Watchmaker’s Seen Times Change

With his forearms on the chin-level workbench, Vincent Degani is picking apart the tiny innards of an early 1950s-vintage Lady Hamilton.

“This is the pallet fork,” he explains, as the points of his tweezer close around a T-shaped object one-quarter of an inch long and about as thick as a human hair. “This over here is the escape wheel,” he continues. “And this is the fourth wheel . . .”

Disassembling the dainty workings, the 78-year-old Degani’s hands are tremorless. His gaze, amplified by a magnifier attached over the right lens of his eyeglasses, is as a vise.

Clearly, time has been a friend to the watchmaker.

“Oh, I can still do it,” he says. “I’m fairly steady, although it takes me a little longer these days. I used to do five to seven watches a day, and now I do three or four. But I have a lot of younger hobbyists come in here and try to work on watches, and they can’t do it. So they do clocks, which are bigger.”

Degani has been fixing watches since June 30, 1939, when he graduated from the Chicago School of Watchmaking. Like a fine watch, his life has been a model of regularity: 38 years in business for himself, 52 years married to the same woman, 59 years in the same trade.

Every business-day morning he breakfasts at the same restaurant across the street from his store, Vincent’s Canoga Park Jewelers. Every Thursday he takes off to play golf.

In an age that celebrates aberrance, the watchmaker’s existence ticks on, agreeable in its measuredness.

*

Vincent Degani was, in a sense, born to his trade. After World War I, his father and uncle made money smuggling watches from Switzerland into their native district of northern Italy.

After fixing watches in Detroit, Chicago and Florida, he did wartime duty making Navy timepieces work right. In 1960 Degani opened a cubbyhole of a shop next to the Madrid Theater (later turned into an adult movie house but now being reconstituted as a live theater showplace). The people waiting in line to see the latest John Wayne or Doris Day movie would fiddle with their watches, lift them to their ears, and bring them to him. Before long, he had a frisky business going.

Then, in 1978, he moved to another store, on the same side of Sherman Way in the next block across Owensmouth. The new place was a ballroom by comparison to the old. It had long, wide showcases, and ample space in back for Degani’s workbenches and drawers and bins of Lilliputian hand tools, spare parts and other watchmaking tackle.

After World War II watchmaking was considered a stable living, one discharged soldiers and partly disabled workers were encouraged to embrace. By the time Degani moved into his new store, however, electronic watches were already laying waste to the trade.

The better of the new watches, in which a battery replaced the traditional mainspring, and a vibrating quartz crystal usurped the role of a balance wheel, were incomparably more accurate than traditional wind-up mechanical watches. Whereas the standard mechanical watch ticked about 18,000 times an hour, the quartz watch beat more than 32,000 times a second, reducing time-keeping errors accordingly.

Some electronic watches were so cheap they were disposable. All four U.S-based watchmakers--Bulova, Hamilton, Elgin and Waltham--disappeared or were absorbed by foreign companies, and left American soil.

Many watchmakers saw their businesses wither. Degani held on. He learned to work on the more substantial of the new watches, even though servicing them often amounted to cleaning contact points and replacing batteries.

In the 1980s, people began to tire of the impersonality of electronic watches, and turned anew to mechanicals, especially the exquisite machines of the venerable Swiss companies. The Swiss helped refine the standard of the mechanical watch upward from 18,000 beats per hour to 28,800, to narrow the accuracy gap with electronic watches.

The interest in fine new mechanical watches, combined with the increasing collectibility of antique and keepsake watches, has transformed the watchmaking landscape. Today, there are not enough skilled watchmakers to go around.

“In the ‘70s, when the electronics came in, a lot of these guys were already in their 50s and didn’t want to mess with learning a new part of the trade,” says Jim Lubic, technical and education director of the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute near Cincinnati. “Plus, they told their kids not to get involved because the trade was going down the tube. So we missed out on a whole generation of watchmakers there.”

*

The year Vincent Degani moved into his new store, there were 44 watchmaking schools in the United States. Now there are 14, the closest one to California being in Seattle.

With the average age of current watchmakers exceeding 60 years, an organization of Swiss watchmaking companies has launched a worldwide training program for new practitioners. The organization estimates a need for a minimum of 25,000 skilled watchmakers by 2003, for jobs that pay $24,000 a year for a beginner to more than $80,000 for an expert veteran.

Not that just anyone is fit to be a watchmaker.

“You’ve got to be mechanically inclined, and you’ve got to be a patient person who knows how to concentrate,” Degani says. “Taking a watch apart and putting it back together, you can never lose track of where you are. When I’m working on, say, an expensive Rolex, I’ll come back to the shop at night when the place is locked up so nobody bothers me.”

Faithful attention to the intricate workings of watches over the years seems to have put Degani in touch with larger systems that govern human contentment.

Certainly, a watchmaker is uniquely respectful of time’s inexorability--Degani in recent years has endured an aortal aneurysm and implantation of an artificial knee.

Yet, like a fine watch, a good watchmaker relies on smoothly polished internal surfaces, and is well balanced, minimally frictive, and made of material that resists fluctuations in temperature of all types.

Degani imagines himself soldiering minutely on at his craft till time itself runs out. “I’ll do it till I die,” he says.