A Tale of Two Clocks — and of a Happy Gamble.

In 1806, Deacon Joe Waller ordered from Riley Whiting, a Winchester, Connecticut clock maker, the wooden works, pendulum, and weights for a long-case clock, a ‘grandfather’ clock.  He had made, or made himself, we don’t know which, a beautiful but rustic case of walnut, and thus was created “The Waller Clock” for his new farm in West Enosburgh, Vermont.  Joe, alongside his father Israel and brother David, had fought in the Revolutionary War with Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, when Vermont was not even a colony but only a rocky, hilly outback claimed by both New Hampshire and New York. The “Deacon” came about later, when he split from the Congregational Church he had helped found in Enosburgh Falls and decamped to a new Baptist church because, as he wrote, he “didn’t want to take communion with those who had merely been sprinkled.”  Deacon Joe is the longest living male in my direct Waller line, dying at 87 in 1852.

The Waller Clock

The clock passed down to Joe’s eldest son, Chester, and then in time to his son Henry.  By then, the family had moved on from Enosburgh Falls to Barton Landing, up in the “Lost Kingdom”, the far northeast corner of Vermont.

Henry died in the 1879/80 measles epidemic, at age 36.  His wife, Josephine, passed on 120 days later, of a broken heart people said.  Left behind were four boys, ages 1 through 7, the second of whom, Halley, aged four, grew into my Grandfather.  The orphans were parceled out to uncles and grandparents.  The orphaned Waller clock was taken in by Henry’s sister and disappeared from Waller view. 

Until 1935.  Then Halley got a call from a second cousin: the clock had been standing for over 50 years, unused, in a second bedroom of his Vermont farm house which was being put up for sale; “if you want it, come and get it.”  Grandpa drove out from Akron, Ohio and brought the Waller clock back into its proper family.

My son Frank had been hankering for the clock for a few years.  My Dad had passed it on to me before he died, and Frank seemed to see in that a recognition of independent adulthood, a senior rite of passage as it were. I began to empathize.

My talk of sending the clock off to Frank, in Champlin, Minnesota distressed Ann; she had become attached to the clock steadily tick-tocking away in our kitchen/sitting area.  I, on the other hand, thought Frank had a good idea and a good claim.  So how to mollify both?

Could I replicate the Waller Clock? I started idly checking auction houses on line. In December of 2016, I came upon an auction of clocks in Buffalo, New York; among the offerings was a “New England Tall Case Clock: early 19^th C, butternut case, original painted dial, wooden works, time and strike calendar movement.”  The consignor claimed it operational; the auction house folks assured me that all the parts were there.  And the case looked good – at least in a small b&w photo on-line.  

Was I serious about this, about giving up  the Waller clock and replacing it with another?  This Federal-style clock was the first I had found on offer.  “What the hell”; I put in a ridiculous, low-ball bid, sight unseen.  In January, word came that I now owned a second grandfather clock – in Buffalo.  And I dared not tell Ann.

Licensed inter-state shippers bid twice or more what the clock cost, but the auction house led me to a gypsy shipper whom they trusted to handle antiques.  She gave me a good price and said that she could pick up the clock in January and probably would have a West Coast run by March or so.  Delivery was to Cypress Tree, in Redmond, our trusted furniture restorer and re-finisher.

January came and went; no pick-up.  No problem said the auction house; we’ll just hold it for you.  March came and went; neither pick-up nor delivery.  In April, the pick-up in Buffalo. In August, the delivery.  I went over to Cypress Tree to see what I had bought.  Good news: the black walnut (!) case  needed minimal work, and a missing finial could be reproduced.  Neutral news: while the second hand seemed original, the hour and minute hands, and one of the two weights, looked like more modern replacements, perhaps later 19^th or early 20^th C.  Bad news: the calendar was a dummy.  Not such bad news, really; they rarely worked anyway.

The works and dial were as advertised.  In fact, the works were virtually identical to the Waller Riley Whiting’s design and the apple wood gears and spindles looked as if they came from the same lathe under the same hand.  I suspect I have either an unsigned Riley Whiting or a Hoadly, a partner of Whiting’s who left to make his own clocks in 1813.  I commissioned Cypress Tree to lightly clean the dial; reproduce the missing finial;  tighten up, steam clean and wax the case; and hold the clock until we returned from Scotland.

