Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

My very first watch was probably a Timex.  We had neighbors two doors down, the Reeves, and Fern and Orrin were like grandparents to us, by proximity anyway.  Our natural grandparents lived in Iowa when we were small, and the Reeves were very much family.  Orrin was a watchmaker and worked at Rosensweig’s Jewelers in Phoenix.  He had a little magnifying loop on his glasses and in the evenings would work on the watches he brought home with him to repair.  He had a workbench in the back bedroom with a pull-out drawer that would fit tight against his stomach so when he dropped a part, it landed in the drawer instead of the floor.  The area was well-lit and I remember watching him for hours as he teased apart the inner workings of watch mechanisms.  To the youthful that might read this, you may be unaware that all that we had were wind-up watches, and their exactness was not based on the atomic clock or cell phone time.  Orrin didn’t have much good to say about my Timex, despite that fact that he gave it to me.  One problem that applied then, and still does almost universally, is that if you give someone something you’ve repaired that fails, you are likely to see it again- to re-repair it.  Orrin cleaned and oiled and gave appropriate CPR to that watch and kept it running.

 I ran cross-country and track my freshman and sophomore years in high school, and Mom and Dad gave me a stop watch that I could run with.  It didn’t tell time, but got a lot of use anyway.  My junior year I got a job in a salvage store.  The boss would occasionally bid on the returned items from Fed-Mart.  They would come in huge boxes, 6 foot square and 2 feet deep.  Among all of the other goodies, I found several watches that had been returned and that didn’t work.  The boss gave them to me as they weren’t salable like they were, and my first watch repair adventures began.  These were pretty cool because they were self-winders.  Instead of having to wind the watch every day to keep it running, there was a little centrifugal weight inside that was geared to wind the mainspring.  Moving your arm would make the weight spin and keep the spring wound.  Orrin was fairly respectful of these mechanisms, and I cleaned and oiled them and was able to resuscitate three out of four, with a little cannibalization.  I wore them for years, and then after Beverly and I were married and moved off to Boston to go to school, she bought me one of the new LED digital watches for my birthday. To see the time, you had to push a button and the red LED display would glow with both the date and time.  I learned a valuable lesson that every young husband should appreciate from that watch.  The watch she bought me wasn’t exactly the watch I wanted, so I returned it and got the one I did want.  Big Mistake.  And men, I know you can’t see the problem with that (and I’m still a bit unclear as well), but that doesn’t make any difference.  If your  sweetheart goes to the trouble of finding out what you want and shopping for it and wrapping it up and giving it to you as a surprise because she loves you, just suck it up and love it, whether or not it was the one you wanted.  Peace and love at home is much more important than how the time and date are displayed on the face of the watch (or whatever).  Anyway, I wore that watch until all the chrome wore off and the buttons didn’t work any more, and finally the LCD watches were born.  Their display is continuous, and you only need to push the button to light the display when it is dark; a big improvement.  I had a series of Timex and other LCD display watches over the years, and they were only $25 or $30 dollars (actually quite a lot at the time), but one might last for several years with an occasional new battery.  I have had some much nicer watches, but I’m not smart enough to take them off before I begin a project in the garage, and the cheaper models hold together better  and aren’t such a loss when you break them. 

My current watches are the $5-$10 variety from Walmart with a Velcro band and LCD display.  I have stuck with the same model now for 5 or 6 years, and while I’ve had to modify them a bit (the pins that hold the band pop out, so I have just heated up a paper clip red hot and melted it through the same place the pins would fit, and then cut it off to make it permanent), I feel just fine about throwing them away every couple of years.  As the Timex guy might say, they “Take a lickin’ and keep on telling accurate time” (they don’t actually “tick”).  So what does that say for the watchmakers of the world?  I guess there are still some higher-end watches that a watchmaker may be needed to maintain.  Orrin passed away just after the digital revolution in watches began, so he didn’t get to witness in person the decline of his trade, but I still feel a little guilty when I strap on my cheap digital watch.