The Amber Collection Story

1983

This is a true story about how we tried to start a company

Importing Amber from the Dominican Republic.

Written 4/2011* 3,948 Words

Copyright 2019

Howard Yasgar

It was in In late 1963 I when I was again in the Dominican Republic, traveling with my good friend Miguel Marquez.

While we were in the capitol city of Santo Domingo, and we had some free time, so I took my friend Miguel to the downtown public marketplace.

I always enjoyed walking around, the place looking at the various booths. I was looking at all the strange things they were selling.

My friend Miguel, who was from Cuba had seen enough markets in Havana and he wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was.

When I was in Santo Domingo, I particularly liked going to the market and looking at the booths that were selling pieces of polished amber and polished amber jewelry.

Since I was a kid, I had always known what amber was, it was petrified tree sap that was millions of years old.

Some of the pieces of polished Dominican amber actually had petrified insects embedded in them, they were insects that had been trapped millions of years ago when the amber was just sticky tree sap.

Then after many millions of years the tree sap had hardened, and now it was being mined in a half dozen places in the Dominican Republic.

Dominican Craftsmen had learned how to polish the amber pieces and use it to make inexpensive jewelry.

By cutting, polishing and using cheap gold plated brass wire, they were able to make things

like bracelets, necklaces, ear rings and pendants, all kinds of items that they sold to the foreign tourists.

My interest in the amber they had was strictly curiosity, I liked looking at the pieces of amber that had insects or other fossils in them.

Back in the 1960’s, at the Santo Domingo public market, you could buy pieces of polished amber for as cheap as .25 cents, amber bracelets were $2.00 and big necklaces only cost from $8.00 to $10.00 each.

I enjoyed looking at it, but I never bought any, as I had no need for it.

At the time, I didn’t think anyone back in Miami even knew what amber was.

This story starts when Miguel and I were driving from Santo Domingo to the city of Puerta Plata, and we had stopped for lunch in the city of Santiago.

I liked stopping in the city of Santiago, because after lunch we could sit for a while on a bench in the central park, and fiddle around with the local street salesmen that would all be trying to sell us something.

Those street salesmen could easily tell I was a foreigner, so one by one they all would approach us with all kinds of local aphrodisiacs they had for sale.

Usually this went on until the coco frio salesman would come buy selling coconut water.

For only .25 cents they would cut off the top of the coconut and then scrape some ice into it.

I always worried that the water they used when making the ice might not be clean, but, I hadn’t ever heard of anyone getting sick from it.

The last time I was in Santiago, I had bought the coco frio, and I was still alive.

On this beautiful day, as we were sitting there drinking our coco frio, I looked across the street, and saw a small store, that I hadn’t see before. It had a brightly painted sign in front that said “La Casa de Ambar”, (The house of Amber).

I mentioned it to my friend Miguel, I said let go see what they had. But Miguel waved me off, he wasn’t the least bit interested.

So, I finished drinking my coconut and I walked over to the store.

I was kind of surprised to see an amber store in Santiago, I thought all the amber was being sold back in the Santo Domingo market place.

The inside of the store appeared neat and clean, it looked sort of like a jewelry store, it had a combination glass front sales counter with a built in glass display case.

I could see that the display case was full of all the different color shades of amber, and it was all being displayed in a very upscale manner, not like the jumbled up way they sold the amber in the Santo Domingo market place.

At the time this happened, I was 24 years old, and the fellow sitting behind the display case looked to be in his 50’s.

As I entered he store, he stood up to greet me.

He was perhaps 5 foot 8 inches tall and a little overweight. He had a neatly cut mustache and he appeared well dressed.

His hair was well trimmed, and he was wearing a short sleeved blue pin striped dress shirt.

The fellow reached over the glass counter to shake my hand, as he introduced himself to me, as he handed me his business card.

That moment to me was one of those strange situation, where you meet someone and you instantaneously know he was going to be a good friend.

I told him who I was, and that I was from Miami.

I also told him that Miguel and I were just passing through Santiago, heading to the city of Puerta Plata.

As we spoke, I told him that I had always been fascinated and curious about amber.

He said he was an amber collector himself, ad had been for many years, and he sold amber to other collectors all over the world.

He proudly said many of his biggest customers were in Japan.

