A timeless profession: Horologist opens clock repair store in downtown Colfax

If a puppy whines in the middle of the night, you wrap a clock in a towel and tuck it in with the miniature canine struggling to sleep. If Cinderella hears 12 consecutive chimes, she knows her time in a ballgown and glass slippers has come to an end. If someone dies, you pinch the pendulum of the nearest time piece to stop its motion.

No other machine has intertwined so intimately with the rhythms of human life than the clock. Its steady, percussive ticking mimics the heartbeat and comforts us. The clang of the bell on the hour reminds us of our responsibilities. A stilled movement reflects a pause in normalcy. The clock even has humanoid elements: hands and a face.

A clock, however, is nothing more than a few springs and wheels stuck in a case, and unlike its human counterpart, a clock can tick-tock into infinity if it receives proper maintenance. Douglas Gull, proprietor of Colfax’s new Corner Clock Shop on North Walnut Street, has made a career out of ensuring the hours march onward.

“It’s been not quite a lifelong thing, but quite a while,” Gull said.

You can easily imagine Gull, who sits behind his workbench with high magnification lenses pulled over his brow, fiddling with anything mechanical he could find as a child. His father owned a house painting business in Nevada, and four brothers and one sister each contributed to the venture after school and during summer vacations.

“It was a family business, so it was always on a shoestring,” Gull said. “Nobody fixed anything for us; we fixed everything.”

If Gull found any extra equipment, he’d disassemble it just to see how the belts turned and the wheels rotated.

“Sometimes I’d get it back together again; sometimes I didn’t.”

By the 1980s, Gull had mastered the “getting it back together” part of tinkering. He moved from Nevada to Des Moines to work in a clock shop where he stayed for the balance of the decade, most content when he sat divining the interworkings of older time pieces.

“The movements are usually just a little bigger. There’s a lot more space to work in them,” he said.

Gull holds up 10 beefy digits unsuited for work on minuscule mechanisms of watches. “It’s just real satisfying to work on something that’s 100-plus years old. You get to sit there and kind of think about where it was when it was new and who has owned it.”

As the decade waned, Gull turned his attention away from clocks and toward a college degree. It’s difficult to imagine Gull, with his thick white beard, clunky rings on his fingers and a collection of multicolored studs in his ears following a traditional path, but he didn’t stay the course forever. As the 2010s grew into the 20-teens, he returned to clock repair after earning his horology certificate from Gem City College in Quincy, Ill.

For the past eight years, Gull has been working on cuckoo, grandfather and mantle clocks and everything in between. Once or twice a year, someone will waltz through his door with a broken Victrola or a jammed music box for him to correct.

Before he stumbled upon the Colfax storefront, he said he “kind of looked all over” for a location to open his own repair shop.

“All the buildings were new; they weren’t really what I wanted,” Gull said.

While visiting relatives in Colfax one evening, Gull spotted the vacant ceramic brick storefront on North Walnut Street.

“I thought, ‘That’d make a really neat little clock shop.’ It’s the perfect size,” he said.

Not only that, but it sits next to one antique store and within walking distance from others. Customers traveling for repair service can easily reach the location from Interstate 80, convenient for people who don’t want to haul their timepieces to Des Moines or Johnston.

The day after he first noticed the space, he negotiated a lease. Gull spent a few weeks transforming the Pepto-Bismol pink walls of the former veterinarian clinic into a grasshopper green open workspace and officially opened the Corner Clock Shop Sept. 8. Cuckoo clocks cheep at all hours, the pendulums of mantle clocks from the 1850s swing sedately and movements of kitchen clocks tick behind newly cleaned glass cases. A stream of customers have walked into this cacophony of rhythms to drop off malfunctioning timekeepers.

“There actually is quite a bit of demand. More than you’d think,” Gull said.

He’s realized that almost everyone whom he encounters has a clock that once belonged to a relative and has lain dormant for several years.

“A lot of people just assume an antique clock will never get fixed again or it’s going to be so expensive it’s not worth it,” Gull said.

Once he conducts a preliminary clock exam in front of each customer and sketches out a treatment plan, many realize their antiques are not only charming but have the potential to be functional. For a couple hundred dollars, they can hear the bim-bam strike or the Westminster chimes toll for several more years, and the sentimental feeling toward the object usually overcomes any hangups about the cost.

The horology trade today hinges on nostalgia, on our desire for a timeless connection to the past that dwindles with each passing year’s increased digitalization. Gem City’s horology program that turned out 200 to 300 certified horologists every six months in the boom years after World War II now attracts less than a dozen mechanics each session. In his long years of clock repair, Gull has met only one young person who considered transforming his interest in tinkering with time into a career.

The horologists who remain increasingly struggle to find replacement parts. Manufacturers have ceased to mint them.

“If you get something that needs to be fixed and it’s something you can’t make, then you go and cannibalize another clock,” Gull said.

He keeps buckets of out-of-order clocks, their brass guts spilling out of their cases, in the old vault at the back of his store.

Despite the challenges facing horology, Gull believes that trade will remain viable for some time. The desire to intimately know the same ticks and chimes as our ancestors did still outweighs our complete conversion to electric blips pulsing across plasma screens. For nothing more than a few springs and wheels stuck in a case, clocks have a lot of charisma: Gilded carriage clocks exude elegance, lean grandfather clocks ring with stateliness and unusual banjo clocks sing whimsy.

Each time piece has its own personality.

“Sometimes,” Gull said of particularly finicky characters, “they just be stinkers.”

Contact Phoebe Marie Brannock at 641-792-3121 ext. 6547 or pbrannock@newtondailynews.com