HOW MANY KIDS WE FORCE TO FINISH HIGH SCHOOL...:

If It’s Wooden and Old and Once Kept Time, Call Him (KATIE ZEZIMA, 7/05/08, NY Times)

For nearly all of Robert Coffin’s life, the passing of time has been marked by the ticking of many, many clocks.

Mr. Coffin, now 90, first repaired a clock while a pupil at the grammar school in this seaside village of 900 people. He has collected, sold, made and fixed clocks — only those that run on cogs and springs, “nothing electric” — ever since, and is now known as the man to call in eastern Maine if a clock needs fixing.

“Clocks are second to my wife, and I mean that,” Mr. Coffin said before settling into his workshop, which is filled with clocks, miniature figurines and hundreds of tools and parts. “It’s almost my life, if you will.”

Mr. Coffin is among a dwindling number of craftsmen who repair antique wooden clocks. The work requires patience and painstaking skill, including an ability to replicate wooden pieces that have not been manufactured for centuries.

“The business is rare,” said Alexander H. Phillips, a clockmaker in Bar Harbor, Me., who is a friend of Mr. Coffin. “You just don’t have that element of craftsmanship anymore.”

...would be better off learning a craft?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 5, 2008 7:45 AM