WARWICK — Twice each week, 75-year-old A. George Day Jr. parks his car in front of the Unitarian Meeting House on Orange Road. Unlocking the church door, he ascends the cream-colored stairs to the balcony looking out over pews below, reaching a door just large enough to duck through comfortably.
The door, tucked away at the side of the balcony, opens to darkness. Two more sets of steps hide inside, nestled between rafters, but Day knows exactly where he’s going.
“I can go up there blindfolded,” he said. When he’s alone, he never brings a flashlight.
Once all the stairs have been climbed, there’s a room no larger than the bed of a pickup truck.
Lit only by one small window at the top of the stairs, the room contains an elaborate green piece of machinery, with gold-colored letters reading “E. Howard & Co., Boston, Mass” embossed on the side. A monotonous ticking breaks the silence.
For the past 50 years, as of June 30, Day has been responsible for winding the town clock, the faces of which show on three sides of the church. Since the clock was installed in 1884, no clock winder has held the position for as long as Day.
However, Day recently announced to the Selectboard that he’ll be retiring, finishing his service on “a nice round number.”
“It’s time,” he said simply. “I think it’s better to give it up and be around to help (train the next clock winder).”
Being a town-owned clock, the clock winder is appointed by the Selectboard and paid a stipend of $213 annually, Day said. But when he began his service as clock winder back in 1967, he received $1 per week.
Day remembered how when he was 25, one of his friends on the Selectboard approached him about the position.
“The gentleman that had it before me, (Kenneth Matthews), was selling his house and moving out of town,” Day remembered. “I said ‘Sounds OK, I’ll do it for awhile.’”
Matthews showed Day the ropes. Winding the clock, Day explained, involves cranking up two separate boxes of rocks. One, which weighs 500 pounds and requires 156 cranks weekly, controls the chime. The other, which weighs more than 200 pounds and requires 26 cranks, controls the time.
As the week passes, the boxes of rocks — which Day said have been replaced by weights in most other clocks that are still wound — descend down two “raceways,” one of which goes all the way down to the church’s basement.
At first, Day made weekly visits. But over the years, the physical aspect of the job has led him to come twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. He also oils the machine’s bearings every three to four months.
Day recounted the clock’s history, which began with its manufacturing in Boston. It was shipped by rail to the depot in Orange and taken by horsedrawn wagon the rest of the way to Warwick. The shipping crate which held the clock was even repurposed to build the room where it now sits.
Based on town meeting records Day found and a plaque on the machinery, the clock was donated to Warwick by Martha Clapp and her sisters Catherine C. Humphreys, Rebecca C. Trask and Mary C. Weis of Dorchester in honor of the 100th anniversary of their mother’s birth. Their mother, Mary Blake Clap, was a Warwick native.
Over the years, the clock has seen its share of repairs, Day said, as well as some icy days that freeze the clock face’s hands. For example, in 2007, the chime side weight broke, falling down to the cellar and smashing apart.
“We had to have it all rebuilt because it damaged some gears in the clock,” he said.
Though the clock didn’t chime for two or three years, the time side of the mechanism still worked, and Day continued to make his regular trips to wind the clock.
Though Orange Road is one of the better-traveled roads in town, many residents are oblivious to what goes on inside the Unitarian Meeting House, on the other side of the clock face.
“I’ve been living in town for five years and I never knew the clock had to be wound,’” Day remembered Selectman Lawrence “Doc” Pruyne saying during this year’s annual town meeting.
Learning that Day had been winding the clock for 50 years, residents applauded. But to some, having a clock — and a chiming one — is essential, Day said, recounting a story from 2007 when the clock wasn’t chiming.
“There was this elderly woman who said ‘No way we’re going to have a clock without it chiming in town,’” Day said. As a child, she had said, before cell phones, a clock chiming was the only way to know when it was time to come home for supper.
Maybe Day didn’t think he would be clock winder for 50 years back in 1967, but from being fire chief for 27 years to sitting on numerous town committees, he’s been determined to support Warwick, one tick-tock at a time.
“It’s just another way of serving the town,” he said.
Reach Shelby Ashline at: sashline@recorder.com
413-772-0261 ext. 257