By one of those lovely coincidences that sometimes happen, I was reading Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance (about various kinds of fathers and what we inherit from them) when I got the call last week that my father’s clock was repaired and ready for pickup. My father was a railroad man—the kind who didn’t just work for the railroad but also had model trains sprawling over half the garage or basement—and the only item I asked after his and my mom’s deaths was the old railroad clock from their house. It’s a beauty–a Seth Thomas clock with simple lines, a lovely mahogany case, and a shiny brass pendulum and weight.
According to my brother (the family historian), the clock presided over the train station in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, from about 1910. (The clockmaker who repaired it for us also suggested a date of about 1900.) In those days, railway clocks had to be sturdy and consistently on time because trains connected the United States. Once a day, my brother says, someone sent out a radio or telegraph message so that station clocks all over the country could all be set to the precisely correct time. (He thinks the phrase “on the ball” derives from a railroad inspector, Ball, whose advocacy got 75% of America’s trains running on strict schedules. Most websites disagree, but my brother tends to do deeper research, so I don’t regard the issue as settled.)
When electricity came in, these lovely old clocks were kept around as memorabilia for a while, but the Pawhuska train station was decommissioned around 1968, and my dad was given the clock. (By then, he was the head of the Tulsa office for the Frisco railroad, a midsized Midwestern company bought in 1980 by the Burlington Northern.) From then on, that clock always hung in our dining room. My mom kept it through two moves after my dad’s death, and when she died last year, it was the only piece of furniture I thought worth the expense of transporting from Oklahoma to Massachusetts.
It was an expense–and a bit of a hassle, too. My brother hand-delivered it to my friend Janet, who carefully boxed it up and mailed it to me safely. Two weeks later, my husband and I drove it up Newfane, Vermont, to Richard Bates at The British Clockmaker. He had a year’s backlog, he told us, but we weren’t in a hurry. Last week, after fourteen months, we got the call to come and fetch it home.
Both visits to the clockmaker’s workshop felt like episodes from an Anne Tyler novel. Newfane is idyllic, with an old brick courthouse, a white Congregational church, and a fairly famous inn grouped picturesquely around the town green. And the clockmaker himself, Richard Bates, matches the setting. He grew up with clocks and apprenticed with his dad, right there in the house where he still lives. A bit shy, he’s also bright-eyed, meticulous, and passionate about his work. When we first walked into his workshop, I saw only gray precision machinery and tabletops cluttered with boxes of gears and screws. But when I looked more closely, I noticed exquisite antique clock faces and many gorgeous time-telling devices, from grandfather clocks to tiny German table-top clocks. Richard was such a vivid character that, on the ride home, Michael and I invented a quirky, small-town romance for him. (Some quiet, quietly pretty potter–or maybe web designer–with a nerdy kid moves back home to rural Vermont. She remembers Richard from a grade school crush, and things unfold from there. It would make a great Hallmark Christmas special.)
Then we had to get the clock on the wall. Richard gave us detailed instructions for getting a heavy wooden clock properly mounted, punctuated with warnings about what would happen if (1) it wasn’t attached to something stronger than drywall or (2) it wasn’t mounted exactly level. So the next stage was to call on Peter, the guy who handles our periodic bursts of enthusiasm for renovation. (Though less shy than the clockmaker, he’s similarly bright-eyed, meticulous, and passionate about his work.) Peter examined the clock, pursed his lips at the place we’d been planning to hang it, and suggested we instead give it pride of place in the dining room. Two days later, he returned with a spirit level and a plank to mount behind the drywall. In twenty minutes, he had it hanging securely and absolutely, exactly level.
The clock looks beautiful. More surprising to me, it keeps perfect time. And more important, it evokes my dad—and not just because it’s a railroad clock as he was a railroad man, or even because it was his clock for many years. Though my parents loved parties and my dad was an excellent salesman, at home he was a quiet man. After work, he wanted a drink with my mom, a nice family dinner, and then to be left alone to read his paper in peace. The clock is quiet, too. Its dignity and its hushed tick give our dining room a satisfying air of order and calm.
I’m sure my dad would be happy to see it hanging there.
