From a small, low-lit workshop in his basement, Jason Rowe works each day, looking through his visor’s magnifying lens, manipulating small parts from the insides of increasingly rare clocks that once graced the walls of homes around the nation.
Clockmakers like Rowe fight to keep these heirlooms alive as more and more tradesmen disappear each year. Their absence leaves a book of business impossible to fulfill by those who remain, putting these old clocks at risk of becoming artifacts if the industry doesn’t see a serious change.
After a lifetime working as an executive assistant, Rowe left his job in 2017 to work for a family friend. He started by taking photos of clocks, setting aside the ones that caught his eye for himself, and auctioning them through eBay before he took on an apprentice role under the wing of the shop’s repairman.
Rowe took to clocks quickly, building on a lifetime of interest in mechanics and tinkering, nurtured by his auto-mechanic father, but his new career still challenged him in a way he hadn’t expected, yet has served him well over the last few years.
“The crazy thing is, this is why (my mentor) was driving me nuts with constantly rebuilding these over and over again,” Rowe said. “And I understand now. I gotta have the right amount of this and the right amount of this, because the only way you’re going to find out you’re wrong is when you put it all back together and take the power back on it. And if it doesn’t work now, you get to go and take it all back apart again. ”
After a few years, he went into business for himself and quickly found a niche repairing German cuckoo clocks and clocks damaged by fire or other disasters.
Now he has more work than there are hours in the day and wishes he could take on his own apprentice, but can’t, due to not only his lack of time but his inability to find a willing candidate.
“There was a time where there was still enough people doing it that had big, lifelong businesses of doing this. Now I don’t really compete for any work. If anything, it would be nice to see somebody interested in getting in the industry,” Rowe said. “Now, I’m at the point where I’m so busy, I don’t know how I could actually train somebody if I wanted to.”
After less than a decade, Rowe has already seen the industry change as clockmakers retire and no one fills their shoes, yet scarcity doesn’t apply only to the labor force but the intricate parts they use to do their work.
“I’ve always known the industry’s leaning towards where you’re going to have to be able to machine pretty much everything you need,” Rowe said, voicing his frustration with the lack of proper maintenance that leads to more extensive repairs.
As parts scarcity goes up, so does the amount of time needed to do repairs, meaning Rowe and people like him have had to be more selective, invest more time into the things they want to keep alive, and even take jobs from faraway states for specialty clocks in regions without a clockmaker.
“I enjoy the really early stuff, like anything before the 1960s and stuff. Late 1800s, early 1900s is stuff I really enjoy working on, early German stuff,” he said.
As for the future, Rowe feels secure in the longevity of his own job, but has his doubts about the future of his craft with the lack of schools, apprentices and interest in the old clocks.
If he is truly the last of a dying breed, the last generation of American clockmakers will leave behind an uninherited wealth of knowledge lost to time and a chunk of history that may be irreparable in their absence.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Jason Rowe turns back time to keep an age-old craft alive in Cincinnati
Reporting by Otto Rabe, Cincinnati Enquirer / Cincinnati Enquirer
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
