(rshsdepot) Seattle, WA (King Street Station)

[I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com]

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
 
For more on the area clock restorations, visit  goto.seattlepi.com/r1744
 
Bernie Wagenblast
 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
No Parking Anytime: Time no longer frozen on King Street Station  clocks
By KERY MURAKAMI
P-I REPORTER
 
For a little more than a decade, the giant hands of the four clocks on the  
King Street Station's towering tower were stuck in time, each one giving its 
own  version of the moment.

Each one wrong -- at least for most of the day.
 
But last week, both hands of each clock pointed almost straight up, exactly  
11:58 a.m. All the clocks were running again.
 
Less obvious was how two volunteer clock hobbyists -- working in their  
basements on the intricate pieces that make the giant hands move -- had  restarted 
time. 
 
On Friday, one of them, Norm Nelson, 75, was in his Lynnwood home workshop  
- -- where he is most days. The tables were littered with tools, some of them  
antiques he collects. Pieces of clocks were scattered -- a face here, a gear  
there.
 
On one table sat a clock built by the Waterbury Clock Co. in 1880 and  housed 
inside a walnut case. Its chimes had been removed.
 
Nelson is a patient man. He spends about four hours a day, after all,  
fiddling with the innards of clocks he buys and renovates for fun. Still, the  
chimes test his patience.
 
The silent workshop is his refuge. On a wall, a wooden sign his daughter  
made has cutouts shaped like a hammer and a saw, and says, "Norm's  Workshop."
 
"I could spend all day repairing clocks," he said.
 
His interest started about 40 years ago, he said, when his brother-in-law  
showed him four antique clocks he'd bought. Nelson, a machinist, was fascinated  
- -- not because they represented the nature of time, but because of their  
mechanisms and the rich wood around them. Like any true love, they were  
beautiful on the outside, and complicated inside.
 
The man who used to take care of the clocks atop the station was Amby  Amjor.
 
"He was this 75-year-old guy who would go up the 99 steps in the tower  
whenever anything needed to be done. He had keys, and no one ever knew he was up  
there, except maybe his wife," Nelson said.
 
But he retired around 1985, and without him, the clocks eventually  
stopped.Although Amtrak still used the station, BNSF Railway, which until  recently 
owned it, didn't have employees there. So, railroad spokesman Gus  Melonas said, 
the railroad never fixed the clock.
 
In March, the railroad sold the building to Seattle for $10. The city, as  
part of a $26 million renovation of the building, planned to fix the clocks,  
said Richard Sheridan, spokesman for the Seattle Department of Transportation.  
But they wouldn't have been fixed so soon had two members of the National  
Association of Watch and Clock Collectors' Seattle chapter -- Nelson and Paul  
Bellamy -- not volunteered after reading about the project in the paper, he  
said.
 
Part of the club's mission is restoring other old public clocks, Nelson  said.
 Years ago, Nelson said he worked on the clock at Colman Dock on Seattle's  
waterfront. It fell into Puget Sound once, then sat forgotten in a warehouse  
with chicken coops for decades before it was restored in 1984.
 
Nearly a quarter-century later, Nelson and Bellamy climbed the metal stairs  
of the King Street Station tower, passing skeletons of sea gulls, to see what  
exactly had stopped time above Pioneer Square.
 
Originally a 9-foot pendulum ran the clock, but at some point, it was  
replaced by an electric master clock, which sits in an office on the top floor  of 
the station and at the bottom of the stairs leading up the tower.
 
Wires run up the tower to the mechanism, which is housed in a wooden shed  at 
the same level as the four clocks. The mechanism turns four cylinders, one to 
 each clock that make the hands move.
 
Arriving at the top, Nelson and Bellamy found two of the gears and one of  
the shafts in need of replacement.
 
Bellamy built new gears and the shaft. Nelson cut the ridges of a gear on a  
lathe in his workshop.
 
The essential parts that got the clock running came from an unglamorous  
past; Nelson scrounges around estate sales and recycling centers looking for  
metal scraps.
 
"It might look like junk to you," he said, "but to machinists these are  
gold."
 
There were three more trips up and down the tower, Nelson said. One time,  
the shaft was too long, so they carried it back down and brought back a new one. 
 Another time, they found they didn't know how to set the four clocks and 
needed  more researched.
 
On June 2, they got the clock running. Neither Nelson nor city officials  
recalled what time it was.
 
But it must have been a little before noon.
 
"It wasn't a big joyous moment, or anything" when the hands moved, he said.  
"It was just, OK, let's go eat."
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