Local Jeweler William Sites Earns National Award
June 24, 2010
The Black Orlov, one of the largest black diamonds in the world, is said to bring good luck to whoever touches it. Only a select few people ever get that honor considering the 67-carat stone is valued at more than $1.5 million, but for a few minutes in the early 1970s, local jeweler William Sites (’72) held the diamond in his hands.
“This guy walked in, and he reached in his pocket and pulled out this little box and opened it up, and in it was the Black Orlov,” Sites said recently. “I got to look at it and hold it. It was phenomenal.”
Sites was a young, 24-year-old gemology student in New York City at the time. He’d recently joined the family business, Sites Jewelers, which opened its first store in downtown Clarksville in 1922, and he was spending six months at the Gemology Institute of America, learning everything he could about the trade. [Read more]