This is a such a perfect, and lovely, account of our clock adventure. It’s remarkable that the clock conveys both a prior way of measuring time and a different quality of time itself. Someone very smart had to figure out what relationship of gears and weight would produce the accurate movement of the hands around the dial, still reliable after a hundred years. The soft tick and steady movement of the pendulum suggest that time itself may mutate as the years and their surrounding circumstances evolve. Perhaps we actually experience time differently in 2020 than people did in 1900. When I stand before the clock, I feel an echo of bygone time, perhaps quite different from ours.
Hi Nancy. I love that you have ONE thing that reminds you so of your father and represents so much of what he stood for. Far better than (IMHO) of keeping dozens of little sort-of things to remind you. Of course it helps that it is both functional AND a beautiful piece of furniture. ~Kathy
Your father also had a kind heart and a twinkly sense of humor. He was a lovely man who was always perceptive about my feelings and supportive, from meeting me at the age of 14 until our last visit shortly before he died. I am glad the clock makes you think of him. My guess is that would please him so. He adored you.
Beautiful clock and beautiful story.
Thanks! You must have some things from the time in Japan. I’d love to hear about them.
I love your story, Nancy, and the clock itself; there’s a magic to old clocks that keep good time. I inherited an old Seth Thomas mantle clock (with mercury pendulum, a surprising feature) that had been my great-grandfather’s retirement gift from the Black Episcopal seminary where he (a white Episcopal clergyman) taught Latin, Greek and Hebrew(!). It went to several clock repair shops before we found one equipped to repair it; it has kept excellent time for the twenty years since. One of my favorite Saturday morning rituals is to wind it and tweak it as needed so it’s correct to the second!
I don’t even know what a mercury pendulum is! But it’s a lovely table-top clock, and I’m pleased to know its history. What a great family of educators you come from!
Your essay is very much on the ball! It contains hidden depths. It would be a lovely piece to teach, with all its various streams of thought presented so beautifully in such a limited amount of space.
That was a lovely one. It put me on a train which merrily rumbled down a rabbit hole of associations. Kathy Is quite correct- it is brilliant to have one substantial and noble artifact which expresses an ancestor so clearly. Unfortunately, I not only have one, but an attic full of memorabilia from a host of ancestors. I will be doing a favor to my heirs if I just had the Junk-It truck back up to the house while I shoveled all that stuff into it.
More seriously, I too have a railroad clock ticking reassuringly in my dining room. It’s a 1910 E. Howard 8-day Banjo Wall clock which once kept time in the Newtonville Massachusetts station. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a railroad man as well. In his case, he ran the Brighton Yards for the Boston and Albany Railroad. Those yards were to the right of where the Mass Pike toll booths once were, where the Pike bends to make its approach to the city proper. That area once covered many acres of rail yards, and was the hub for all freight shipments on the B&A in and out of Boston.
Ranging further off the track, so speak, I can tell you the Boston and Albany took immense, one might say overweening pride in their railroad. They called themselves “The Railroad Beautiful.” It was an era when railroads vied with one another to build better and more beautifully as a way to compete. Thus, the B&A hired H.H. Richardson no less, to design all their local railroad stations. Thus all stations as far as Worcester were beautiful buildings built of red sandstone with granite footings and slate roofs, and eye-pleasing overhanging roofs to shelter passengers. Then they hired professionals to landscape the surrounding approaches, planting lovely perennials, laurels, azaleas, hydrangeas and placing brick walks through all this to each station.
Of course, cars supplanted railroads, and the Mass. Turnpike Authority claimed the B&A right of way through the north end of Newton. My aunt, who lived in Newtonville, was able to claim the clock from the Newtonville station in advance of the wrecking ball. But she couldn’t save the many lovely Victorians and all the old railroad stations as the Authority gashed a trench through the heart of Newton’s north side. They left only the tracks and a few pathetic plastic shelters where once Richardson’s comfortable and beautiful structures once stood. You have to go to Wellesley to see what Newton’s stations once looked like. But even there, the landscaping has been replaced by parking lots, so that even in using the commuter rail, we have acquiesced to car culture.
Sorry, I plunged off the trestle into the ravine there….
You sound just like my dad! Full of enthusiasm. How lovely about your clock — I’ve seen it, of course, but never heard its wonderful story.