TIME ON HIS HANDS : A Clock Repairman Shares His Skills So Craft Will Survive

A dozen or so clocks--some silenced by a yet-to-be-diagnosed ailment, others robustly ticking away--surround Lad Taylor with a constant reminder of the very thing that seems to be forgotten in his workplace--time.

The ragged, drab, green carpet looks as though it has not encountered a vacuum cleaner in 20 years. The walls are shedding their plaster. The two vinyl easy chairs, their stuffing bursting at this seam and that, are coated with dust. The ashtrays are full of cigarette butts; the air is full of stale smoke.

His telephone, which dates back deep into the Dial Age, rings every 30 or so minutes.

“Hello,” he answers, none too perkily. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nine to five, five days a week. Can’t tell you that--have to price ‘em as they come. Yeah. Bye.”

There’s an adjective that exactly, precisely describes what Taylor is not--solicitous.

He does not solicit business. He does not solicit popularity. He does not solicit publicity. You call him; he won’t call you.

When a man excels in an increasingly rare craft--one that will be necessary until the end of time--he has no need to peddle himself.

How many clock repairmen of his caliber are still around in Orange County? Taylor thinks for a moment before responding, “Maybe three.” Not to brag. Ask him an honest question, he’ll give you an honest answer.

“Us old fellows are dying off, and there aren’t enough young ones coming in to keep this trade alive,” he says. “Millions of clocks came over from Europe after World War II. Eventually, they’re either going to have to be cleaned or repaired. Plus, new ones are being made. In another 20 or 30 years, there isn’t going to be anyone left to do the repairing.”

So the 73-year-old pro hopes to disseminate the art of piecing together timepieces before time runs out. He recently began teaching a class in clock-making at Rancho Santiago College--right down the street from his Santa Ana office/home.

The inquiry is posed as casually as possible: Oh, by the way--does he, uh, live here?

“Heck, no. I wouldn’t live in this dump,” Taylor responds to a mute sigh of relief. “This place is ready for the bulldozer. My wife and I live in a house in the back.”

A total stranger to Taylor has just dropped by. He introduces himself as John Hanneman, a clock repairman who drove in from Sun City to seek Taylor’s respected counsel. Hanneman is in a bit of a tizzy; he’s relatively new at this business and can’t quite figure out the inner workings of an antique specimen left in his care.

Taylor takes the visitor under his wing and proceeds to give him more than he possibly could have bargained for: a hard-to-find part essential to the antique clock’s revival; a lesson in “bushing” improvisation, and a demonstration of custom-made tools.

“He’s got decades of experience, I’ve got five years,” Hanneman says. “I took this up after I retired from the federal government.”

“I’m going to show you something,” Taylor tells his admirer. The something he shows Hanneman is how to punch new bushings out of cost-free, readily available material--a clock’s inside panel.

“Oh, lovely,” Hanneman marvels. “A boxful of bushings is $60, so when you can save that kind of money, it’s a godsend.”

To a lay person’s eyes, the doodads look like mere dots of metal. But those dots represent the nuts and bolts of clock repair. Bushings supplement minuscule holes that--through years of rubbing against the moving parts they encase--have become too elongated.

Taylor is chock-full of such wisdom. “It’s something a person picks up,” he says. “Like these pliers--they’re my invention. My brother made them. He’s a master mechanic.”

You would have to understand what makes a clock tick to appreciate the pliers’ worth. However, one could deduce by the men’s reverence for the tool that it indeed works wonders.

Next Taylor shows off a gadget that holds steady the mainspring’s barrel for winding and unwinding. But just in case you have any big ideas, don’t imagine that you can run right out and buy one. “There’s a guy in Colorado who made these, and sold the rights to some big company,” the expert clock repairman says. “Last I’ve seen of it (on the market) was 10 years ago.”

Then he takes his tourists into a disheveled room meant to be a kitchen. “This is my pride and joy,” he says, pointing at a complex gadget. Clockmakers know it as an instrument lathe, used for shaping pivots and shafts. “It’s worth $25,000; I got it through a horse-trade some years back.”

“Oh, lovely,” Hanneman again enthuses.

Then Taylor points at another machine: “That’s for cleaning clock parts.” Then at a more familiar device: “And that’s my coffee pot.”

Taylor decides to show his temporary apprentice another trick of the trade. The lesson requires a certain internal mechanism, so he volunteers one of his own clocks as an organ donor. “This is the way you take a clock apart,” he says, straight-faced, and haphazardly dumps its innards on his desk.

“I could shake apart a clock and know where all the pieces go when I put it back together,” he adds, after his little joke has won the desired laughs. “Younger fellows have to draw pictures of where everything goes. It’s quite a process.”

A customer walks in to pick up his clock. “How much do I owe you?” he asks.

“Twenty dollars. Your clock should be good for another few years now,” Taylor says.

“All I have to do is live long enough to get my money’s worth,” the customer cracks.

The three men, all hypothetically retired, start talking about advanced age. “My brother’s 82 years old, and he says he’s going to live to be 105 and get shot by a jealous husband,” Taylor interjects. “I intend to stay with it (clock repairing), unless I get arthritis in my hands or something like that.”

