Julio Marsella’s Providence
Sometimes you come across a piece of jewelry that doesn’t just speak to you; it sings. That’s what I experienced many years ago when I came upon a remarkable brooch and earrings set marked Jewels by Julio. Then, when I had the incredible good fortune to talk to friends and family of the maker, I discovered why I felt I heard that jewelry singing such beautiful music. Julio Marsella played opera every day over the public address system of his jewelry factory and sang along as he walked around the shop. Everyone who heard him agrees that Julio’s tenor was as beautiful as the jewelry he created.
Jewels by Julio undersea fantasy brooch and earrings set.
Marner was the name of the jewelry manufacturing company owned by Julio Marsella and Ralph Neri. Founded in 1946, soon after the end of World War II, Marner was originally located on Empire Street in Providence, RI, in three rooms over the storefront occupied by Harris Furs. Neri left the thriving company before it expanded and moved to the second and third floors of the Westminster Building at 43 Hospital Street, directly across the street from Coro, leaving Julio as the sole owner of the business. At this location, the factory produced jewelry around the clock, and in 1953 the company moved to an even larger plant on Harris Avenue. Some of the pieces produced by Marner were identified with their own company name, usually as Jewels by Julio, Julio Marsella, or Marner, but most were made for other companies such as Hobe’, Hattie Carnegie, Kramer, and many others and would be marked with their names.
Jewels by Julio and Marner marks.
Born in Rhode Island on September 17, 1911, Julio Marsella was the youngest of five children, and the only one born in America. His parents were Italian immigrants, and his father worked as a shoemaker. By age 18, Julio was working as a foreman in a Providence knife factory. Ten years later, before the beginning of World War II, Julio had moved into the jewelry industry and was working as a foreman for Trifari. After serving in the Army during the war, he began his own company. From the beginning, Julio served as the company’s designer, though later he hired five or six additional designers and sample makers to keep up with the company’s success. It appears that Julio spent quite a lot of time planning during the war, designing for the business he would create when it was over. In 1946 he applied for, and received, 11 design patents for various types of jewelry.
Marner designs were varied in style, but always elegant.
Marner was a family affair, as was typical of Providence jewelry companies. Julio’s nephew, Larry Marsella, began working for his uncle soon after the business started in 1946, when he was only 11 years old. Two of Larry’s brothers also worked for their uncle. At one time or another, Julio’s nephews performed most of the activities of the company: beadmaking, cover, plate, foot press, drill press, and stone setting. Louis Marsella, Larry’s older brother, shared their uncle’s artistic talents. In addition to the jobs already mentioned, he became a designer and mold maker. He even had some engineering skills, and helped design and build the large plant. He was the one who installed the pipes that fed gas to the beadmakers’ benches. Larry was highly skilled as a polisher, creating a smooth, even surface on the jewelry before it was plated. His polished pieces were so fine that people sometimes mistakenly thought that they had already been plated. Julio set very high standards not only for his jewelry, but also for his nephews. Larry remembers Julio telling them not to put their feet up on the rungs of their chairs when they worked. When they complained that it was more comfortable that way, Julio said, “You can’t be comfortable when you work! When you work, you just work!!”
Julio Marsella employed many others besides family. After the move to the large plant on Hospital Street, Marner had about 60 or 70 employees. Like all of Providence, Marner was a melting pot. The employees included both men and women from a wide range of ethnicities: Italian, Irish, Jewish, French, African-American, and more. The Marsella family was strongly committed to nondiscrimination and fairness in wages and work conditions. Julio believed in keeping his workers happy. He frequently treated everyone to sandwiches from the diner across the street and Larry Marsella, as the youngest employee, was often given the task of taking the employees’ orders, calling them in to the diner, and going across the street to pick up the food.
In 1954, picking up the sandwiches turned into quite an adventure for 19 year old Larry! Everyone was working as usual during Hurricane Carol. Julio believed that he and his workers would be safer inside on the upper floor of their large building than out in the wind. Larry was sent out into the hurricane to pick up food and while he was at the deli the storm surge came in. He proved himself to be a truly heroic delivery person, wading back through waist-deep water with the sandwiches.
Most of the women working for Marner were on the third floor. Their main jobs were soldering, stone setting, finishing, and hand linking of beads. When linking the beads, the women used tools in both hands, working at amazing speed. Sometimes these tools were pliers held in both their right and left hands, but often the women used special crimping tools attached to rings resembling wedding bands that were worn on both hands. The women also worked at the stone setting presses that made rhinestone chain. These machines were operated with a foot press that closed the prongs around the stones. The special drill press used to set collets was harder to manage, so this heavier work was done by Larry and his brothers.
Note the band of rhinestone chain used on this Marner bracelet, made by women working at the stone setting presses.
In the early days of the company, pieces were sent out for plating after being polished in the Marner plant. Julio was sometimes unhappy with the quality of this outsourced plating. There were cracking and bubbling problems related to “burning” the finish. Also, outside platers sometimes skimped on the quantity of gold used. A perfectionist in all things, Julio decided to begin plating in-house. After that he was able to assure his customers that “when you want 3 mils of gold, you got it! Not 1-1/2.”
Julio Marsella’s drive for perfection led him to begin in-house plating.
An entire wing was devoted to glass bead production. All Marner beads were handmade, using torches. The glass came in four foot canes, in boxes six to eight inches square. These boxes were set up near the production area so the canes could be drawn out for working at the benches. Beadmakers worked on both sides of the long benches, with asbestos dividers to protect the workers from the heat of their neighbors’ torches. This room was considered a great place to work in the winter, as it stayed warm and comfortable. In summer, however, the room was terribly hot. The heat at the height of a standing man’s head was 120 degrees. Beadmakers wore cloth bands around their foreheads to keep the sweat from rolling into their eyes. Two women worked as beadmakers, but most of these craftspeople were men.
