I keep promising to start posting here regularly and then I flake off. Anyway this time I really mean it.
Yesterday my neighbor, who is also the town first selectperson, asked me to wind the town clock while he was away for a week. I didn't even know there was a town clock, let alone that it was part of the job description of the first selectperson to wind it. It turns out that somebody donated the clock to the town a long time ago, and specified that it be installed in the belfry of the Congregational church. So obviously almost nobody realizes that it even is the "town" clock. It occurs to me that this is probably a First Amendment violation but nobody cares.
The reason the First Citizen is winding is because the church member who used to do it can no more. The congregation has dwindled and right now, the church seems to be inoperative and doesn't even have pastor. So Gary didn't know what else to do and started winding the clock himself. This is obviously not a long-term solution. Anyway we went over there and he taught me how to do it. This involves going up to the balcony, then climbing a steep ladder and going through a hatchway into the belfry. The clock is a beautiful Seth Thomas mechanism has to be at least nearly 100 years old because the company stopped making them in 1929. I saw one before in a clock shop where I had my grandparent's old pendulum clocks repaired, and I wanted to buy it then as a decorative object. Of course hardly anyone ever sees this one.
It's weight driven. The weights fall down a shaft to the side, so it's a bit different from the model you see at the link. Lifting the bell weight is a lot of work, even with the mechanical advantage of the crank and gear works. It probably weighs two or three hundred pounds. The weight that drives the clock is much easier to lift. Towns installed these clocks in the 19th Century when most people couldn't afford timepieces, but life was becoming much more regimented by time due to factory work. Our town was exclusively agricultural back then, however, so presumably this was just intended as a prestige item. Willimantic, which was a factory town, is a bit too far away for the locals to have worked there before the automobile.
Nowadays, I suspect that the burghers don't really care about the clock. I think if they do want it to stay in operation they'll have to come up with some money to put someone on retainer to wind it and keep it oiled. It seems that nobody cares about old stuff anymore. The price of antique furniture has crashed and antique houses don't sell. I regret that actually. Anyway I'll wind the clock tomorrow and again on Saturday, before Gary gets back. Then I hope we'll have a conversation about what to do next.
My parents and sister went to Cornell University. There's the requisite clock tower, tall and august and stately. It probably has ivy growing on it. A few decades ago, the Cornell Alumini Magazine published an April Fools' issue with the tower on its cover, the old metal analog clock numbers transformed into a digital face with bright red Arabic numerals. Digital numbers were relatively new at the time, and not yet common. But could you imagine the horror of such a thing actually coming true?
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