Navajo jeweler Jimmie King, Jr. has a quality many would envy: he seems profoundly at home with his work, with his life and with himself. Considering the number of worlds King successfully straddles, this sense of deep satisfaction is especially remarkable. A man not necessarily of contradictions, but of combinations, King brings the old and the new together in his jewelry-making to create pieces that are at once deeply traditional and stylishly high-fashion.

This combination manifests itself in other aspects of his life as well. When he needs to recharge his emotional and spiritual batteries, King drives to the farthest reaches of the Navajo reservation where roads are barely even ruts in the landscape. Driving there, he listens to B.B. King and Albert Collins' blues tapes loud. One of his latest exploits is Bungy Jumping! (See photo above.) On matters of the spirit, he consults tribal elders and medicine men whose opinion he greatly respects. On matters of finance, Forbes magazine is more to suit. With his braided, silver hair, King looks like the traditionalist’s traditional Navajo gentleman. When he opens his mouth, sometimes he sounds as if he's just walked out of a boardroom where, no doubt, he's been telling a great story.

King, the sophisticate, is also King the man for simple solutions, whenever they apply. His stunningly crafted jewelry conjures images of a studio filled with complicated machinery for calibrating and cutting the delicate pieces of coral, bone, ivory or turquoise painstakingly inlaid in many of his pieces. In reality, the delicate instrument that measures the inlay pieces is King's sharp eye. With a diamond saw, he cuts each piece by hand and fits each tiny section only, he says, by "eyeballing it." His inlaid gold and silver bracelets generally are made from three separate sheets, a flat interior one, a thicker middle one and a domed outside sheet. He welds those together flat, then shapes them around a car axle with a rawhide mallet. A car axle? The sophisticated smith used an old auto part? "In the Army we were taught 'field expediency, use what you find,' they'd say. Every one of my bracelets since 1970 has been bent on that old car axle. People come to my workshop and ask, "Is this all you have?' And I say very simply, 'What more do I need?"

The army stint of which King speaks was as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne. That period in the armed forces also, indirectly, made King the silver and goldsmith he is today. After serving in Okinawa in the early 1960s, King returned, in round-about fashion, to the area near where he;d been raised and got himself a job singing with a Country Western band at a nearby club. One evening, he met a young Zuni lady by the name of Rena. It turned out that Rena was a jewelrymaker and one day, King asked if he could watch while she made a pair of earrings. "I remember the little table she had in her workplace and her small propane torch. In two hours she made some very pretty earrings and I got real interested," King recalls. Rena went on to teach King about the jeweler's art, and soon he was asking "What if I do this? What would happen if you put this in here?" …And another King combination would come into existence. The stonecutting is traditional Zuni, the silversmithing Navajo and Zuni, and the designs are pure Jimmie King, Jr. Each piece is stamped with a recognizable trademark that looks a bit like a bow knot with six dots over it. King's medicine-men mentors, Tom Yellowtail and Hugh Little Owl, first explained to him the symbolic significance of the six dots, which represent in order: East, South, West, North, Father Sky, Mother Earth. Together they symbolize a person's life as he is born like the new sun and travels in a cycle until his hair is white as the snow from the North. "Then after you are returned to Mother Earth, Father Sky will always be there to watch over you," King says. "Now that I've gotten older, I see that what Mr. Yellowtail and Mr. Little Owl taught me was right. So every piece of jewelry I sell, unless it’s too small, has those dots on it."

There's a certain heft to King's jewelry that adds to its classification. This, he says, is directly attributable to his father, who was one of the famous Navajo Codetalkers during World War II. His dad believed in doing things right and building them to last, king says. "He always told me, 'When you build a fence, build it.' And boy, his fences are going to last through eternity. So tell people whey they buy one of my pieces, 'Your grandkids will still have it. I don’t make anything flimsy.' " Nor does he make anything ordinary. One of the aspects that sets King's bracelets apart is the fact that frequently the inside, as well as the top, is designed. Some of the designs are just, well designs. But some of them have a deeper meaning. One "Storm" bracelet, for example, was devoted to a cousin who served in the Marines in Saudi Arabia during the Desert Storm operation. "I remember saying, 'I think I'll design something for her.' I came up with this idea of a bolt of lightning. A plain silver bracelet, but on the inside it has this line that goes up and down. "In Navajo, our medicine, good luck charm, whatever you call it, is corn pollen. And the color of corn pollen is yellow. So I put this little bead of gold back here, where it’s not even visible from the top, representing the corn pollen. "And I tell people, this is your life. You're up and you’re down, but you keep on going, having faith in yourself and with medicine and your crucifix, your Star of David, whatever that power is for you. "Nobody knows it's there but the person who's wearing it. But hey, if your husband was wearing fur-lined shorts, it'd be okay if only he knew what he was grinning about, wouldn't it?"