I was amazed at what he told me, so I started looking over all the specimen pieces of amber he had in his showcase.

I could see he had in his inventory a lot of highly polished pieces with inclusions in them. Some even had petrified bugs and others had leaves and twigs inside them.

He picked out of the display case a piece of highly polished amber and it had an entire grasshopper in it.

I could see that he also had pieces of polished Amber in all the color shades.

Besides from the usual honey color, he had amber that appeared blue, green, and yellow, as well as every other color of the rainbow.

He also had quite a bit of jewelry that was made from pieces of amber. I thought most of it looked like the same kind of items I had seen in the public marketplace back in Santo Domingo, but somehow his appeared to be of a much better quality.

I asked him how much he charged for bracelets and necklaces, and when he gave me his prices, they were much higher than the prices I had been given in the public market.

Then he said, “Don’t be concerned about the prices, if I was interested in buying any amber, he would give me a discount”.

He said, “The prices he was quoting me now were just tourist prices”.

He told me he had several local amber polishing companies that were working with him and they could make any kind of amber jewelry I wanted.

I asked him if he could ship amber to Miami and he said he could.

However he warned me that it was illegal for him to export raw unpolished amber, it had to be polished in the Dominican Republic first.

He said he didn’t think there was any U.S. duty on importing amber.

My mind was now racing so fast, I was thinking I could possibly be one of the first people to sell the Dominican amber in Miami.

So I told him that I would like to try selling amber in the States, and he said he would be happy to work with me.

I was so excited, I just knew that my fiancé Katherine would be just as excited as I was, the stuff was just beautiful.

I then picked out around $300.00 worth of items and he gave me a 50% discount.

As I was getting ready to leave, he took out a tray full of polished oval stones they were bluish green with white veins in them.

The stones were highly polished and most were about ¾ of an inch long by 1/2 inch wide ovals, I thought they looked like a very light colored Turquoise.

He said, we have just discovered this stone here in the Dominican Republic, and it is only found here in this country, we call it Laramar.

He told me that I was one of the first Americans to see it.

I thought the stones were nice but I wasn’t impressed with it’s color, like I was with the amber.

Before flying home, since I was now going in the amber business, we stopped in the marketplace, and I again went back to the amber booths.

Now I had learned that collectors wanted amber with insects inside, so I bought about 30 or 40 pieces of amber with ants and insects inside for .50 cents apiece.

After leaving the market place, I felt that now I was really in the amber business.

Miguel said I was wasting my time.

When I landed in Miami, the U.S. Customs agent asked if I was bringing anything of value back with me, I said yes, and I showed him the amber necklaces and bracelets, He asked how much I paid and I fibbed and said about $100.00.

He said “Nice stuff” and he waved me through.

When I arrived home, I showed Katherine all the amber jewelry, but for some reason, she wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as I was.

At the time, I felt it might be because she didn’t really know what amber was, I thought that once we started selling it and she saw how good it sold, she would soon change her mind.

That’s when I spread out the jewelry and insect pieces that I had bought, and I realized it wasn’t very much, it wasn’t enough to try and display anywhere.

I had bought just a very small selection of what my friend in Santiago had. I could see that if I was going to make a business out of it I needed a lot more items, to display.

I got on the phone and called my new found friend at La Casa de Ambar, in Santiago, and I told him that I needed him to make me up a bigger selection of his items.

He agreed and said he would send me about $500.00 worth by parcel post, so I told him I would send him a check by mail that day, and I did.

In a week his package arrived, and now I had a pretty big selection of Amber to display.

I then brainstormed all night and decided to call our new company “The Amber Collection”.

I was still excited about everything, however Katherine still remained kind of cool regarding it all.

I could see she wanted to help me but she just wasn’t as excited about it as I was.

I sat down at our kitchen table and hand drew pictures of each piece of jewelry we had, as well as each every kind of polished piece, and I gave each one an item number.

My good friend Bob Martinez who was an amateur photographer, built a special light box to take a very professional color photograph of all the amber I had.

Because amber is translucent, the light box made a beautiful professional photo that I was able to have reproduced and use as a cover of our new Amber Collection catalog.

Katherine and I went to the library and we started to study all about amber, and we soon learned all about it.

It appears that years ago in Europe, amber was found on the seashore, but it was exclusively used to make jewelry for the European kings and queens. It was illegal for commoners to own any amber, for a while it was punishable by death.

