Enjoying Life Working Around the Clock

“Sounds like rain on the roof, doesn’t it?” Vern Osborn says.

Yes, that is the ever-present sound inside the little shop on North Grand Avenue in Santa Ana where, even on bright sunny afternoons like this one, the soft arrhythmic ticking of dozens of antique clocks creates a syncopated jazz blend that instantly soothes.

Osborn lives with that sound. You wonder if he could live without it. His family has been in the clock business for the last 38 years, and the ticking of clocks is the rhythm of his life. It began in a way he can’t really explain, other than to say he was 19 and sitting on his front porch one day in 1955 when a neighbor across the street dropped a beaten-up clock into the trash barrel.

You really going to throw that away? Osborn asked the neighbor.

Before the trash dust had settled, he had the clock inside his house in Whittier. “I took it all apart, messed with it, fooled with it and finally got it to where it ran a bit,” he says.

Who can say why a life goes in a certain direction? That was the first clock Osborn had ever fixed. At the time, his job was delivering movie scripts by motorcycle.

He still says he has no idea why he rerouted his life that day.

Over the next few years, Osborn kept collecting and fixing clocks. One here, one there. Eventually, he had 356 of them. Several years later, he went into business.

That trail has led to his Grand Avenue shop, Clocks Americana, where he and co-owner Carolyn Bradley have some 100 clocks for sale, most of them antiques, and with the oldest dating to 1725.

Walking around the store, you can almost imagine you’re in a child’s storybook tale, where clocks short and tall, fat and lean, fancy and plain, seem to vie for your attention.

Osborn says he’s still struck by how attached his customers get to their clocks.

He thinks he knows why. “The clocks are alive and they move and they do things,” he says. “And they have a personality. Maybe one will strike wrong once in a while just because it wants to, and it may not do it again for another six months.”

Over the years, Osborn has become a clock historian (he owns between 75 and 100 books on clocks), and it saddens him to know the business isn’t what it used to be.

“In the clock industry, we’ve lost more than half the clock shops in the last 10 years,” he says. “In all of Southern California, from Santa Barbara to San Diego, we maybe had 75 once and now we’ve got half of that.”

The oldest clock in Osborn’s shop is 275 years old. “It was built by a very fine English clockmaker,” he says. “It still runs and it’s ticking and does everything it did 275 years ago. There’s no reason you couldn’t keep it running for another 275 years.”

Tick, Tick, Tick All the Time

In a society where the next big thing in digital timepieces will be on the market tomorrow, and then the next big thing the week after that and then the week after that, well, let’s just say it’s comforting to see that some things actually last.

Besides, it’s a nice little irony, don’t you think? The invention that keeps time turns out to be the oldest mechanical thing still on the market.

Clocks have lasted, Osborn says, for a simple reason: “There hasn’t been a major improvement in 300 years.”

Clockmakers came to America from England and by the late 19th century, clock factories took up square blocks and employed hundreds of people and turned out hundreds of thousands of clocks. One of the more famous clock companies eventually became an operation known as IBM.

Now 64, Osborn figures to play out the string in the business. Why not, when every day brings a potential new challenge, like the customer last week who wanted repairs on a clock made in 1840.

At some point in its history, the clock’s owner had refashioned the whole thing, using pine and plywood, an old doorbell, a circular stick, two tennis ball cans and molten lead to build a new case and redo the pendulum and the weights that drove it.

With passion like that, Osborn says, clocks will survive.

“In this day and age,” Osborn says, “you can buy a little clock that talks in 12 languages and does everything, like tickle your nose if you need it. So why is there fascination with old mechanical clocks that tick and make noise? It’s that ticking sound. It’s almost like they’re alive and like they have a heartbeat.”

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.