At that time, most of the beads made in America used only crystal and/or topaz glass because these colors were the easiest to work. Different colors of glass required different temperatures and different handling. Marner made beads in all colors and created a wide variety of fancy shapes. The company’s beadmakers were tremendously skilled, and their creations were so precise in size and shape that they could easily be mistaken for machine made. The primary customer for Marner beads was Larry Joseph, owner of Hattie Carnegie, a company well known for its richly colored and textured beadwork.
The beads were created by pulling molten glass into the desired shapes with tweezers (as in the case of Julio Marsella’s patented heart-shapes), or by rolling and turning the melted glass onto a piece of wire, producing the hole through the bead that was later used for stringing or linking with chain. After the glass bead was completed and cooled, the wire was held with a vise grip on one end and pulled with pliers on the other end. This pulling stretched and narrowed the wire, allowing the bead to fall off. Larry Marsella reports that the company experimented with hollow wire at one time because they hoped it would be easier to remove the beads from hollow wire, but they found that this type of wire melted if it became even a little too warm and was thus too hard to use. Although some beadmakers coated their wire with ash to facilitate removal of the beads, Marner did not use this process. Using ash made it necessary to wash the beads after they were removed from the wires and this led to excessive breakage during cleaning.
Julio Marsella’s patented heart-shaped handmade beads.
The many types of beads made by Marner included:
“Inlaid beads” – commonly referred to as foiled beads, these beads had metal flakes inside the glass
Beads with natural mineral goldstone inclusions
“Brocade beads” – with lacy ribbons of contrasting glass laid over the main portion of the bead
“Rice beads” – shaped like grains of rice, but longer
“Sugar beads” – with crystals of crushed glass on the outside of the bead
Beads were by no means the only products produced by Marner. They also made cast jewelry for a variety of customers, two of the most notable being Hobe’ and Kramer. In-house mold makers, including Julio’s nephew, Louis, designed these cast pieces. Most commonly, the cast pieces had glued-in rhinestones. Julio’s perfectionism showed itself in this area, as well. He insisted that all of the stones should be perfectly even, with none askew or sticking up further than the others. This drive for uniform perfection required that the individual cups into which the stones were to be set had to be individually drilled with a press after the piece came out of the die (the industry name for a mold).
Because Julio demanded that only the best materials be used in his jewelry, Marner rhinestones were imported from Czechoslovakia and Austria. All of the metals, glass, and stones used in Marner jewelry had to be of the highest possible quality because of the pride that Julio Marsella took in his work, no matter how small the piece. Two of the cast designs particularly memorable for Larry Marsella were brooches: a sailfish with a glass stone belly and fully stoned fins, and a birdbath with three angels perched upon its rim.
This whimsical Brutalist pendant necklace was on the cutting edge of 1950s design.
The Marner plant included an elegant showroom where customers were greeted, shown the jewelry, and entertained. This room, which was beautifully lit and featured velvet-covered jewelry display tables, was kept supplied with food, liquor, and soft drinks for the customers. The showroom was flanked on one side by Julio’s office and on the other by the staff’s office. Julio’s office had fine mahogany furniture, and the staff’s office boasted new-fangled desks with pull-out typewriters. One of the female employees made matching curtains for both of the offices.
Beautifully lit sample jewelry was displayed on velvet-covered tables in the elegant Marner showroom.
In the showroom, wholesale customers examined the Marner line and ordered samples. One advantage of having a showroom in the plant was that if a wholesaler wanted to see a piece with a different color of stones or plating the changes could be made in a matter of minutes, while the customer waited. Sample pieces were provided free of charge to wholesale customers who then sent out their salesmen to retail buyers around the country, carrying the samples in heavy cases from store to store, gathering orders from retail jewelers and department stores. If the wholesale customers’ orders were large enough, Marner granted those wholesalers an exclusive on the line and refrained from selling the same items to anyone else.
Wholesale company salesmen carried heavy sample cases to show to retail customers around the country.
After Julio received three final design patents in 1956, the Marner company closed its doors in 1957. According to Larry Marsella, the same downswing in business that affected all the Providence jewelry-makers at that time also took its toll on Marner. Julio found himself overextended in his large factory and fell behind on taxes and payments to creditors. Julio made a last-ditch attempt to save his business, traveling to New York and gathering many new orders. Sadly, when he returned to his factory, orders in hand, local officials had barred the doors and would not permit him to enter. He showed the officers the stack of orders and asked for the opportunity to continue working so he could pay back taxes and satisfy the creditors, but they would not relent. This was the end of Marner.
A former business associate has reported that after Marner closed Julio went to work as a designer for the Whiting and Davis Company in Plainville, Massachusetts, but we have no paper trail to confirm this information. Larry Marsella says that Julio opened a small shop in Providence where he made novelty items such as metal statuettes and paperweights, but no jewelry.
According to Larry, his uncle Julio remained “sharp as a pin” until the day he died in 1985. Always busy with various artistic pursuits, Julio maintained a darkroom in his home where he pursued his hobby of photography, and even more important, he continued to study classical singing with a new vocal coach. His technique improved even further, and Larry reports that Julio’s voice was more beautiful in his 60s and 70s than it was when he was a younger man. He sang at the weddings of his nephews and nieces and every week in his church. Today that exquisite tenor voice continues to reach down through the decades and echo through the elegant jewelry he left behind.
An earlier version of this article, written by Cheri Van Hoover, first appeared in Vintage Fashion and Costume Jewelry in 2004 and was used with permission on our previous website. It has been updated and adapted for use in this blog.
