Smith: The old clock again tells us the time

A great many minutes and days and years have ticked past since the 1908 tower clock atop the Empire Building bonged the arrival of a new hour. A long time since it did so consistently, anyway.

The four-faced clock on Old Courthouse Square has its voice back, thanks to a handful of Hewlett-Packard/Agilent/Keysight engineers who relish a mechanical challenge.

“There is no owner’s manual for it,” Stan Jaffe said. A restless engineer, he learned clock repair as a hobby and recruited friends to help figure out how to fix the tower clock’s strike mechanism, powered by a 1,600-pound weight.

Assisting the engineers was John Roche, an IT consultant who works in the Empire Building and, along with business partner Cory Vader, winds and maintains the great clock beneath the gold dome.

Roche showed Jaffe and the other engineers the main problem with the strike works: time had bent and broken teeth off a six-inch gear.

Online research by Jaffe led to the discovery of just such a gear at a going-out-of-business clock manufacturer on the East Coast. Keysight allowed a staff model-maker to perform some necessary machine-shop work on the gear.

A while back, the repair squad got the clock to striking, but the number of chimes didn’t match the hour. More head scratching, analysis, tweaking.

Jaffe and the other guys, who worked on the clock for the love it, toiled in the tower for a few more hours Saturday. They armed the strike mechanism, and at 3 p.m. stood down in the square and looked up.

Bong! Bong! Bong!

Beautiful.

OLD GLORY WAY: Folks who share a street near Santa Rosa’s Slater Middle School hope you might drive, pedal or walk by today. And bring the little ones.

They’re sure to like the flags.

Aware that residents of many neighborhoods enjoy dressing up their yards and homes for Halloween and Christmas, even Easter, resident Meagan Ashley acted to encourage everybody on Jacqueline Drive to display an American flag on Veterans Day. She bought a bunch of small flags for children living on the street to stick in the ground along the curb.

Ashley and her husband, Matt, went door-to-door to ask neighbors if they would like to display a flag on their home. If a neighbor didn’t have a flag, the couple offered to buy one and install the mounting hardware.

Today, visitors to Jacqueline Drive will find an avenue of flags extending from Sonoma Avenue, across from Slater, to Montgomery Drive.

Ashley said the flags will come out on other national holidays, too, and she hopes they’ll spread to neighboring streets.

BILL ANTON DID WELL in public schools, graduating from Santa Rosa High in 1988. Somewhere along the way, the son of Marcia and Dr. Nick Anton resolved to go into education.

He’s now “Principal of the Year” for the state of Vermont. With him at the helm, the extraordinary Dover Elementary School has expanded its early childhood program to 3-year-olds, promoted the teaching of foreign languages and made Dover the first International Baccalaureate primary school in Vermont.

Bravo, Mr. Anton.

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.