreds of others were forced to leave the area to look for work. He took Katie and their son to California, where he found work in another jewelers shop for the next 15 years. There, they raised a family of 4 boys.  In 1945, Ray died and his widow called Abe in California and offered him the store. He accepted.

Abe and Katie returned to the area in ’45 to take over the store and Jim, the oldest son, returned from WWII in the summer of ’46 to join his father in the jewelry business.
(Brothers Bob and Kenneth were both killed in unrelated, tragic plane crashes in the ensuing years and youngest son, Mickey settled in Phoenix and became an attorney)

In 1947 Jim met Mary Karoglan, a Miami native, when she walked in to pay for a lay-a-way. It took only two dates for Jim to be convinced that Mary was the girl for him and they married in 1948. Mary helped Jim and his father in the store from day one. As she explained, “I’ve always liked serving people.  I started out working for Woolworth, and later I was at the Miami Commercial Company. I just loved being behind a counter.”

It was a good time to be in business. The war had just ended and the entire country felt optimistic about the future. Jim and Mary invested $7500 to remodel the interior of the United Jewelry and started a family which would come to include 2 sons; Jim and Kenneth and a daughter, Kathy.

At the time, the store was officially called the United Sporting Goods and Jewelry Store. Jim expanded the business into sporting goods, athletic shoes, and team uniforms, in addition to the full line of electronics, musical instruments and jewelry which his father had always carried. In 1979, after nearly 3 decades of running one store together, Mary talked Jim into letting her open a second store on the highway in the newly developed Cobre Valley Shopping Center.

It was in a good location on the highway and, as Mary says, “I was tired selling rifles, TVs and music I knew nothing about. Plus they were heavy,” Mary said. “I liked the jewelry.”

A few years later, when Wal Mart moved into the area, the Miami store dropped their line of sporting goods and athletic shoes and began to concentrate more on those items which Wal Mart did not handle: i.e.: collectible guns and musical instruments, while Mary operated her jewelry store with the help of daughter Kathy.  “I carried the same quality pieces, just less of it. And I would try to carry what people wanted.”

Jim Jr, who ran the store with his father, and now handles the collectible gun sales and musical instruments for the business, says  “…it used to be that the average person might have one shotgun and maybe a rifle in the house. Now, that same person may have 7-8 shotguns or rifles and 15 handguns.”  It seems gun sales have had their ups and downs, at one point surpassing sales of jewelry in the store, and at other times taking a back seat. And despite Wal Mart cornering the market on the rifles for the hunter, Jim’s business is now strongly entrenched in collectible guns and hard to find ammunition.

In 1998 the family, decided to combine both stores into one location and settled on the old Woolworth building on Broad in downtown Globe. It was the last of the Woolworth stores to close in the Southwest and had been on the market for a few years. Mary knew the brothers who owned it and had been in the same sorority with their mother.

“So, I got a good deal on the building,” she says with a smile. It was also in ‘98 that Jim Bernstein retired altogether, and Mary, along with her daughter, Kathy and eldest son Jim, took over the reins of the business. Once again the gun business, musical instruments and jewelry were all under one roof. Granted, it is an unusual combination of merchandise for most visitors to grasp: mixing Remington rifles, fine diamonds and Gibson Guitars. But for the unique variation of merchandise found in the store, one thing remains uniform. And that is service. Ever since Abe Berstein first went into the jewelry business, the family has been taking care of each customer as if they were going to know them for a lifetime. And in Globe-Miami that makes for quite a few generations of customers.