Like a diamond, Roger Weinreich is multifaceted.
He’s probably best-known for running Good Fortune Jewelry in Keene with his wife, Maddie, for over 34 years.
The pre-owned jewelry store, which sits at 110 Main St., sources from tens of thousands of consignors all over the world, and stocks everything from diamond necklaces to silver coins to musical instruments, Weinreich, 75, said.
Good Fortune is a destination for collectors from Boston, New York City and other countries, he said.
But running a business over three decades is just one of Weinreich’s cuts. He plays the guitar, sculpts with bronze and has a reputation for activism and education about nuclear disarmament. He also helped found the Keene Music Festival, an annual celebration of local artists during Labor Day weekend.
But at the core of it all, Good Fortune — and Weinreich — is driven by serving its region.
“The business grew out of us being here, looking for something to do in the community,” Weinreich said.
Growing Good Fortune
In the mid-1980s, the Weinreichs moved from Boston, where Roger said he had been a career firefighter with the Cambridge Fire Department. In search of a rural lifestyle, they came to the Monadnock Region. And wanting their sons to be able to see what they did for a living, they started a brick-and-mortar consignment store.
The focus was furniture, but in the early days, the Weinreichs took everything.
“If somebody brought in a coffee cup, we would consign it,” Roger Weinreich said. “If somebody brought in a dishwasher or a jet ski or a motorcycle, we would consign it.”
But the longer they operated, the couple started to see a specialty materialize.
“We began to really see what was out there,” he said. “As people began to bring jewelry, we realized there could be a niche there, because people were having very little luck selling jewelry on their own back then.”
Most jewelers won’t buy a product back because jewelry depreciates so quickly, according to Weinreich, who said this aspect of the business deters even retail giants like Amazon.
“It was just an experiment at the beginning and it took years for things to start to sell — literally,” he said. “Once they did, we then got educated more quickly.”
The couple took classes from the Gemological Institute of America and brought jewelers and gemologists onto their staff, Weinreich said.
Eventually, as selling jewelry began to take up more of their time, the Weinreichs had to drop the furniture side of their operation. Over the years, they have made more than a few refinements, including adding musical instruments, electronics, precious metals and, more recently, silver coins and bullion.
But that’s one of the strengths of Good Fortune, Weinreich said — its ability to adapt.
“We’re very fluid as a company,” he said. “People that visited us years ago, if they came in today, they wouldn’t recognize us, because we’ve shapeshifted so many times. We enjoy it.”
While Good Fortune has plenty of antiques and what Weinreich calls “museum-quality” pieces, the store’s most popular items are contemporary pieces that were first purchased within the past five years.
Because they are used, those pieces often sell for around 80 percent of the original price, Weinreich said. That’s the allure for consumers, who might pay significantly less for a piece compared to when it was brand new.
The pieces on the store’s website range from just under $100 to roughly $15,000.
Good Fortune also has a pawn shop, which offers employed community members in a cash crunch loans secured against collateral, Weinreich said. He’s seen everything from expensive rhinoceros statuettes worth thousands to firearms to secure loans that range from about $400 to $15,000.
Judy Blake, who manages the store, said she has known Weinreich for nearly 25 years. They met while Blake was performing with her R&B band The Nines, whose performances Weinreich used to attend frequently.
After Lyme disease sidelined Blake for a while, Weinreich reached out to offer her a job at Good Fortune, she said.
“He really helped me come back to life after being sick for a very long time,” she said.
Weinreich’s neighborliness is reflected in the store itself, Blake said, describing how Good Fortune goes the extra mile to make sure people don’t lose the items they pawn.
“Roger is such a community-minded person,” she said. “He’s a well-loved person and boss.”
As long as people like jewelry and believe in the value of gold and silver, Good Fortune will be around, according to Weinreich.
“There are plenty of juncture points where we could have closed or sold the business,” he said. “We kind of pushed through, mostly because we did something different than we thought we would do.”
Outside the display room
But it’s not all work and no play for Weinreich, a mainstay for the downtown Keene scene. The Gilsum resident also has a shine for music.
In the early 2000s, he said he had a hand in founding the Keene Music Festival, a sprawling, multi-day event that features local bands playing original compositions.
“The theme really was to throw music up in as many locations as we could and keep the music accessible — put it right on the sidewalk, not on platforms or stages,” Weinreich said.
The festival’s creation was also an opportunity for Weinreich’s own band, Earth Colony, to play some gigs as well. He also does some solo acoustic shows, too, he said.
“He’s a very creative person, for sure,” Blake, a Peterborough resident, said. “He’s always writing songs or working on projects.”
That’s not Weinreich’s only artistic pursuit. He also sculpts with bronze, and said he has worked in a foundry in Maine.
But his hobbies — which he referred to as “careers” — run the gamut. Weinreich also spent his younger years spreading awareness about nuclear disarmament.
Weinreich, who remembers duck-and-cover drills in school and the Cuban Missile Crisis as a young boy, belongs to the Arms Control Association.
The Washington, D.C., organization works to educate people, from the general public to government officials, about the dangers of some types of nuclear weaponry and about pathways to make the world safer, he said.
People tend to understand other existential issues such as the impact of climate change, but many are not attuned to the details of nuclear combat, Weinreich said. He even participated in the Nuclear Freeze campaign in the 1980s, a widespread effort to stop the United States and the Soviet Union from testing and producing nuclear weapons.
“Ultimately, it comes around to the destruction of the entire planet, so having vehicles out there to disseminate information is really important,” he said.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock gauges “how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making,” according to the organization’s website.
The organization recently set the clock to 85 seconds from midnight, the theoretical point of annihilation, down from 89 seconds in 2025.
Nowadays, Weinreich maintains a website connecting organizations with information and writes letters to the editor about certain aspects of the issue, he said.
But the facet of his life in which he takes the most pride is less exhilarating — and that’s exactly the point, he said. He delights in going out into the woods and being alone.
Weinreich’s fascination with this began when he was roughly 19, while out traveling in the Middle East. At one point, he ended up all by himself for a few days.
“I was a little hungry, a little frightened, but on one of those nights, something really special happened for me,” he said. “And whether I say, ‘I had a vision of divinity or God or spirit,’ it was enough for me that, the following year, I decided, ‘I’m going to go be alone in the woods again for a couple of days.’ ”
Nowadays, Weinreich tries to make a regular Thoreau-esque exploit into the woods.
“It’s a kind of experience that’s shaped me almost more than anything else,” he said. “Now, especially with the advent of cellphones and everything, it’s hard for us to really get away.”
He said his next endeavor would be constructing cabins in southern New Hampshire to make being solitary more accessible.
“When I was younger, my mom would say, ‘I like how you act or look when you’ve been in the woods for a few days alone, and I would like to do that, but I don’t want to, like, sleep on the ground or deal with mosquitos,’ ” he said. “I used to jokingly say to her, ‘Well, I’ll build you a cabin in the woods.’ I think there was some merit to that.”
Noah Diedrich can be reached at 603-355-8569, or ndiedrich@keenesentinel.com.
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