DONIVANANDMAGGIORA

My mother would never let us be idle in the summer, so aside from sports, we would take crafts classes of all kinds: pottery, lapidary, painting - a wide variety of things. Then I took one semester of jewelry making at NMSU, in New Mexico. When I went to Albuquerque looking for a job, that all paid off. I got a job making turquoise jewelry with a new company, largely based on those experiences. Well, that company went from $0 to $1 million in the first year, and aside from making a lot of jewelry, I also became the foreman of both a silverwork shop and the lapidary department, where we did fine inlay work in addition to cutting stones. After that experience, I traveled for awhile, did jewelry in garages and such, and then moved to Hawaii. There I got a job in a shop that gave me my first real taste of gold. Then I came to San Francisco, and got a job in a large, fine jewelry shop, where I learned all about platinum, diamonds and fine quality craftsmanship. In 1983, I decided it was..