He’s Having a Great Time as White House Clock Man

He’s seen Harry Truman change light bulbs and been chewed out by Lyndon Johnson. For half a century, genial John Muffler has kept the White House ticking.

Gently ticking, as in the tick-tock of scores of antique timepieces cased in mahogany, in marble, in malachite, in bronze. Clocks that tourists see and presidents rely on.

John Muffler, with 51 years of White House service to his credit, is the White House’s official clock fixer and winder. He’s the former chief electrician and longest-serving employee at the White House. He has a diamond in his White House staff pin to prove it.

Muffler, who at 76 now only works a few days a week, keeps 85 clocks balanced and oiled and wound with keys that protrude from a brass pocket ring like spokes from a wheel.

The ring has keys shaped to wind the 12 tall case clocks, the 16 mantle and banjo clocks, some by the most famous of American makers. Simon Willard of Boston, for one. Muffler dropped one of those clock-winding rings in the time capsule created during the Bush administration to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the White House.

But the tick-tock of Muffler’s five White House decades has as much to do with presidents as it does with timepieces. Mr. Muffler--that’s what everyone at the White House calls him--is a bit of a time capsule himself.

He first set foot on the White House grounds during World War II when, as a member of a Navy ceremonial guard, he participated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s state arrival ceremony for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

“I remember Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt were down there under the old magnolia, and I looked up at the house and saw staff people leaning out the windows to watch and I said, ‘Gee, I wish I were up there and a part of all of this.’ ”

“And then I was up there.”

His first White House job was a humble but useful one: assistant electrician, fixing lamps, changing lightbulbs.

But these lightbulbs were lighting extraordinary scenes. And extraordinary stories. Including the story of the president who changed lightbulbs himself.

One day, some time after he arrived in May 1945 and had become a familiar part of the White House residence, the first lady approached.

“Mrs. Truman said to me, ‘Johnny, would you leave some lightbulbs up here in the residence for the president. He’d like to do a few things like that himself.’ ”

“After that I checked every morning,” Muffler said. “He never did the chandeliers, because you need a ladder for that. But when I went around to check the lamps, there would be a used lightbulb in an ashtray.”

Muffler remembers the day when Truman invited Herbert Hoover to call. It was the first time the 31st president had entered the White House since 1932.

“They went inside and came over to me and the president told Mr. Hoover, ‘This is the man that changes my lightbulbs and keeps my office bright.’ ”

Muffler became chief electrician. His father-in-law had been a White House chauffeur. His son is a White House calligrapher.

“I tell my wife, Marie, she is my first lady because her daddy was here and our son is here and so am I,” he said.

Another story bubbles. This one starring John F. Kennedy, who on a certain day gave the handyman-electrician a specific and initially mysterious task: Install a buzzer in the bottom of the ashtray on the stand near the president’s Oval Office rocking chair.

“When he had visitors and wanted to end the conversation without being too abrupt he would put his cigar down in the ashtray and push the button next to it and his secretary, Mrs. Lincoln, would pop out of her office and clear her throat,” Muffler said.

“When he tried it for the first time the president said, ‘Oh that’s great, I love it.’ ”

Then there was Lyndon Johnson. As Muffler describes him, he was Truman’s opposite. He hated to see a light burning with no one using it.

“I got fried by LBJ for that three times,” he said. “But then, if you didn’t get fried by LBJ, you were nobody.”

He remembers his first encounter with Johnson. Muffler was on a ladder, working on a chandelier. The president walked in, looked up, growled: “Who do you work for, the power company?”

Muffler climbed down from the ladder: “No, Mr. President, I work for you--and the United States government.”

Mr. Muffler gives a tour of some of his clocks, talking of the antique escapement parts he had to replace, of the wedges he fitted into the cabinet of a 200-year-old tall-case clock to keep its pendulum swinging; of the eagle finial from an old gilt clock that Pat Nixon had duplicated as a set of bookends to present to her husband.

“I’ve gotten so that they’re all my favorites,” he said. “I had an uncle a long time ago who told me, ‘Find yourself a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ This has been it for me.”