Blankenbakers leave jewelry business

When Bill Blankenbaker first started work in the building at 213 S. Main St. in Dunkirk, he was a sophomore in high school learning to be a meat cutter.
That was a few years back.
Later this month, he and his wife Marilynn will close the jewelry store they’ve operated in that same location since 1983.
A few things have happened in between.
It was in that building, back in Bill’s meat cutter days, that the couple first met.
Marilynn, who grew up in Evansville, spent every summer from the time she was 7 to the time she was 17 visiting her Stewart family cousins in Dunkirk. And she was quick to notice the young guy behind the meat counter at Ludwig’s Market.
Bill’s dad was Dunkirk fire chief, and he’d asked Paul Ludwig to give young Bill a job.
Before long, co-workers were teasing Bill every time Marilynn stepped through the door. “They used to say, ‘Here comes your girl,” recalls Bill.
They continued to see one another while she attended Ball State and he worked at Ludwig’s and did a stint in the U.S. Navy.
“I married him because he had a job,” kids Marilynn.
The building, meanwhile, stopped being the site of Ludwig’s in 1953, when the grocery moved to larger quarters on the south end of Dunkirk. Willard Gaunt moved his jewelry store into that location in 1955.
And in 1956, the Blankenbakers moved into a house in Dunkirk, with the Gaunts as their neighbors.
It wasn’t long before the Gaunts asked Marilynn if she could help around the store. First it was helping to clean the display cases on Wednesday afternoons when the store was closed, but before long she was indispensable.
By 1963, she was working at Gaunt Jewelry full-time.
Twenty years later, Willard Gaunt came to them with a starkly worded proposal: “The store’s going to close if you don’t buy it.”
“You hock everything you got and dig holes for more,” Bill recalls of the decision to buy the store. He continued to work at Ludwig’s meat department for two more years, while Marilynn and daughter-in-law Jackie Blankenbaker ran the shop.
“She sent me to watchmaker’s school,” says Bill.
In 1988, the couple moved into an upstairs apartment at the back of the building, so they didn’t have much of a commute to work.
But now, they say, it’s time to call it a day.
“Bill sleeps, and I putter around,” says Marilynn.
Both agree that it’s Jackie who has kept things running smoothly in recent years.
“Jackie’s the only reason we’re in business,” says Marilynn.
“She’s the daughter I never had,” adds Bill. “She was the glue that held this place together.”
W.E. Gaunt Jewelry will close as of Dec. 20. The Blankenbakers were honored Wednesday at the monthly networking breakfast of the Jay County Chamber of Commerce at West Jay Community Center.