European amber became commonly referred to as “Baltic Amber”.

When Amber was discovered in the Dominican Republic, in many ways it was prettier than Baltic Amber, but to the amber snobs, it was referred to as “Green Amber”, because it was millions of years younger than true Baltic Amber.

Katherine said, that she felt that because the Dominican jewelers used only gold plated wire and fake gold hardware, it could never be sold as fine jewelry, it was being made like cheap

costume jewelry and I realized that she was right.

She also said she didn’t think Americans knew what amber was, to most of them, amber just

looked like plastic.

I thought quite a bit about it, and then I decided we could go to down town Miami to a jewelers supply house and I would buy gold hardware and upgrade our amber to 14K.

With real 14K gold hardware I could make ear rings and pendants, that could be sold for more money.

While we were at the jewelry supply store, I got carried away and I also bought a jewelers stone polishing machine and several other tools that I would need to polish and make amber into expensive jewelry. I would become a amber jewelry manufacturer.

It was all very exciting for me, but now that I was set up to make 14K Amber jewelry, I now needed to buy some raw amber to experiment with.

So that’s when Katherine and I went off to the Dominican Republic.

It was 1990 and our trip there was going to be a combination of a vacation and a buying trip to get some raw amber for me to work on.

We arrived in Santo Domingo early in the evening, and rented a Japanese car, and we then headed to the Santo Domingo Hotel, it was a new and modern hotel where we had reservations.

That evening, our first night in Santo Domingo, as we were getting in bed, the air conditioning went off in the hotel.

I wasn’t terribly concerned as I thought we could find a way to open a window.

However we had no such luck, the windows were not made to be opened.

After a miserable first night, the next morning we set off heading for my friend La Casa de Ambar in Santiago.

Once we were in Santiago, I was disappointed when we found that my new friend was out of town, so we ended up speaking to one of his employees.

I told him were heading towards Puerta Plata and we were staying at the brand new government owned hotel there.

He said, that was a good choice as the hotel was new and excellent.

He said, that my friend, the stores owner, was now having problems with the local amber miners.

In the past he always had bought amber in bulk from them, and if he found some pieces of amber with inclusions in it, he could make some extra money.

But now the miners were looking inside the amber before they sold it, and they now wanted a lot more money for any amber with insects or other inclusions in it.

I asked him if he knew where I could find some uncut pieces of amber to experiment with in Miami.

He then gave me a handful of uncut amber pieces for free.

He said that as we crossed over the Cordiera mountains on our way to Puerta Plata there was an amber mine on the mountain called Palo Quemado.

He said we could stop there and see how they mined amber.

So we said goodby to him and we hit the road.

The worn out, pot holed road over the mountains was like driving on a washboard, and the little Japanese car rattled so much that the glove box door fell off.

We found the Palo Quemado mine store as it had a sign over the door.

We went in but the store was completely empty except for a broken baby scale sitting on the counter with a giant chunk of honey colored amber sitting on it.

The baby scale was long time broken, I cold see the scales dial was missing, but by looking, close I estimated the chunk of amber was 1 to 2 pounds in weight, and I didn’t see any insects or inclusions in it.

As we stood there looking a fellow walked in behind us, actually he scared us.

He was dirty and sweaty, and was not friendly at all.

I asked him if he had any amber for sale, and I could see by his facial expression he thought he was going to make a killing on these two American tourists.

He pointed to the piece of amber on the scale, it looked to be about 5 inches by 5 inches in size.

I picked it up and I asked him how much he wanted.

I thought he would say $20.00, but he said he wanted $100.00 in U.S. currency.

We gracefully left the store as fast as we could and drove on to Puerta Plata.

Once there, we followed the signs from the main road to the new government hotel and we checked in.

As it was still light outside, we walked around the expansive hotel grounds.

The place was a mess, nothing was neat or trimmed properly, even the swimming pool was green with algae, enough to make you feel sick, the entire place was a dump.

At supper time we walked to the hotel restaurant and found a table.

We looked at the menu, but we were both concerned that if the hotel grounds and pool were so filthy, what was the kitchen or food preparation going to be like?

We studied the menu and decided we didn’t want to risk taking a chance of getting sick.

But we needed to eat something.

