Volunteers bring Empire Building's clock bell back to life (w/video)

Bong! Bong! Bong!

Thanks to a small corps of fellows fired up by the challenge of fixing old contrivances, the 1908 clock atop downtown Santa Rosa’s Empire Building once again strikes the hour. The timely clanging of the tower clock’s great bell is charming, retro.

But when Stan Jaffe hears it, he thinks back to when the clock was new and entirely essential to the nearly 8,000 people of Santa Rosa.

“It was a whole different era,” said Jaffe, the Keysight Technologies engineer chiefly responsible for the restoration of the hourly bong. “It was like pre-electricity.”

More than 100 years ago, not everyone owned a clock or a watch. Though the domed tower wasn’t originally part of renowned architect John Galen Howard’s design for what began as the Santa Rosa Bank Building, and in the eyes of some detracts from the classic grace of the structure, the clock’s four faces and its hourly strikes for decades helped townsfolk keep their lives on schedule.

It’s not clear how many years have passed since the strike mechanism worked, or worked consistently. The clock wasn’t operating at all when, about three years ago, it piqued the interest of John Roche and Cory Vader, who had opened an information technology business, V&R Solutions, in the Empire Building.

They spoke with partners of the law firm that has for decades been the building’s primary tenant: Geary, Shea, O’Donnell, Grattan & Mitchell. Two of the partners, John Geary and Patrick Grattan, own the building with Greenbrae attorney Thom Taylor.

Roche and Vader learned in 2011 that the clock wasn’t keeping time because building superintendent Dan Marlin, who’d long wound and tended it, had retired to Wyoming. The clock could not strike on the hours, law-firm partners told the pair from V&R, because the decades had broken teeth on a six-inch gear essential to the strike mechanism, and estimates for replacing it were astronomical.

Roche and Vader cleaned up the clockworks, well-built in 1908 by the former E. Howard & Co. of Massachusetts, and commenced taking turns climbing up into the tower to wind it. They continue to wind it today.

Enter Stan Jaffe.

The engineer with Keysight, formerly Agilent, formerly Hewlett Packard, enjoys pastimes that involve working with his hands. Intrigued by vintage clocks, he learned clock repair from Cyrus Wind Dancer, a Santa Rosa clock repairman and restorer who year ago made repairs to the Empire Building clock.

Curious about why the clock keeps time but doesn’t chime, Jaffe did some research. He became satisfied that the strike mechanism could be fixed with some elbow grease and not at great expense, and he recruited some engineer and ham-radio buddies to help him.

They are H-P/Agilent retiree Larry Nutting and Greg Farrell and Bob Dildine, both of whom work as contractors for Keysight. The clock project, which they began earlier this fall, was not their first volunteer restoration effort.

They and Jaffe toiled merrily to renovate a 20-kilowatt RCA transoceanic Morse code radio transmitter that was put into service in West Marin in 1959 and hadn’t been operable for years. The engineers put in more than two years of work on it when it was ceremoniously flipped back on at Point Reyes National Seashore in the summer of 2013.

For the clock project, the first order of business was to replace the damaged gear. Jaffe went online and found, for sale, a clock gear that had been manufactured by E. Howard & Co. and never used. Roche and Vader donated the money for the purchase.

The gear had not been completely finished, so Jaffe and his helpers arranged for a Keysight model-maker, Randy Miranda, to machine a notch that had to be in place for the gear to work. Keysight, which encourages community volunteer work by its employees, allowed Miranda to finish the gear on site and on company time.

Jaffe and the others on the volunteer crew put the new gear in place, cleaned decades of gunk from the strike mechanism’s toothed wheels and earlier this month used the hand-crank to raise the 1,600-pound weight that powers the strike-works.

Jubilation. At the top of the hour, the gears turned and cables pulled, and the hammer smacked the big bell, more than three feet across at its base. But the number of strikes didn’t coincide with the hour.

More adjustments. On Saturday morning, Roche welcomed Jaffe, Farrell, Nutting and Dildine back into the tower for another work party.

At 10 a.m., the strike mechanism began to whir and the hammer banged the bell. Once. Only once.

Jaffe eyed a metal arm that ?he’s become familiar with. “It ?looks like it’s a little sticky still,” he said.

He and his buddies worked a bit longer Saturday and, voila. At the top of each hour, the fine old clock now strikes precisely as many times at it’s supposed to.

What the future holds for the Empire Building and its again-striking rooftop clock is up in the air. The partners who own the building have announced they’ve put it up for sale, and soon the Geary firm will move to new digs on E Street at Sonoma Avenue.

Clock-winders Roche and Vader hope to keep their business in the building, but they know everything could change if it’s sold.

Whatever comes, Jaffe and the other engineer-tinkerers treasure having been able to figure out how to restore the top-of-the hour strikes.

Farrell said it’s been great to learn about the clock “and also to be able to do something for the community, which is really fun.”

You could say that for him and his mechanically inclined pals, it’s been a good time.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.