Clocks are Taylorville man's passion

TAYLORVILLE - Bill Kennedy's fingerprints are all over the stately Christian County Courthouse, but nowhere as evident as on the tower clock that has provided time uninterrupted since the courthouse was built in 1902.

Every Saturday between 7:30 and 7:40 a.m., Kennedy enters the south doors of the courthouse and begins a trek up a four-story labyrinth of wooden stairs, ramps and metal staircases to the "clock box" - a small room above the building's belfry - to wind the striking Howard Round Top model clock.

He's been the keeper of the clock for the past 25 years and is the third person to have the duty - Kennedy would call it an honor - of winding the 112-year-old clock once a week and otherwise taking care of it.

"The money he's spent on that clock .," said retired Christian County Board Chairman John Curtin. "He's been a wonderful asset."

Curtin called Kennedy "the unsung hero of the courthouse."

"He'd come to committee meetings, and we'd be talking about doing one thing or another, and he'd say, 'I think I could save you some money,"' Curtin said.

He designed the heating and air-conditioning system for third floor. He figured out a structure around the peak of the stained glass atrium restored in 2002 for the building's 100th birthday so that it could be cleaned. He designed a retracting stairway to get to the clock room from the belfry that doesn't destroy the view when no one is using the stairs. Five years ago, Kennedy installed the "slave clock" (a gift from an anonymous donor) in the courthouse lobby and synchronized it with the tower clock. Then there are the brass railings on the interior courthouse staircase.

"The stairs were originally designed for one railing," Curtin said. "Someone had a fall, and the insurance company said we needed a second set of railings. Bill said he'd figure it out.

"He got the brass, made some bends in it and did some other things to it, and we paid to have it installed," Curtin said. "I reminded him several times that we hadn't received a bill for the brass and his work. He finally told me, 'No, and you're probably not going to get one, either."'

Started young

Kennedy doesn't mask his love of the courthouse or his desire to undo the "remodeling" done in 1969 that hid the original courtroom and covered the since-restored atrium with false ceilings.

"The courthouse is the most architecturally significant building in the county," Kennedy said. "I'm just trying to give it its due respect."

The building itself may be near to his heart but "the clock is what brought me here," he said.

Kennedy said he began "fooling around" with tower clocks when he was a student at Eastern Illinois University from 1968 to 1972. As a result of "fooling around," he rebuilt the clock on the Coles County Courthouse in Charleston, and he's worked on many other tower clocks.

"I don't do it anymore, but I would go to most of the clocks in the Midwest," he said. "Usually just to get them straightened out and find a local keeper."

Kennedy is the third clock keeper in Christian County.

The first, Clarence Slaybaugh, was a Taylorville jeweler and the local Howard Clock Co. agent. He installed the clock, which was built by the Boston-based clock company and purchased for $955, then maintained it for the first 30 years. His apprentice, Raymond "Red" Abel, then took over in 1932 and maintained it for 50 years.

"Red got so he couldn't climb the stairs anymore, and they were looking for someone to replace him," Kennedy said.

Climbing the stairs probably wasn't Abel's only problem.

The strike weight - which provides the energy for a hammer to strike the 2,200-pound bronze bell each hour - travels four stories downward each week from the clock tower to the courthouse basement.

Winding the clock requires that the weight be raised back to the top.

"Winding it with the key (basically a large hand crank) takes a strong, fit man about an hour," Kennedy said. That's the equivalent of trying to bring a small car up four stories with a hand winch. On the time side of the clock, a 600-pound weight travels a little over one story.

"I did that once," Kennedy said of winding the clock by hand.

After that, he designed an electric motor that slips onto the same shaft and doesn't alter the clock itself.

Now winding the clock takes about 10 minutes.

Plenty to monitor

But that isn't the only thing on Kennedy's checklist when he ascends the tower each Saturday.

In addition to oiling the massive timepiece, Kennedy listens to it run and strike. He also can do this remotely at home through a series of cameras, radios and a telephone line he has rigged up.

"It's convenient to listen to the clock strike at 8 a.m. so you can know the error," he said. "I check it remotely every day."

The phone connection can be used to just call and listen to the clock to see if it is running. He also can listen to the strike and determine the clock's rate with a modified timer.

He said the phone connection also can be used to hold the pendulum to stop the clock.

"In practice, we call the clock every day and reset it using this device," he said. He explained that the clock is set to gain a second or two a day and that is corrected by stopping it remotely.

The five cameras "are just in positions that allow us to examine the things that would normally be looked at if I was there," he said. "They save trips to the courthouse and up the stairs."

The clock house also contains an old WWV radio receiver. The National Institute for Standards and Technology (formerly the National Bureau of Standards) operates the time and frequency station in Fort Collins, Colorado.

"The receiver used to allow me to get time-of-day information with which I set the clock," Kennedy said. He said in years past, it was somewhat difficult to get accurate time-of-day information, "and if you think about it, you have no business fooling with a public clock if you don't know what time it is."

However, time marches on, as they say. He now has a wristwatch that listens to WWV every night and corrects itself. Plus, there's an app for that.

If Kennedy is unavailable to wind the clock, he has a colleague who substitutes for him. And if no one wound the clock at 8 a.m.?

"The clock would stop about 11 a.m.," he said.

The Christian County clock is original, and don't get Kennedy started on the electrification of perfectly fine old tower clocks that occurred mostly in the 1950s and 1960s.

When he took over keeper of the clock duties, he and some volunteers took the clock apart and cleaned it, and he's since replaced a few bearings. But that's it.

"It will run another 100 years without a doubt," he said.