He has already retired once. “I had a TV repair business for years. Back in 1970, I had a heart attack, and my doctor said I couldn’t do any more heavy lifting, so I closed down my business. My wife says, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I says, ‘All I know is clocks.’ ”

Taylor has tinkered with clocks ever since he was a boy growing up in Huntington Beach. His knack seems genetic. “My father was an auto mechanic; my older brother is a master mechanic; my younger brother is an architectural engineer,” he says.

“It’s a talent--the knowledge of mechanical things, plus the ability to use your hands.”

Repairing clocks has not made him rich, but it has made him satisfied. “The reason I do this is because I’ve liked it from the beginning,” he says. “You’ve got to like your job, or you’re lost.”

And his profession has made him a statesman in his own field. In 1972, Taylor founded the Orange County chapter of the National Assn. of Watch and Clock Collectors, which still meets once a month and boasts 120 members.

Of his celebrity status he says: “Yeah. It’s an ego trip. That’s all it is.”

His customer leaves. His telephone rings.

“Hello. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right, a class in clock-making. Once a week. Well, I don’t charge anything --the college does.” He glances up with an amused smile, treating his guests to his private, deadpan humor. Of course, the caller cannot see Taylor’s grin. The caller probably assumes that he’s just plain gruff.

“This is my first time to teach a college class,” he says after hanging up. “I’ve taught five or six people at a time, never a whole class. The college heard about me and asked if I’d do it. I figured I should. It’s real important that a new generation learns this trade.”

“If I ever decide to retire, maybe one of my students will take over my business. I’d have to handpick him,” Taylor says, almost wistfully, having no one in mind at the moment.

Taylor himself does not make clocks, as the title of his class indicates. Nor does he collect watches and clocks, as the title of his club indicates. He just repairs clocks. And he just repairs clocks . No watches--clocks and only clocks.

“I’ve never been much on wanting a 300- or 400-year-old clock just because it’s valuable,” he says. “I like them; I’m just not the collector type.”

Still, he and his wife have managed to acquire a few beauties--which she lays claim to, he says.

“Guess I ought to bring out our pieces de resistence ,” he says, then vanishes into his living quarters. Taylor soon returns with a pair of century-old carriage clocks.

One is an ornate, gold-plated British work of art, decorated with silver, mermaidlike creatures. The other is a simple, elegant French design. Each is worth thousands of dollars.

Carriage clocks are the original travel clocks. Before glow-in-the-dark digital numbers, voyagers brought along the portable clocks to keep track of nighttime. “You push this button, and the clock chimes the hour,” Taylor explains.

“Clocks are the only machines that survive,” he notes, admiring his prized possessions. “I’ve worked on 150-year-old clocks that haven’t needed a single new part.”

Alas, they don’t make clocks like they used to, he complains: “Modern clocks wear a lot faster. Even in expensive new clocks, the material is cheap--the metal is thin and soft. When I get modern clocks in here, every one of them needs new bushings.”

Those trendy plastic wristwatches annoy him. “They can be bought for $4 to $25; when they break down, it’s cheaper to throw them away than to have them fixed.

“We in the United States are the biggest wasters. Everything is disposable. You use something once, you throw it away--plastic bags, cardboard, paper. Not only is it bad for the environment, it’s a waste of talent and workmanship.”

Suddenly Taylor’s wife, Jeanne, breezes in, every bit as vivacious as he is curmudgeonly. “If anything happens to my clocks, somebody dies,” she teases, sort of. Then just as suddenly, she disappears.

At that very instant, right on cue, a customer comes walking through the door. “How splendid!” he says, immediately spotting the two carriage clocks. “Want to sell them?”

“My wife would kill me. She just told me so,” Taylor answers.

“Well, if you ever get a divorce from your wife, we’ll do business,” the man assures him.

“I’ve been married to her for 53 years. I think at this point I’ll keep her,” Taylor reckons.

All the while, Hanneman--Taylor’s pupil--has been a fly on the wall, quietly observing his mentor in action. He announces that he had best be going, to beat the afternoon traffic.

It’s not unusual for tyros to show up on his doorstep, Taylor says after Hanneman has departed. He accommodates them. Some of them pay him for his time, some of them don’t. “The main thing I care about is that people learn this profession,” he reiterates. “Every trade needs teachers.”

An ambitious clock repairman could bring in $60,000 a year, Taylor says. “I don’t make that kind of money, because this is more a hobby for me than a business. I don’t charge the going rates, and I only work about 25 hours a week. As you can see”--he motions to his television set--”I goof off a lot.”

And he doesn’t bother to promote himself. “I haven’t spent one cent on advertising,” Taylor says. “I get plenty of business through word of mouth.”

Time--measuring it accurately--is his job, his talent, his existence. Has his profession given him a different perspective on the stuff life is made of?

Taylor does not treat the question as if it were silly, which some would argue that it is. He ponders it, then haltingly responds:

“Well . . . I don’t even know how to explain this. . . . Time is relevant, just like age. I don’t think of myself as being as old as I am. I don’t dwell on age. . . .

“Time is what you make it. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.”