In early October, Ann went into hospital for a knee replacement.  The next day the clock was delivered and the Waller clock wrestled downstairs.  I set the newby up where the Waller Clock had stood since 1991.  And it ran! – for 20 minutes.  Call to my old clock repairer: he no longer made house calls on long case clocks, but led me to Storm Smole, nee’ Austormius Josephus von Smoleans, trained in his family’s Austrian clock works founded 1729, and proprietor of  Edelweiss Time Company on Bainbridge Island.

 

In the meantime, Ann came home.  The next day she observed that “the clock has stopped.”  “Yes, I have a guy coming tomorrow.”  Storm came, admired and tinkered, and it ran again.  It chimed the hour; that was new, for the chime on the Waller clock had been decommissioned by my Dad long before as ill-fitting the dignity of the austere, tall case.  No mention from Ann at the new sounds ringing through the house every sixty minutes.

 

The Janes Clock

A week went by.  Sure, she was distracted by her knee recovery regimen,  but no notice of this new resident of our home.  A second week.  Then she asked why I had removed the door knob on the clock.  No, I hadn’t removed any knob: puzzlement.  Finally, more than two weeks after the replacement of the Waller clock: “something is different . . .”  I then introduced her to the Janes clock.

The Janes clock is a delight, happily tick-tocking away and once I learned its sensitivities, keeping accurate time.  The Waller clock, after careful encasement and shipment (read expensive) is now safely in its new home in Minnesota.  A new and challenging climate for a wood works clock – huge temperature and humidity swings – but not too unlike the conditions it lived in in Maryland and Ohio, though very different from those in Vermont.  But it will be happy there, at 212, and do well for generations of Wallers well into the 21^st C, I am sure. 

And I?  I am one happy gambler!  

Holiday Positives

At our speaker’s club Thursday, the Topic Master spoke of the stress-free holiday he had enjoyed – clue: without family.  He recalled for us those strains and tensions of family holidays – the expectations, the shoulds and shouldn’ts, the pressures and judgments -- and how free of all that he felt this year.  There were empathetic nods around the table, so he challenged each of us to share a positive holiday memory, and the tales brought smiles all around.

My father was a challenging figure – a workaholic under the pressures of WWII and the Cold War that he had to deal with at the War Department and the AEC.  He also was a bit of a martinet, demanding at table that we three kids defend our views, use precise words, think clearly and logically.  It was how one raised a child, as he had been raised.

 

Later on, he learned to relax, long after I had left home. Until those later days, though, I lived in awe, admiration and respect, yearning for his approval and affection.

My younger sister is a poet.  Her poetry selections this year (her 23^rd annual gift of her works that meet her standards) included one entitled My Father.  The long and poignant portrait of our Dad and her relationship with him included this stanza:

               My father was my model for approach/avoidance.

               He terrified me.  I dreaded/couldn’t wait,

               Until I heard him enter the house,

               Tall and smiling, or grim and cold,

               He was our own weather system.

               His mien cast the atmosphere.

               . . . .

She, the youngest, grew a close and loving relationship; he mellowed and she managed him better than did her older brother and sister.  We, on the other hand, had issues to resolve.  

But not at Christmas.  At every Christmas time, a boy emerged.  Dad loved the holidays -- the music, the lights, the fellowship.  He blocked out those “real world” tensions for a time and lavished his joy on all.  Christmas Eve and Morning were ceremonies of suspense, New Year’s day an open house for friends, neighbors and acquaintances – an open house with roaring fire, punch, often roast oysters and always pans of fin and haddie.

The first year after leaving the AEC and moving to private industry, in New York City, Mom and Dad rented a house in New Canaan.  It had a 16 foot living room ceiling – the boy’s Christmas dream.  He bought a 15’ tree.  Our stored decorations were at best for a 7’ tree; off to Gus’s Hardware for strings and strings of lights, cartons and cartons of bulbs and garlands – and, oh yes, a 12’ step ladder in order to place the stuff and put the sacred star atop the whole.  Christmas décor that year was a budget-buster for Mom.  (A once in a lifetime: the house they built and moved into the next year, and all subsequent houses, had but 8’ ceilings.)

So the Soltice Holidays were always positive and welcome in our home, not just for themselves, but because they cracked open the patriarch and let out that gentle Ohio boy, whom my Mother so loved, hidden inside.