FROM LUTZES TO LOUPES AND LAB TESTS

SOME MIGHT SAY that Charles Butler—a Lake Forest resident since 2018 and a former world junior champion in ice dance—is a true renaissance man. After success on the rink, he tackled a career in medicine and then founded Charles Jewelry in New York City.

He balanced all of the above, Super Man style—often whipping off his white coat after a New York University Medical School class, finding the nearest bare coat hook, and then flying to the big city’s Diamond District.

“I’d always wear a tie to class on days when I’d have to meet clients at my jewelry store,” Butler recalls. “You should have seen some of the funny looks I’d get from nearby students during lectures on those busy days. It wasn’t unusual for me to take out my loupe and inspect the diamonds—three, usually—I had placed in the crease of my open textbook.

“I never took notes during medical school lectures in big auditoriums, because all the answers were right there in the books. But I listened, listened pretty intently, while looking closely at those diamonds.”

Butler today continues to toil simultaneously in the fields of medicine and jewelry. He’s an Omniwell hospitalist, a locum tenens (temporary physician) who travels to U.S. hospitals starving for stellar stethoscope wearers with off-the-charts bedside manners. Charles Jewelry, now serving worldwide clients, has an excellent reputation for producing the highest quality craftsmanship along with personalized, concierge-based, customer service.

With a Chicago location on South Wabash Avenue, Charles Jewelry has thousands of clients, with most of the domestic customers hailing from New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

How many docs/diamond setters do you know? There can’t be many. You could probably plop the total number of them onto a tandem bicycle.

This much we know. Only one human in the history of civilization has ever ordered a CT scan, sold a spider brooch, and performed in ice dance at a Winter Olympics (Nagano, Japan, in 1998). Butler, then 18 years old, and Jessica Joseph, then 15, are still the youngest dance partners (combined ages) to have ever competed atop an Olympic sheet of ice.

“I love science, especially chemistry and biology,” says Butler, who completed his residency as a Doctor of Internal Medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “A diamond is a carbon-to-carbon structure, such a beautiful thing. I’m a diamond importer, in charge of materials; I’m a supply-chain guy. The endorphin rush I get after building a wedding ring for a friend and feeling I’m a part of the couple’s love story is similar to the rush I get after helping a patient breathe easier.”

Butler also works out daily, has been teaching himself to play the guitar since 2021, and, with his wife, Park Ridge native Megan, is raising their 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mary, who thinks her dad already has the music chops of Eric Clapton. An elite juggler keeping pins aloft; a circus star spinning a family of eight’s plates on poles; and Charles Butler living his life. Three of a kind. And the man, who previously owned Ultimate Skate (an ice skate blade company) and the groundbreaking VideoMedicine, Inc., is seriously thinking about launching a health food business in the near future.

“I enjoy being a serial entrepreneur and prefer the starting and building aspects of businesses to the maintaining part,” says Butler, who earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree at the University of Michigan. “Discipline is everything in my life; it’s the No. 1 key for people who are constantly busy. But right up there near discipline is a person’s support team; you’re not going to achieve anything without the backing of the important people in your life.

“My wife (Megan serves Charles Jewelry as its indispensable chief operations officer and cuts rugs as Charles’ all-time favorite ballroom and swing dance partner) is a major part of my team. She has been incredibly supportive and somehow puts up with my crazy ambitions.”

Born in Salt Lake City, Butler began playing competitive hockey at the age of 5 after moving to Michigan. His father, also named Charles, was a cardiothoracic surgeon, and his mother, Minnesota native Penny, became the first female Mayo Medical School graduate and toured as a member of the Ice Follies. A Russian defector/ice dance coach name Igor watched the couple’s 11-year-old skate one day and surmised the youngster could cut it as a dancer.

Good call, Igor. A stick-less, pad-lass Butler later joined Joseph for competitions and festivals all over the world. Butler counted the number of countries in which he laced ’em up and stopped at 26; Butler and Joseph dazzled German audiences five times. The pair won U.S. Junior Championships in 1996 and 1997 and reached the pinnacle—as junior performers—with their gold-medal show at the world championships in 1998. They then silvered at the 1998 U.S. Senior Championships to qualify for spots to represent Team USA’s Olympic squad in Nagano and build snowmen with athletes from other countries in the Olympic Village. Fights broke out, too, but they were fun ones. The ammo: snowballs.

Greats Wayne Gretzky and Tara Lipinski were among Butler/Joseph’s Olympic teammates 26 years ago.

Butler and Joseph, alas, placed 21st, after a skate blade nearly sliced a loosened lace and caused an unfortunate fall.

“I never got nervous before or during a competition,” Butler says. “The mind is more powerful than the body. My mindset on the ice was always, ‘Let’s go out there and have some fun.’ Worrying about where we’d finish never made sense to me. It’s hard to do well when all you’re thinking about is a place in the standings.

“I always smiled when I skated. Spectators and judges saw my joy, couldn’t miss it. I looked like I was having a good time out there because I was.”

Butler would love nothing more than to get the opportunity to beam on an entirely different stage someday. “Maybe 10 years from now I’ll play the electric guitar in a Dad band,” he says.

Maybe? Sorry, Charles. Someday you’re going to sell resplendent rocks by day and rock the house at night.

For more information about Charles Jewelry, visit charlesjewelry.com.