News Summary

SPRINGFIELD — To Bob Christel, the tick and tock say a lot about a clock. If they are evenly spaced and balanced, the mechanism driving them is, too. But if the sounds lurch after one another like a man with unmatched leg lengths clunking over a boardwalk in ill-fitting fitting wooden shoes, it's time to make adjustments.

Although strictly a hobbyist, Christel specializes in Connecticut clocks, most of them mantel models made "between the middle of the 1800s and 1910" and many with decorative ginberbread, he said.

Every Tuesday and Saturday, he's used to winding his 25 or so clocks. But on Good Friday this year, Christel, 82, abandoned his routine to get a look at the inner workings of a clock that wouldn't fit on any of the mantels or walls of the Christels' neatly kept home in Eastview Heights: He got a rare up-close look at Big Ben.

As purists will point out, Big Ben originally referred to the 13-ton bell that sounds the hour at the British Parliament. But to most people the name includes the clock's 23-foot diameter face made of 312 pieces of opal glass; the 5-ton clockworks; the 316-foot tower that supports it; and the 400-pound striker Christel heard sounding the noon hour the day of his visit.

"It was loud," he said.

After hearing it, Christel learned Big Ben also includes the oversize old English pennies used to adjust the timing mechanism.

"If they want to alter the time by a fraction of a second, they'll add or take off old pennies," he said.

The first clock Christel fixed was a Connecticut model that belonged to his maternal grandmother and that didn't keep a second of time during the 40 years it spent in the Norwalk, Ohio, home, in which he grew up.

At a time he estimates at "Oh, my golly, 30 years ago," Christel used what he calls "unconventional methods" to clean it.

Then an industrial arts and math teacher at North High School, he took the clock's mechanism to Rick Chimento's auto shop class and dunked it in carburetor cleaner.

"It cleaned off nicely," he said, and with the addition of watch oil, it ran.

Christel's 33-year teaching career ended in 1983 and was followed by 14 years of service for the Clark County MRDD Board and TAC Industries.

After that, he and his wife, Lois, happened to make a fall visit to a clock museum in Bristol, Conn., outside Hartford, with his hobby in mind.

"We asked about learning to fix clocks, and they said, there's a school in Columbia, Pa.," he said.

During trips there for two separate weeklong classes, he learned about making a drawing of the works and disassembling them before doing the cleaning in a proper solution.

All the while he picked up old clocks at auction. (Fifteen now await his attention in the basement.)

After learning the basics, he and two of his classmates asked instructor Roger Chastain for further private instruction. He obliged with a series of three-day workshops in his home.

And this February, Chastain sent an e-mail to his advanced students about a rare opportunity to make trip to the holy grail of mechanical clocks.

Lois recalls her husband receiving the message.

"He read me the e-mail, and I was just astounded, and I said, 'Oh, you're going to go, aren't you?,' " his wife said.

"He said, 'No, why would I go,' " she recalled.

But at his wife's urging — "she said it was the chance of a lifetime," he recalled — he reconsidered, as he often has over the 50-plus years of their marriage.

"Bob comes from a family that thinks, 'If we did it last year, why wouldn't we do the same this year," and I'm totally opposite," his wife said.

"He's very laid back, slow to jump on things, and I jump on them before I think," Lois continued.

She tends to be on the opposite extreme.

"If everything went the way I wanted to, we'd probably both be in jail," she said.

In addition to urging him to go see Big Ben, Lois, a retired nurse, talked with Bob about training for the 334-step climb up the tower, which he did by working up to 13 trips up the 27 steps in the Christel home.

And he saw the sense of it, in part because of his experience fixing clocks.

Over time Bob Christel has learned that to his tick, his wife, Lois, provides the perfect tock.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.