Iconic Lafayette clock may get new home in small-town fight

LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) - Three years after it was plucked from its perch near an Interstate 65 exit, the clock that was a Lafayette icon on top of the Hour Time Restaurant for four decades has a new owner and could have a new home soon.

Lorne Koehler-Marsh, a landscaper who collects and repairs clocks, said he bought the former Hour Time clock - with its four, 12-foot faces - with hopes of mounting it atop a tower at the front of a shop he hopes to build on family property in Dayton.

He said he'd hoped to buy the clock when memorabilia and fixtures at the Hour Time first went up for auction in the summer of 2016, after the restaurant and the attached Best Western closed to make way for a Doubletree by Hilton hotel and two new, out lot restaurants, Panera and LongHorn Steakhouse. But he skipped the auction, figuring the price would be too salty.

"When I saw what it sold for," Koehler-Marsh said, "I thought, 'Crap, I wish I'd gone."

The clock went for $7,500. Since then, Snyder Entertainment, owned by Mark and Monte Snyder, left the Hour Time clock in open-air storage, surrounded by sections of chain link fence along Progress Drive, within sight of its previous home.

Lorne Koehler-Marsh stands on top of the clock that once sat atop the Hour Time Restaurant in Lafayette. Koehler-Marsh recently bought the clock, which had been in storage since it was auctioned when the restaurant closed in 2016. He plans to move it five miles to Dayton, where he hopes to put it on top of a tower leading to a future clock workshop.

When the Snyders, along with partner Gary Atkinson, revealed six months after the auction that they'd been the mystery buyer, they touted the clock as the centerpiece for Lafayette Raceway, a proposed "family fun park" featuring go-kart racing, miniature golf, laser tag, batting cages, arcades, a 3D simulator and a restaurant. By summer 2018, a pair of crowdfunding efforts had come up short and no location had been announced, according the Lafayette Raceway site. The Snyders opened a food truck called the Hour Time Brick Oven Pizza Company, which incorporated the clock in its logo. But plans for a full-fledged park never came.

Mark Snyder said Thursday there were some "mixed emotions," but Snyder Entertainment's plans were going slower than expected with the family fun park. So, when Koehler-Marsh approached them, given that the clock hadn't moved in several years, Snyder said the company accepted his offer.

Koehler-Marsh, a Purdue alum who graduated from Rossville High School in 2012, said he can remember eating at Hour Time only once. But Koehler-Marsh, whose fascination with ornate clocks while growing up led to a hobby and a collection of high-end, antique Black Forest clocks, said he always loved seeing the clock as a kid when the family drove by. And he said his great uncle, Emmett Koehler, was close with Hour Time owners Roy and Fran Meeks.

"Just the history of it," Koehler-Marsh said. "I could build my own clock for what I have in mind. But I just like all the local ties to it."

The clock dates to 1910, built in Leicester, England. The clock, weighing in at seven tons, originally sat on top of a train station in Rochdale, England.

As Roy Meeks tells the story, he bought the clock at an auction in Los Angeles in 1977. He was building an upscale restaurant to go with the hotel and convention center he'd opened in 1973 at I-65 and Indiana 26. The Hour Time was going to be filled with loads of antiques and odd features - including a confessional that served as the exit from the Hour Time into the hotel lobby.

Meeks saw the clock as a beacon and focal point for the Hour Time.

Meeks had paid $8,000 for the clock. When it was shipped to Lafayette, Meeks said it arrived in boxes and sacks of parts. (Meeks tells about how Ripley's Believe It or Not tried to buy it from him shortly after the auction, but that he'd refused because he really wanted it. "But when it came," Meeks said, "I thought maybe I should have said, 'Yes.''')

A crew from Kettelhut Construction Co. took on the clock as a project in the two years it took to build and open the Hour Time Restaurant, re-assembling the works and fabricating parts as needed.

Koehler-Marsh said he tried a couple of times to get the Snyders to sell the clock in the past two years. He said he tried again in early October, motivated, in part, by controversy in his small town, just east of Lafayette, along Indiana 38.

There, Koehler-Marsh's father, Ron Koehler, an owner of Koehler Brothers Nursery and Landscaping, is a member of the Dayton Town Council. His mother, Cindy Marsh, is a force behind the "Keep Dayton Small" movement, which sprang up in protest to the annexation and rezoning of land on the south edge of the town of 1,550 people to make way for Baker Farms, a subdivision in the works along Dayton Road.

The battle over the subdivision has split Dayton into factions, leading to social media sniping, face-to-face confrontations at town events, lawsuits and accusations of underhanded tactics, all coming to a head in the Nov. 5 town council election. Koehler is leading a coalition on one side. The other four members of the town council are running on the other side.

Koehler-Marsh's idea, at least for the next few weeks: Move the Hour Time clock to Koehler Brothers property and drape a banner over it, adding it to competing political signs that are so thick in Dayton yards and business parking lots this fall.

"Brand it as a symbol for how it's 'Time for a Change in Dayton,'" Koehler-Marsh said. "That really was the spark that got me going to get that clock."

Snyder said his company is retooling its concept.

"What we have in the works should be even more exciting than our original plan," Snyder said. "Watch for our next announcement coming soon."

Koehler-Marsh said he should have the clock moved the five miles from Progress Drive in Lafayette to Dayton Road in the next week or so. After that, he said, he'd work on details of a proper tower for the clock and how it would fit in with other historic buildings his family is working on in Dayton.

Koehler-Marsh said the clock is in good shape. ("Kettelhut built that thing like a tank," he said.) And he said it was in working order. He doesn't have a set timetable to get the Hour Time clock back up high.

"It should be something to see," Koehler-Marsh said. "We're talking about Lafayette history, here."

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Source: Journal & Courier

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Information from: Journal and Courier, http://www.jconline.com