Local News in Brief : Laguna Beach : Here’s a Fellow Who’ll Give You the Time of Day

A clock restorer has presented the city with a surprise gift: He fixed an antique clock in the downtown area that has been stuck at 9 o’clock for more than 2 years.

“The residents, merchants and visitors to Laguna deserved the time,” said Brice Woodward of Laguna Beach, who restores wristwatches and clocks. So on Sunday he and two friends, Pat and Peter Becker of Costa Mesa, erected scaffolding near Forest Avenue and Glenneyre Street and spent about 7 hours installing parts, rewiring and cleaning the clock.

Councilman Dan Kenney recently received council approval to have the clock repaired but money had not been appropriated.

“It was a nice civic gesture, and I appreciate all they have done,” Kenney said. Woodward said he was “not interested in being compensated for the job.”

The clock has been in Laguna since the mid-1970s, when a merchant bought it from another merchant in Orange. That city, however, claimed that it and not the merchant owned the clock. To bypass the red tape, a small posse snatched the clock and bolted it to a pedestal with a concrete base in Laguna Beach, “to make sure nobody borrowed it,” said Mike Eggers, one of the raiders and now a Dana Point council member.