Tiffany’s Odd Job

In “A Tiffany Gift” (September October 1987), the examples of the jeweler’s art with which you illustrated your text were intriguing and well chosen, but I suspect that Tiffany never filled a more unusual order than that which my father, the late Lynn Landrum, columnist for the Dallas News , presented in 1918, when he asked the firm to execute an engagement ring of his own design. What he wanted was a full rose crafted in gold with leaves on each side. The unusual feature of the ring was that the diamond was completely concealed within the rose and could be seen only from the back of the ring.

I have no idea how large a diamond the ring contains, although from what can be seen of it, I am sure it was far more than my father could afford. His intention was to have the heart of the rose cut out after the wedding so that the diamond would show through, but working as he did in his early career on country newspapers, he could not afford to send the ring back to Tiffany to have the change made. Twenty years later he proposed to have the job done, but my mother refused, preferring to have the world’s most unusual diamond ring.