Littleton – Take a step back to the time when shopkeepers opened their specialty stores to sell products they loved and believed in – books or art or even chocolate.
About 34 years ago, Cathie Havens was fascinated with the heavens, so much so that she and her first husband built their own telescope. It was a pretty good one, and soon they were asked to build another, and another. In 1972, they risked everything and opened a retail store, S&S Optika, specializing in the tiny, obscure field of “extended vision” optics.
Their marriage didn’t last, but the store survived. And more than three decades later, S&S Optika remains as it started – a cubbyhole of a store, out of view, in the tiny Brookridge strip mall near South Broadway and Belleview Avenue in Littleton.
The store is packed with tripods, telescopes, spotting scopes, binoculars and even a few large-format cameras. Among astronomers and stargazers, S&S Optika has developed a reputation as one of the best, if not the best, specialty optics stores between Chicago and the West Coast.
“If anyone tells me they’re interested in buying a telescope, I tell them they have to talk with S&S first,” said Jim Moravec, founder of the International Association of Astronomical Studies and a science teacher at North High School in Denver.
The store caters as much to amateur stargazers as it does to professional astronomers. Telescopes range in price from $190 to $6,000. But it’s the professional knowledge and support, from assembly and installation to maintenance, that draw such a wide following of loyal customers.
In about 1980, one of Cathie’s favorite customers, Tim Havens, began hanging around the store more and more. He convinced her that their match was made in heaven, and the two walked not to a chapel but to the steps of the University of Denver’s Chamberlin Observatory in south Denver, where they were married.
Their lives still revolve around telescopes, astronomy and serving stargazers.
The Havenses recently built the IAAS a $10,000 refractory telescope – 6 inches in diameter and 8 1/2 feet long – which Moravec’s students will use in a project for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to map geological movements on the moon’s surface.
They have assisted the Denver Museum of Nature & Science with many of its public programs, including ones on Haley’s Comet and NASA’s Voyager mission to Saturn. They frequently can be found helping members of the Denver Astronomical Society at the Chamberlin Observatory, which hosts monthly open houses for the public. Admission is $1.
Even bird watchers and Audubon Society members flock to their store for spotting scopes and binoculars.
Most recently, the Havenses assisted the Jefferson County School District in installing two 14-inch-diameter reflecting telescopes at its Windy Peak Astronomy Center near Bailey.
“It was a hobby to me that grew out of control,” Cathie said. “It’s been wonderful.”
Staff writer Mike McPhee can be reached at 303-820-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com.
