Malloves Jewelers marks 90 years

MIDDLETOWN — The chamber calendar continues to be packed with events and activities as Memorial Day approaches in our great nation.

However, before diving into some of the exciting news of the week, I want to begin this week’s column by congratulating Malloves Jewelers, which recently celebrated an amazing 90 years in business.

Malloves has a rich history that began in 1928, and it has been a staple of downtown Middletown ever since. Its current owner, Marc Levin, has led Malloves since 1992. Before Marc, the store was under the leadership of his grandfather Max and his great uncle Joseph Levine from 1938 until Max’s death in 1940. After Max’s death, Marc’s father Buzzy Levin began working at the store at the age of 13.

During Buzzy’s senior year of high school, he decided to stay on with the family business, despite having a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Buzzy Levin officially bought the business from his mother Beatrice and Uncle Joe in 1957. He ran Malloves with distinction and honor before officially handing the reins to Marc in 1992.

Since the beginning, Malloves Jewelers has been known as an outstanding family business and a strong corporate citizen. Buzzy was a strong supporter of mine and the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce for many years. He was a great businessman but an even better person. Marc is a chip off the old block, and he has continued this tradition of conducting good and honest business in downtown Middletown, all while supporting the community the family loves.

I am very proud of Marc and thank him and his team for their continued support of our chamber and for their continued dedication to Middletown. I congratulate them on 90 terrific years, and wish them many more years of success.

The chamber calendar continues to be packed with a number of exciting events and activities. This week features meetings of our Westbrook Division, Cruise Night on Main Planning Committee, All Middletown Division, Women’s Leadership Collaborative, East Haddam & Haddam Division, and MCSAAC Advisory Board.

The All Middletown Division, which will be held Wednesday morning at Wadsworth Mansion, will feature Liberty Bank President Chandler Howard and Chief Financial Officer Tom Pastorello,

ecology, applied for and received an undergraduate research grant to support his work in the lab.

Although the survival rate of tadpoles in high salinity is lower and the team has observed some mutations such as crooked spines, Frymus said the team has been surprised at how resilient some of the subjects have been.

A study co-led by scientists from Yale University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the results of which were released in 2016, found, among other results, that road salt makes the frog population more masculine. Male tadpole populations increased 10 percent when exposed to the salt, the release on that study said.

“The health and abundance of females is obviously critical for the sustainability of any population because they’re the ones that make the babies. So if you have a population that is becoming male-based, the population might be at risk,” the Yale/RPI 2016 release said.

Brady said his initial concept for the experiment was to measure the growth and resiliency of wood frog tadpoles in salty water, but the students have collected data at the same level as doctoral students.

“As an undergrad, this is a lot of work,” Senturk said.

Frymus said the two are nearly constantly in the lab while also balancing a regular load of classes.

Brady said the convergence of evolutionary biology and ecology is a fairly recent development to both fields, although he concludes it makes sense to consider the relationship between competition and evolutionary adaptation.

With the reproductive schedule of wood frogs, Brady said, often times they begin to mate at the same moment vernal pools are at peak saltiness, sometimes including unnaturally warm days after a snowstorm.

The danger for the species, he said, is that frogs that make habitats in roadside pools are typically evolved from the farthest jumpers, as they must survive among road traffic. If salt in the water were to impair the development or survival rate of some of the farthest jumpers in the species, it could have a deleterious effect on the entire species.

An alternative theory he has is that salty pools are already an “island of misfit toys,” where the weakest in the offspring are dumped, meaning the species as a whole could go farther into the woods.

Although the SCSU team has begun the work, Brady said it would be too soon to make conclusions about the impact road salt can have on amphibians when it reaches their mating habitat until the cycle has occurred several times.