If he worked anywhere else, Samuel Kleinberg might be in line for a gold watch when he retires next month.
After 53 years as a jeweller, though, it's not likely he needs one. Even if he does, it's a purchase best left to him, given the expertise that follows a lifetime in his line of work.
Besides, Mr. Kleinberg is the boss, so who would give it to him?
In a saner world, his son, Michael, would be the one to send him off to a leisurely life of golf and grandkids. His eldest child always had a knack for the personal side of the business, and was in line to take over when the world stopped making sense on July 9, 1991.
"It was completely out of the blue," Mr. Kleinberg, 72, says of the night Michael, 35, died during a robbery at the family business, housed on the second floor at the end of a strip mall at Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue.
While his father took in Major League Baseball's All-Star Game at the SkyDome, Michael, a father of three, was preparing to close for the day when two masked men appeared in the shop. They bound and gagged him and an employee, then helped themselves to more than $3-million worth of jewellery.
As he tried to struggle free, Michael was asphyxiated by the rope his assailants had wound tightly around his neck. The employee survived, and one of the robbers, a Russian mobster named Alex Yaari, was jailed for manslaughter.
Fourteen years later, this singularly black period still robs Mr. Kleinberg of words and moves him to tears, and stands out, in the way such killings do for the survivors, as a grotesque distortion of how life is supposed to play out.
"It was a terrible time," he says.
Up to that point, things could hardly have gone more smoothly for Mr. Kleinberg, a slow-and-steady sort whose work ethic was forged early, in his mother's poultry shop on Dundas Street downtown.
"This is where I started to work, before I was 10," he says, recalling how he used his bicycle to deliver chickens.
Later, during summers off from Harbord Collegiate, he worked on a farm his father owned near Bolton. Through the year, "our activities were friendship, sports and going to school," Mr. Kleinberg says. "We didn't have any money."
At 19, he met Frances, the woman he would marry, at a B'nai Brith social, and wound up an apprentice in her brothers' jewellery shop. He stayed 15 years, honing his craft and socking away what he could.
By 1967, Mr. Kleinberg was ready to fly solo. He opened a shop at Eglinton Avenue and Bathurst Street, in a tiny fifth-floor space instead of a street-level location, because he wanted "a more private type of business, catering to individuals as opposed to the masses."
The first day had him wondering.
"I remember the day I opened and I remember very well that I was shocked that nobody came in," he says. "I just had to bide my time and wait until, basically, I built up some kind of clientele."
And build it he did; within six months, he hired his first employee, a jeweller. He was the first of many, as word of Mr. Kleinberg's handmade pieces and personal service spread.
After running out of room at the first location, he moved, in 1977, to his current spot at Bathurst and Lawrence. Soon afterward, Michael graduated from the University of Toronto, but chose the family business over a teaching career.
The son took care of the retail end, while the father oversaw a burgeoning wholesale and manufacturing operation that put Kleinberg jewellery into shops across Canada and into the United States. At its peak in the late 1980s, the company employed 60 people.
Then came that night in 1991.
"It just happened suddenly," Mr. Kleinberg says, recalling how he left the baseball game early, oblivious to the news that awaited him at home. "Apparently they went looking for me [at the SkyDome]and I'd already left."
Two weeks later, after "quite an ordeal," the grieving father returned to where he made his living; to where his son had died. Things were different from then on.
"He had become really close to my clientele," Mr. Kleinberg says, but "some customers didn't come back for 10 years after that; some, even, until recently."
They were uncomfortable, he says, and retail traffic dropped by about one-third.
Mr. Kleinberg also felt a loss of incentive, as "my and my wife's focus was more on [Michael's]children. We spent a lot of time taking them places and doing things with them."
Just this week, the grandfather took Michael's middle child, 21-year-old Evan, on a tour of his old stomping grounds around Harbord Street and Spadina Avenue, pointing out the losses and gains and changes since he grew up there.
Heart bypass surgery two years ago was a signal that it was time to retire, so last spring Mr. Kleinberg sold his wholesale division. All that's left now is the retail store, where six employees remain, and where the only sale he's ever advertised is well under way.
"I feel very good about what I've accomplished, as far as reputation and goodwill," he says; so good, in fact, that he decided to close the store rather than risk his good name on a new owner.
It won't be easy to leave his long-time customers, but it's the most sense he can make in Michael's absence.