Tending to timepiece appeals to caretaker

Here’s a job that can take a toll: “I was up in the tower one day when the chime started to go off. I always try to get out before that happens, but I didn’t make it this time. You better believe I got my ear muffs on really fast!”

Happily, Wes McEachron suffered no ill effects from the 2,000-pound bell’s cadence.

He is part of a team that oversees maintenance of the Music Hall clock. An instrument maker in the machine shop, he monitors the clock about once a month or so, he says.

This summer, the clock and its tower will celebrate 125 years at the base of Bascom Hill. Although no formal commemoration is planned, McEachron, one of the clock’s caretakers since 1988, says he’s proud of that anniversary.

And rightly so. Today, the Music Hall clock tower is the eldest of three time-telling towers on campus. The other two are the Carillon (which sounds chimes to tell time) on Observatory Drive and the clock on Library Mall.

“The clock originally had to be wound with a system of cables and weights. They changed it over to an electric system in the 1950s, but we still have to lubricate it, inspect the gears and motorized parts, and build repair components for it,” he says.

Although an electric motor now lifts the weights, gravity is still the force that makes the clock run.

Built by the A.S. Hotchkiss Company, later Seth Thomas, the Music Hall clock tower first saw light of day in 1879 for a cost of $1,600. Its benefactor was James C. Watson, a member of the then-new Department of Astronomy. The building upon which the tower stood, Assembly Hall in the day, had gone up the previous year.

Over the years, the chimes at certain hours carried explicit meaning. The 9 p.m. bell warned “all boats off” of Lake Mendota. The 10 p.m. gong meant women were due back in their dorm. Today the clock provides important clues as to how late you really are.

Access to the tower is no cakewalk. McEachron uses a series of four ladders to reach it. Once arrived, however, he finds the place a fascinating archive of the way life was once.

“I like to glance at the old newspapers up there — somebody just finished the paper one day and left it there. You can see old advertisements for the UW Marching Band and the football games.

“It’s also interesting to see how the clock’s builders were able to come up with a lot of neat little gimmicks to solve problems without the technology we have today,” McEachron says. “For example, all four faces of the clock have to show the same time. But in winter, things contract. When it’s hot, they expand. So the builders came up with a sliding arm that comes through a driveshaft and frees the mechanism to expand and contract. It’s a simple solution, effective, causes no damage and should last forever.”

Not that the tower doesn’t have problems now and then. In 2002, for example, lightening struck the tower, causing several thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

“The lightening hit the roof, traveled down the beams and blew out all four clock faces and the hands,” he says.

The machine shop team was able to repair or replace a good deal of the damage. The machine shop has had charge of the clock tower for about 80 years, McEachron says, and maintenance lore passes word-of-mouth from generation to generation.

“There’s no reason why the clock won’t go on for another 500 years,” he says.