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GENESSA -- JEWELRY AND WATCHES! Lady G had a bright idea: sell jewelry and watches! Here is where the idea was born, and what became of it: When Lady G's parents retired, they couldn't afford to retire, retirement was not economically feasible for them.
After a long, somewhat varied and generally successful, albeit anything but lucrative, career, Mr. F found himself accepting the early retirement deal offered by Joseph Califano, newly appointed (by President Jimmy Carter) head of the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare, where Mr. F had started out as a social worker; got promoted out of the field, which he loved, into management, which he didn't; left for the private sector to get into computers; and returned as a computer specialist. He hadn't been thinking about retirement, but Carter was definitely thinking about hiring freezes and other budget-cutting measures; early retirement, with benefits, seemed a kinder course than wholesale layoffs. Mrs. F quit her longstanding position as office manager of the Washington Teachers Union and the couple, now empty-nested and unemployed, sold the house and headed for Florida. In the Sunshine State, both of them got jobs, he with a series of universities, still as a computer specialist, and she in a series of offices, soon settling in as a personnel manager for a large company. This was not to last. Mrs. F had a plethora of increasingly serious health issues and Mr. F was becoming depressed as he realized that his former expertise was increasingly irrelevant as computer science progressed beyond his ken. The two of them still loved to travel (Mr. F in particular loved to drive) and in 1982 they embarked on one of their cross-country journeys, this time in the company of Mr. F's older sister, Lady G's Aunt Molly. They visited Lady G in California, then headed back east, stopping in Las Vegas, for they both enjoyed blackjack and (Lady G suspects) bright lights. The night they arrived, Mr. F collapsed in the casino, $90 up. His brief death, his resuscitation, his triple bypass open heart surgery and the next 13 years of his life are another story, but suffice it to say his computer career -- indeed his career as he knew a career to be -- was over.
Now Lady G's parents had to rethink their so-called golden years, which were turning up very green copper at best. How could they support themselves? Lady G is pretty sure it was Mrs. F who came up with the idea of selling costume jewelry, watches and miscellaneous accessories at flea markets, but has no clue why this occurred to her mother. Nonetheless, that is what her parents decided to do. They settled, perhaps after trial and error, on a large, well populated seasonal market in Jupiter, Florida, some distance from where they lived, and drove up there every weekend to peddle their wares and shmooze with the populace. Lady G once had occasion to accompany her mother to Miami for an enlightening wholesale shopping trip. She was pleased when Mrs. F occasionally asked her opinion of an item and even considered her answers when it came to the final purchase. She went, too, up to Jupiter, and helped out a bit, noting that her father, always a shy man, had found his niche. The flea market provided a context within which he could socialize easily, making people comfortable, chatting as if he'd done so all his life (he hadn't!) Mr. F died in early 1995. Mrs. F lived almost two more years. While cleaning out her parents' house, Lady G found brochures and price lists from Mrs. F's wholesalers and decided to follow in her mother's footsteps. She would sell the same kind of products, about which she had some knowledge, at flea markets and on the web. She returned to Los Angeles (she had not been there all along but that, too, is another story) and began to make wholesale contacts, then purchases. She embarked on her own cross-country tour, staying with friends and having some remarkable success at flea markets all over America. When she returned once more to Los Angeles, her health, which alas resembled her mother's, fell apart as never before. She had already begun to create a new website (an exceedingly rudimentary version of the one you see here, although it was not her first site) with pictures of her wares, an online shopping cart via PayPal, the whole shebang. It was not to be. She was too ill to follow through. As you have read on this site's main page or perhaps in its FAQ, Lady G then found that the hard part -- fulfillment -- need not be in her hands, as long as her sales were through sponsors. Thus you may find on this site a selection of product which may be purchased without fear of delay, as even if Lady G can't get out of bed one morning, the sponsor's employees surely can and will. No money goes from you, the shopper, to Lady G (or Lionheart) and no product passes through our hands on its way to you. Unlike that of Lady G's hapless parents, our health is irrelevant to your safety or satisfaction. Indeed, we have expanded to the point that jewelry is but a tiny portion of our offering, and we present quite a library of Lady G's writings as well, for your (free of course) reading pleasure. After some mishaps with AOL (they closed down their website hosting service, on which GENESSA resided) and USAPages (they failed to renew their domain registration and vanished off the face of the earth without a word to any of their clients) this site has been recreated, and is still being recreated; this section is far from complete, and yet you may find some super stuff here. We hope you do! We also hope we have not been to roundabout in our explanation of how we got here. Coming soon, a selection of specific: Jewelry Watches Meanwhile you may visit our sponsors' sites and browse freely:   |
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