Tempus fugit! Yes, time flies - words that are often engraved on the face of a clock to remind us that we exist in a fleeting moment, a world hurtling through space and time changing with every second that we breathe in and out; time measured in the steady, inexorable swing of a pendulum and the equally steady beat of a heart.
Ian MacDonald knows a thing or two about time! When he emerged from his stint in the military in 1946, it didn’t take him more than a few heartbeats to decide to enroll himself in a two-year watchmaking course at Central Tech in Toronto
“I liked working with precision instruments, getting in there and putting a complicated mechanism together and then seeing it work”. Ian was gifted with a steady hand and the limitless patience needed in a profession that demanded minute attention to detail.
When he first embarked on his training in 1947 and 1948, watches and clocks were still “mechanical”, driven by sets of tiny gears and wheels; balanced with jewels and teeny weeny pivots measuring a mind-boggling six-thousandth of an inch. Battery powered watches were just in their infancy and the clock world had yet to enter the digital revolution.
Ian quickly found work at Lloyd Thompson Jewellers in Parry Sound. Four years later, he took his skills as a watchmaker to the instrument lab at Orenda Engines in Nobel. There he worked on the instruments and probes of the Iroquois Engine, designed for the ill-fated Avro Arrow, which is still one of the most advanced jet engines ever developed. When the Orenda plant closed in 1959, he purchased his own jewelry store and went into business for himself.
MacDonald’s jewelry store was one of two jewellers on Parry Sound’s main street. Generally, residents and visitors who were looking for fancy teacups or a beautiful china service would head for Laird’s, while those looking for a watch or a clock repair would visit Ian. For 25 years he sold and repaired watches and clocks, closing his doors in 1985 when he retired. Tempus fugit!
Ian may have retired from the jewelry store business, but his watchmaking skills continued to bring him customers who were searching for someone to fix a clock they had inherited or found at a yard sale. With the advent of the digital revolution, it was becoming harder and harder to get old timepieces repaired. Watchmaking was becoming a dying art, literally ticking its way into oblivion.
“The watchmaker’s school has folded,” Ian mused. Even the Ontario Watchmaker’s Association has vanished.
“People would come to me with a clock or a watch they got from the family wanting to see if it could be made to work again.” And of course, the lure of a repair was irresistible to Ian.
“I’ve seen some interesting clocks,” he said, wandering around his basement workshop. In one corner stands a watchmaker’s workbench dating from 1910. Originally the bench belonged to Lloyd Thompson’s jewelry store, where Ian had worked when he first graduated from the watchmaker’s training course at Central Tech.
The workbench remains equipped with two banks of drawers full of tiny bits and pieces: cogs and wheels, pivots and jewels, row after row of glass and plastic watch faces carefully tucked into individual paper envelopes. Its surface is strewn with tools, including a jeweler’s lathe occasionally pressed into service by Ian when he can’t find a part he needs! There’s a timepiece from a WWII airplane and right beside an old-fashioned alarm clock sits a 1928 cylindrical 8-day clock that once popped into the dashboard of a vehicle, long since consigned to the scrap heap.
Mounted on the walls of his basement hideaway are other souvenirs of a life’s fascination with “time”: a 1910 Canadian Time clock that ticked away the hours in the judge’s chambers. “Heaven only knows what that clock has seen,” Ian chuckled.
There’s a kitchen shelf clock from the turn of the century, complete with a bell alarm, a charming cat clock from the fifties – its saucy tail chasing the minutes and the hours while its eyes roll from side to side. A magnificent, hand carved cuckoo clock from the late 1800’s sits proudly on another wall, its wooden surface gleaming with the patina of age. Unlike cuckoo clocks made today, this earlier model came equipped with heavy, cast brass plates inside. No cheap plastic there! Another cuckoo clock abandoned by its owner had lost a piece of the woodwork around its face but no problem - using the older cuckoo clock as a model, Ian carved a replacement piece so that it now looks complete again.
As he celebrates his eighty-fifth birthday, Ian continues to repair the odd clock or watch with an amazingly steady hand. “I won’t be rushed,” he says ruefully, “I’m too old for deadlines … I’ll only take repair work if there’s no push to get it done right away.” Despite this, there’s a gleam in his eye when he surveys the clocks waiting for repairs on the old workbench.
Time may fly, but Ian’s steady hands and patient skill continue to coax a few old clocks and watches back to life for owners who treasure these reminders of family and friends; those who yearn for the soft tick of the clock’s heart beating slowly and insistently into the future. Tempus fugit!
Lost In Time
Ian MacDonald finds the lure of making a watch tick again irresistible as he works at his home.
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