The purchase of the Bird and Nest paperweight* for 25 francs, marked the beginning of Paul Jokelson’s romance with paperweights. Little did he imagine that this small crystal object, bought in a modest shop on Rue des Saints Peres in Paris, would later shape the course of his life.   The year was 1923. Jokelson was serving an 18 month volunteer enlistment in the French Army.  
     Later, on leave in London with Paul Lorraine,** Jokelson bought three or four more weights at a Bond Street arcade. One was a rare Baccarat magnum scattered millefiori on lace and, he recalls with a smile, that the most expensive weight in that group was L10.  His first sulphide was a plaque of Henry IV, bought along with other weights at the French auction house, Hotel Drouet. By World War II, his collection numbered 120 paperweights.

     Paul Jokelson was born in Dunkirk, France into a family of ship owners. Their ships, 26 in number before World War II, carried freight between France and North Africa and passengers across the English Channel between Calais and Dover.  Jokelson worked in the family business after his term in the service. He was on his second trip to the United States in 1939 when the war broke out and he returned to France to serve in the Army again.
     Attached to a British major as an interpreter, he was evacuated with the British forces at Dunkirk, coincidently in one of his own ships. Jokelson remembers the 10th of June, 1940, as the date he returned to Cherbourg with a few English brigades. He remained behind when the British forces finally returned to England.  He retreated to Albi, a city in the southwest of France, where he was demobilized.
      To avoid internment by the Nazis, he fled to the South of France, which was his home base during the war. Sculptor Gilbert Poillerat, a good friend, shipped his goods - including the paperweight collection - from Paris. His possessions were detoured through German occupied territory and it was good luck that the Germans did not open the drawers of a small chest that contained two guns! His possessions and his paperweights were delivered intact.
     He returned to occupied Paris for a few months on a special mission for the French Underground. A week before liberation, he attempted to return again, but was unable to get into the city because all the bridges across the Seine River were gone. He traveled to a small village near Caen (150 miles N.W. of Paris) where he stayed and was part of the forces that destroyed the last retreating German convoys.

     In 1945, Jokelson joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association. He went to Germany as a director of an UNRRA team and was placed in charge of two camps of Polish Displaced Persons and one of Italian Prisoners of War. It was at this time that he met his wife, Margaret, a U.S. citizen serving as a nurse on his UNRRA team. His position with UNRRA enabled him to secure the special permission required to get permits to attend the Nuremberg Trials, which he found “most interesting.” He recalls how, like all the observers, he was searched to be sure he carried no weapons.
     After 18 months, he returned to Paris and resigned from his post with UNRRA. He and Margaret were married, and six months later, when his visa was granted, he came to the U.S.

     His first position was with an import-export firm and required the Jokelsons to move to Montreal, Canada. Here his work brought him into direct contact with a Frenchman who was wanted for prosecution as a spy for the Germans. Jokelson recounts that the wanted man was easily identified, having lost an arm in W.W.I when he was decorated as a war hero. For Paul, it was even more simple; he had faced this man across a desk every morning for five years before the outbreak of W.W.II. Personal threats against Jokelson did not deter his efforts to have this was criminal extradited. Government delays resulted in the man’s eventual escape to Brazil, where he was assassinated a few years later. Jokelson left this position after 2 ½ years and returned to the U.S.

     It was during his years as head of Micomex, his own import-export firm in New York from 1950 to 1954, that Mr. Jokelson made his first attempt at having modern sulphide paperweights made. An admirer of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jokelson went to the Baccarat factory, where they were finally able to produce a sulphide of Ike. Taken from Eisenhower’s campaign medal, these paperweights were not a good likeness, but they had proven the feasibility of such a project. A year later, on the occasion of the coronation, Baccarat made a successful paperweight of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, from a sculpture by Gilbert Poillerat, made expressly for this purpose.
     At Jokelson’s request, the Cristalleries de Saint Louis produced sulphides of Queen Elizabeth II, also from a sculpture by Poillerat. As a testament to the success of these weights, both artistically and commercially, Paul Jokelson recalls that he returned to the U.S. with a total of 2200 sulphide paperweights from Baccarat and St. Louis. Marketed through antique and paperweight dealers, they were sold out within two weeks.
     Prodded by Jokelson during the five years when he was their U.S. paperweight distributor, the Baccarat factory undertook production of lampwork paperweights in addition to sulphides. These weights also proved to be a success.
     About 300 to 400 flower and millefiori paperweights were made at Cristalleries de Saint Louis between 1950 and 1970, evidence of the experimentation that was taking place at that factory, also at Jokelson’s urging. The scope and quality of the St. Louis weights made over the years, illustrate the success of this venture and are a tribute to Paul Jokelson, the man who advised and inspired their production. He continues as the U.S. distributor for St. Louis.
     At a third French factory, Cristal D’Albret, Jokelson again provided the incentive for the production of fine sulphide paperweights, beginning in 1967. He is the exclusive distributor in the U.S. for these fine weights.

     In 1953, after Palmer Hart, a prominent American paperweight collector, pointed out that there were associations for collectors of all types of things but none for paperweight collectors, Paul Jokelson took steps to organize an association. A lawyer friend drew up ten articles of the Paperweight Collectors Association, still in use today with only one revision. Among the charter members were Evangeline Bergstrom, Charles Kaziun, Paul Lorraine, Palmer Hart and Paul Jokelson. An ad for the PCA, featuring the Bird and the Nest paperweight appeared in the July, 1953 issue of Antiques Magazine and attracted 75 members. Two years later, publicity from a display of paperweights at a New York Armory Show, resulted in many additional collectors. The PCA membership, says Jokelson, has been as high as 3000.
     Through his years as President of the PCA, 1953-1980, Mr. Jokelson wrote and sent out to its members 42 Newsletters. He was - and still is - editor and publisher of the beautiful full-color limited edition bulletins, now issued yearly. He has planned and presided over the 12 Conventions*** that have taken place in sites from coast to coast across the U.S.A. Thanks to Jokelson’s efforts over a number of years, the major auction houses in New York and London finally agreed to eliminate from their lists of selling prices those lots which had not reached the owner’s “reserve price” and had not really been sold.

     Certainly all the ingredients necessary for a paperweight renaissance in the 20th century existed. But, it remained for a man such as Paul Jokelson, a person of adventurous spirit and discriminating taste to become the catalyst. Who could have predicted such effects from the offhand sale of a glass object to a soldier on leave in Paris back in 1923?
     Recognized and respected as an expert on paperweights, Jokelson is considered the foremost authority on sulphides. He is the author of three books on the subject of paperweights.
     Paul and Margaret Jokelson are frequent visitors to Chelmsford, Massachusetts to the home of their daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, Sean, almost 7 and Ashley, 2.

* This antique paperweight is the only one of its kind yet discovered.

** His boyhood friend who works as a ‘liason officer’ between Jokelson and the two factories of Saint Louis and Cristal D’Albret.

*** At the 12th Convention in 1981, Jokelson turned the gavel over to the new President, Mr. Evan Pancake.

Paul Jokelson died peacefully on November 24, 2002. He was 97 years young.