I saw on the menu they had spaghetti with tomato sauce, so I said, how bad could that be,

and we ordered it.

After about half an hour they brought out two dishes of spaghetti noodles and a bottle of Heinz catsup.

As we sat there debating what to do next, the electricity in the hotel went off, and that gave us the opportunity to get up and leave.

We walked in the dark to our car.

I suggested we drive along the Malecon (stone wall along the shoreline), perhaps there was a restaurant down the road that still had electricity.

It was a dark as hell that evening and the only light we had was from our headlights.

Suddenly, on the side of the road, we saw several people sitting on the wall, there was a charcoal fire going and there was 4 or 5 rows of what looked like nicely roasted chickens.

They all looked delicious, their roasted brown skin was shining in our headlights.

I asked how much the chickens were and he said 2 pesos. So I gave him $2.00 U.S. and he wrapped a chicken up in newspaper.

Back at the hotel the electricity was still off, so we walked to our room to try eating our chicken.

As we sat down on the bed, I unwrapped the chicken, and suddenly the lights went on.

We looked at the chicken, and saw that it had no meat on it, the chicken had shiny roasted

skin that was tight against its chest bone, there was no breast meat.

I tried breaking off a leg, but the same thing happened, there was no meat there either, the poor chicken must have died of starvation.

The next morning, we decided to return to Santo Domingo, we would stay one night there and then return to Miami.

We had an excellent early lunch in Santiago, and then we drove straight to Santo Domingo.

Katherine had made arrangements for us to fly out late the next afternoon.

In the morning, we headed for the public market place, I wanted to show it to Katherine, and

While we were there I bought around a hundred pieces of amber, all with insects in them for .50 to .75 cents each.

I asked a few of the sales people if they knew where I could buy some raw unpolished amber, and one of the shop keepers gave me an address.

We headed to the address, and I found a man there who had about 20 lbs. of a yellowish

Colored Amber, it was all a very poor quality and all in very small pieces about ½ inch to ¾ inch in size.

I knew I couldn’t smuggle 20 lbs. out of the country, so I bought 5 lbs. for $100.00 U.S. I knew the fellow took advantage of me and had sold me crap, but I didn’t have time to shop around, so I bought it anyway.

That afternoon we headed to the airport.

As I drove along the highway at the posted speed limit of 65KM, suddenly a policeman stepped out into the middle of the road holding up his hand.

Not knowing what the heck was going on I pulled over.

He said in Spanish, “Su licensia por favor” (Your drivers license please).

For the first fifteen minutes I made believe I didn’t speak Spanish, but he was persistent and finally I gave up.

Katherine stayed in the car, as I walked into a small concrete building that was painted blue.

Inside of the room was bare, except for one desk with a police officer sitting there.

He took my drivers license, and gently tapped it on the desk.

He said in Spanish, “What time is your flight sir”? I told him and he said, “It is too bad you will miss it”.

I asked him, what did I do?. He said, “You were speeding”.

I said the speed limit is 65KM and I was doing 65KM.

Yes he said, but everyone in the Dominican Republic knows that you slow down to 15KM when passing by a police station.

I could see this could be a big problem for me to argue, so I opened my wallet and handed him a $5.00 bill.

I said, please buy a carton of cigarettes for your men.

He said, “Thank you Sir, I hope you enjoyed your stay in Santo Domingo”, As he said that as he handed me back my drivers license.

I walked to our car and we made it to our flight on time.

Over the next couple of years, I made all kinds of amber earrings and pendants using 14K gold.

Katherine and I attended several shows and we did sell some amber.

But I found Katherine was right, Americans had no idea as to what Amber was, they thought it was plastic. Only Europeans and Asians appreciated it. They all knew what amber was and they loved it.

It was around 1990 when Katherine and I were on vacation in Japan.

At the time Russia was the biggest producer of Baltic amber, and due to Glasnost they were

now freely trading with Japan.

It was Christmas time, and we were in Tokyo shopping on the Ginza.

We went up to the top floor of a giant Japanese department store, and there it was.

Table after table all with Russian amber.

There was so much of it that it was mind boggling, and it was cheap.

That evening it was Christmas, and as we walked down the Ginza listening to Christmas music, many of the giant department stores had set up long tables on the sidewalks, all with Russian Amber on them.

At that moment I knew it was the end of the Amber Collection.