Time for a Change
Daylight-saving time ends this weekend with clocks being set back one hour.
For most of us, this means adjusting the night stand alarm clock before going to bed Saturday night. Sure, the oven clock in the kitchen is a little trickier to reset and maybe the clock in the car dashboard stays an hour off until the owner's manual can be dug out of the glove compartment. But it's a relatively painless process.
But what if you had hundreds of watches to change or maybe four giant ones that can be seen all over town?
Merril Moses, 91, knows a little something about time, having spent 71 years repairing what he estimates to have been 20,000 timepieces.
He's been fixing watches since 1946 when, as a World War II Navy veteran, he took a two-year course in watch repair.
“We went six days a week,” he said of his lessons. “You can't be away from it for too long, or you'll lose the touch.”
He started Moses Jewelers in 1968 on Cunningham Street and moved to the Clearview Mall in 1981. His sons, Larry and Tim, opened a Seven Fields location in 2007.
Sitting with his tools and magnifying loupe at the Moses Jewelers' Clearview Mall location, Moses has seen clocks turn forward and back more times than he cares to count over the decades, but whether windup watches or battery-powered, few in his stores' display ever needed reset with the change of the seasons.
That's because, Moses said, “I don't keep them running. Most of them are battery now, and there is no use in keeping them running because the batteries would run down.”
He said he keeps the non-running watches he has on display at the permanent time of 10:10, at least until they are sold.
“Daylight savings or standard time, I don't have anything to do with it. Life is change,” Moses said philosophically.
Robert Emigh, the owner of Emigh Jewelry, 540 Butler Crossing, wishes the time would simply be left alone.
“Most of our watches are Eco-Drive, powered by light, so they are running. We'll have to reset all those by hand. We'll put one of the associates on it,” Emigh said. He added the time will be reset on Monday after the store opens.“We probably have 100 watches and clocks. It will take a couple of hours to do it, depending on how busy we are,” he said.“I would love it if it gets light at noon and stays light until 9,” he added. “It's depressing when it gets dark at 5.”Stephen Goslaw, the owner of Robert Stephens Custom Jewelers, 141 N. Main St., will reset many of his customers' watches.“We have a lot of customers that are not totally sure how to reset their wristwatches,” Goslaw said. “The little knob often has a screwed down crown that tightens up, so they can't reset it. Lots of them have this, so they bring them in to be reset.”Butler County maintenance worker Devin Schweinsberg doesn't have hundreds of watches, just four giant timepieces that can be seen all over town.Schweinsberg is in charge of the four clocks in the 190-foot-tall tower of the Butler County Courthouse.The four clock faces used to be controlled by “something that looked like a VCR,” said Schweinsberg, until about four years ago when the tower was struck by lightning, frying the controller.Now, he said, the clocks are regulated by an automatic controller built by the Verdin Company of Cincinnati.The device controls a mechanical “face controller that physically moves four clocks,” he said.The face controller sits on the old clock house, a wooden structure that once protected the clock's machinery from the elements. The now-disused clock house is covered in chalked signatures from various workers and visitors over the years.Schweinsberg said during time changes the hands automatically either halt for an hour (in the fall) or move ahead an hour (in the spring.)
“I only come up here twice a year to oil the face controller gear box,” he said.Unfortunately, Les Zang, the maintenance supervisor at the Butler Senior High School, doesn't have an automatic option.The 200 classroom clocks at the senior high school all need to be reset by hand, a task that takes the school's seven custodians extra time.“Some are electric. Some are battery,” said Zang. “While some buildings have atomic clocks that reset automatically, here we do them all by hand.“Each custodian in each wing takes care of their own clocks, so they are responsible to have them changed for Monday morning,” he said.“They do them Friday night. On the average each custodian has about 30 clocks, including those in places like teachers' lounges,” Zang said. “It probably takes about five minutes to change each clock. It's time-consuming.”Zang said the task takes longer because the clocks are not all uniform models due to replacements over the years.“We probably replace 30 a year,” he said.They are also responsible for resetting the timers in the parking lot lights at the school.Custodian Debbie Gibson has 14 classroom clocks in the wing she is responsible for, all needing a ladder to be reached.“It takes at least an hour to do it safely with a ladder,” she said.“It would be nice if we didn't do daylight-saving time,” said Zang. “It would save us a lot of time.“Daylight-saving time was designed for farmers, so they could get out to the barn earlier, those that didn't have lights, so they could start to work earlier,” said Zang, who doubted those conditions affect many modern farmers.
