Hands Jewelers

The store threw its hundredth-birthday party a year late, and has since corrected itself: its own timeline now dates the founding to 1853, and the Downtown District registry agrees. John Hands enters the story forty years after that. A watchmaker from Coventry, England — already the fifth generation of his own family in the trade — he came through Ellis Island in 1881, reached Iowa City in 1893, and opened at 22 S. Clinton, in the building the Airliner occupies now. Buying out Startsman came later, and that is the business anyone would recognise today. Charlie Nusser manages it, fifth generation here as well; his father Bill was handed a broom after a music lesson. Anne Rizzo, John Hands's great-granddaughter, is CFO. The holiday window was already a thirty-year tradition when CBS2 filmed it in 2018.