02/26/2008
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Staff Photo by Andy Molloyfrom the Kennebec Journal
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The Wayne clockmaker has now been perfecting his craft for 50 years and has contracts to maintain grandfather and tower clocks, public and private, throughout Maine. In Augusta, he maintains clocks at Hartford Fire Station and Lithgow Public Library. Bryant also tends to clocks at Richmond's United Methodist Church, Hallowell's Old South Congregational Church and on the campus of Hebron Academy.
Bryant's work has spanned as far as Belgium, where he built a clock in a castle south of Brussels in the 1970s. Closer to home, he is currently working on six-foot dials for the town clock of Norway.
With each clock he works on, the self-termed "clock custodian" said he sees his role as preserving a bit of history.
"I'm trying to be conservative and keep these old pendulum clocks running the way they were designed to run originally," he said.
On Sunday, for example, Bryant was called into the Hartford Fire Station to fix a grandfather clock connected to a 1925 whistle that sounds every day at 12:30 and 9 p.m.
While Bryant replaced a spring on the clock's apparatus, the whistle did not sound.
Now back on line, the whistle blows like it did when Augusta's fire department used the whistle to time training regimens for the horses that drew the department's firefighting apparatus, according to Augusta Fire Chief Roger Audette.
Maintaining clocks for historical preservation is not about the clocks' improvement, Bryant said.
"There are people who work on these that shouldn't because they do more damage than good," Bryant said. "There are others that do a superb job, but they make a Cadillac out of a Chevrolet and they charge you for the price of a Mercedes."
Among the Wayne clockmaker's contributions to the field is an automatic winding system for tower clocks that preserves a clock's original winding system but eliminates the need for regular manual winding. Bryant calls his invention the "Bryant Electric Ghost."
"It can be quite a chore to once a week go up in the tower and crank up the weight. It requires a little bit of sweating to keep these rascals wound," he said of a winding system's half-ton weights. "The auto-winding works very well."
Bryant invented the winding system more than 30 years ago while attempting to determine how to return Monmouth's tower clock to working order. The system he installed on the Monmouth clock is intact to this day, he said.
Bryant said he picked up his handicraft from a lifetime of working with his hands. Originally from Wayne, Bryant spent much of his childhood on his family's farm in Winthrop.
"Every farm kid's got to know how to fix machinery real good," he said.
A brief tour with the Navy Construction Batallion also helped him develop mechanical skills, Bryant said.
His work on clocks provided a second income for Bryant during his career as a mechanic at Central Maine Power Company and a pipe fitter at a number of paper mills and nuclear power plants. Now retired, Bryant devotes himself to clockwork and his "hurdy-gurdy man" entertainment act.
As clocks are passed down to younger generations, Bryant said, he hopes the spirit of preservation remains, and that his automatic winding system can play a role.
"In many cases, older gentlemen pass away and a younger generation doesn't really care and they don't know how to do it, and that's where auto-winding can come in," he said. "And hopefully they don't just up and destroy the old clock."
Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, Ext. 435
mstone@centralmaine.com
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