Who’s minding the town clock?

Just a block down the street from Petaluma’s signature Town Clock Tower is another landmark of the horological world, Simoni’s Clock Shop.

The clock doctors at Simioni’s had been taking care of the Clock Tower for years, but will do so no longer.

In business for almost 40 years at the same location on North Petaluma Boulevard, the store doesn’t sell Smart Watches or even Rolex, but timepieces of a more historic period -grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, mantle clocks, the sort of heirlooms that family members can’t part with but that sooner or later need repair.

Henry Simoni, now 84, opened the business in 1978, after running Sam’s Rendezvous on Washington for the first half of his working life. When Sam’s building was torn down, Simoni took up clock repair.

Simoni is still on-site most days, repairing the mechanisms of clocks that make the silver-haired patriarch feel young by comparison. He has a long closet filled with repaired timepieces that could double as a museum exhibit, with pendulums swinging and gears ticking. A banjo-shaped clock is dated early in the 1800s, though he says the oldest clock he ever worked on was a full hundred years older than that, from 1715.

His daughter, Cheryl Shields, is the person most customers interact with. Her son Sean Shields, 41, is now store manager. They are colorful, like characters in a movie about a clock shop where time stands still.

But time doesn’t stand still. When it does - as with the Clock Tower down the street, notoriously out-of-synch with modern timepieces - people complain.

“The Clock is iconic,” said a frustrated downtown merchant of the clock’s unreliability. “It’s the soulful part of town, the focal point.”

The city has been responsible for the Town Clock since the Masons turned the 1882 landmark over to Petaluma in the 1930s, but the investment in that responsibility remains vague. “It falls under the category of ‘and other duties as assigned,’ ” said Dan St. John, Public Works Director. He speculates that if there’s any responsible department, it’s the Operations Division, and these days a volunteer simply winds the clock weekly.

In the past, however, the city has been quick to contact Simoni’s Clock Shop to help keep the clock running. “They have provided technical support when we encounter maintenance issues that are beyond our capability,” said St. John. “And being that we don’t really have any clock maintenance people on staff, it doesn’t take much to get beyond our capabilities.”

The degree to which Simoni’s has helped out in the past three decades isn’t clear, as city employees usually get the credit – and the wages, if available – for the job. “We’ve donated our time as a community service,” said Sean Shields, “just to help out.”

Still, Simoni’s is not entirely comfortable with being the behind-the-scenes hero in the city’s clockworks. “We’ve got no authorization to do anything,” said Simoni. “We started about 25 years ago helping out, showing them what to do - they had a pretty good man who would do it for a while, but they had somebody up there that really fouled up.” That would have been about 2007, when the temperamental clock stopped altogether and had to go to Oregon for repair.

“That’s my pet peeve,” said Shields. “The people who volunteer to work on the clock just may not be experienced enough.” He speculated that what broke the clock in 2007 was simply winding it while the chimes were striking.

“It’s not exactly state of the art modern technology,” said the elder Simoni about the Town Clock. “We’ve started the clock twice, and wrote up a bid to the city to take care of it year-around. But they didn’t even respond.” That bid came to about $8,500 - less than the $10,000 St. John estimated it would cost the city to pay a worker to wind it weekly for a year.

Right now it runs fast – about 20 minutes fast last weekend. It has to be reset and wound at least weekly. It also isn’t chiming on the hour, probably due to a faulty strike-train . Get him talking about the town clock - any clock, with their interlocking gears and counterweights and chains.

“What a beautifully designed machine,” said Shields of the 133-year-old clock. “It’s not complex, but exquisitely made.” His family’s admiration for the technology of clocks permeates the work atmosphere of Simoni’s Clock Shop, but inevitably leads to disappointment with the irregular care the Town Clock sometimes receives.

When Measure Q was rejected in November, any hopes for a Town Clock line-item in the city budget evaporated. Even so, there’s no guarantee increased funding would have found its way to the Town Clock. For St. John, it’s a question of priorities. “Any money that we’d spend on this clock would come out of something else. So what part don’t you want me to maintain? What street don’t you want me to fix this week, what pothole do I skip so I can pay for a clock? We have to make hard choices.”

So while Simoni’s Clock Shop keeps taking in family heirlooms and antique store finds - and giving free advice to the city–the Clock Tower time is invariably off, and the city budget can’t find room to keep it working. “If they asked us to help out, we would certainly consider it,” said Simoni. “But we’ve got plenty of repair work to do here. It’s difficult to make money on what you can charge for this.”

Said St. John, “I’ve looked at a lot of town clocks, and some of them are amazing. I hear Big Ben keeps good time. But for a lot of old clocks in a lot of town plazas? I think I’ll just look at my watch.”

(Contact Christian Kallen at argus@arguscourier.com)