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to be able to work in thousandths of an inch when I'm measuring distances in a really good clock,” he reported.
From the biggest to the tiniest part, they all come out when Gene cleans a clock. He takes photographs of the innards hung on pegboards over his work table, photographs he shows the clock owners to demonstrate his labors.
He generally charges $22.50 for a cleaning job, not a cost effective hourly rate when he's working with 50 to 100 miniature parts.
"1 end up paying myself about $1.25 an hour," Gene laughed. "But I love doing it. That makes it worthwhile. I stay down here to 11 or 12 o'clock at night when I get a really good one to work on.” Sports fans can run down the batting averages of their favorite sluggers. Car nuts speak a language all their own as they rattle on about cams and rods, plugs and points. His new profession has turned Gene Tucker into a clock buff and like any other buff, he's got facts and figures, bits of trivia and special terms that only another clock fanatic can appreciate.
He has stacks and stacks of reference books, reprints of old catalogs on clocks. Using the references, can come within two to five years of dating a clock.
If he’s stumped on a rare occasion, he can send a photograph and description off to the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors and get not only the date the clock was made but who made it as well.
At least half the clocks he’s working on now were produced between 1845 and 1860, America's golden age of timepiece manufacture, according to Gene. Up until that point, when the industrial revolution made it possible to mass produce clock movements, only the wealthy could afford clocks.
Gene flipped through page after page in his reprinted catalogs, pointing out prices for handsome mantel and wall clocks that ranged from $3.25 to $4.50, depending on the cabinet style and whether an alarm was included.
If in good condition, those same (clocks now sell for between $125 and $175. “The more you do to it, the more
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