Santa Rosa man restores old clocks at his Rincon Valley shop

Dah-ding! Chime! BONG! Cuckoo! Ting!

It’s the top of the hour at the Rincon Valley shop of Cyrus Wind Dancer, a former Peace Corps volunteer, hippie, car mechanic, homebuilder, ?whistle-blower and Wine Country masseur who now dedicates nearly every waking minute to the repair and preservation of the charming anachronism that is the fine, old clock.

“There are very few things that were made in, say, 1830, that can still function in 2015,” said Wind Dancer. He previously wore the prestigious name Cy Eaton III but discarded it decades ago, along with many ties to the Cleveland-centered family led by his late grandfather, the industrialist and financier Cyrus Stephen Eaton.

Though fascinated since childhood by the science and precision and artistry that goes into a well-made clock, Wind Dancer, 69, didn’t set out to become a horologist until just five years ago. Today his heart races as if over-wound each time someone carries a new challenge through the door of the Clocksmith Cyrus shop on Sonoma Highway.

“Every week, I see something that I haven’t seen before,” he said. Typically, a clock comes accompanied by a story.

Wind Dancer steps to the shop’s eastern wall and eyes a mounted beauty that had long belonged to late Sonoma County Judge Hilliard Comstock. The clocksmith says it’s an 1874 Gale Astronomical Calendar with secondary dials that reflect not only the phases of the moon and the date but a technological marvel: the time of each day’s sunrise and sunset.

On the floor near that clock are pieces of another whose owner, desiring a restoration, told Wind Dancer it sat in a barn in Fort Bragg for 50 or 60 years or longer. That specimen, dating to 1837, features a clockworks frame fastidiously constructed of strips of brass.

Wind Dancer also introduces the Dutch stool, or stoel, clock that was carried from the Netherlands before its World War II-era occupation by Germany and that a local family would like to have restored. And here’s what the clock man calls a Schoolhouse Clock. “The janitor would wind it up once a week,” he said.

A note card attached to it announces, “This clock stopped April 18, 1906, 5:12 a.m.” That’s the timing of the great earthquake that devastated much of Santa Rosa and triggered the ghastly fires in San Francisco. The same card notes, “It stopped again August 24, 2014, 3:30 a.m.” That was the Napa quake.

Clocks come to him, Wind Dancer said, with “an amazing amount of history.” Now the keeper of an entire library on timepieces, he said that though we now take clocks entirely for granted, for centuries they were handmade by brilliant craftsmen. No two were exactly alike, and they were found only in the homes of the well-to-do.

Back when we were primarily an agrarian society, there was for most of us no pressing need to know the precise time. But technology changed that: Without accurate time-keeping, trains could not avoid collisions, ships could not safely navigate the seas and factory owners could not choreograph production.

“The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age,” wrote historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford in 1934.

“The clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men … It marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire.”

Wind Dancer traces his own passion for the clock to an evening at the Ohio home of his prominent grandfather, Cyrus Stephen Eaton, who’d made a fortune in steel and other enterprises, went broke during the Great Depression and rebounded as chairman of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and West Kentucky Coal Co.

It was 1957, and the former Cyrus Eaton III was 11 years old. “I remember,” he said, “it was the night the Russians sent Sputnik into space.”

His grandfather’s towering grandfather clock had stopped keeping time. Eaton III tinkered with and tried to understand the assembly of wheels - not “gears” - and springs and weights. That he got the clock working again surprised him at least as much as it did the grandfather from whom he’d later disassociate.

The hands would spin for more than 50 years before Wind Dancer - he accepted the name from Native American elders during a vision quest retreat - charted yet another new path in life. He enrolled, in 2010, in the School of Horology, formerly operated in Pennsylvania by the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors.

By that time, Wind Dancer had worked as a building contractor; been a massage therapist in Calistoga; operated the former Fitters International Car Clinic in Cotati; served with the Peace Corps in Gambia and with VISTA in West Virginia; and studied agricultural engineering at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and environmental studies at Sonoma State University.

He’d also investigated environmental abuses at The Geysers geothermal field and the business practices that brought the bankruptcy of a huge wine consortium. Wind Dancer took his findings to late Press Democrat reporter and Wine Market Report publisher Rich Cartiere, who wrote exposés.

Today, Wind Dancer spends seven days a week repairing, restoring and researching clocks. He mused, “If there were an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) class for clock addicts, I would be the president.”

In the era of the cellphone-as-clock, his greatest worry is that there will be no one to take his place once he himself winds down. “It makes me sad,” he said.

Wind Dancer would be delighted to take someone on as a volunteer apprentice and teach him or her the horologist’s craft. He fears that unless a few young people find fascination within the wheels and the history, the passing of the era of the functional, fine old clock is just a matter of time.

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