Clock doctor makes house calls

A broken clock is right two times a day, but that’s not enough for the kids and teachers in the McClaren 1895 Classroom program, for whom the time travel should be as seamless as possible. 

Twice a year the museum hosts hundreds of third graders for an immersive half-day in public school education as it was practiced when Central School opened its doors on Second Avenue East in 1895. Kalispell’s oldest public building now serves as home to the Northwest Montana History Museum. 

The museum’s Seth Thomas wall clock that hangs in the museum’s Swanberg Classroom hadn’t worked in years. Gentle prompts from our volunteer teachers spurred me to action.

I researched local outfits that used to do clock repair, but all seemed to have closed up or moved out of the area. I put out a call on social media. 

Crickets. 

Cue the hero: horologist Chris Anderson, who set up shop in St. Regis after apprenticing in Germany for five years. For one part of his client base, he makes the Flathead Valley rounds every couple of weeks to serve customers, taking the clocks back to his workshop and then delivering them repaired on the next trip. He fixes five or six a week. 

A spry mid-50s guy who keeps to schedule, Anderson got right to work on our patient, then brought it back ticking last month. “It’s a regulator,” he said. “They were used in train stations — also schools. They were a little bit more accurate than others.” 

He unpacked its parts and made adjustments within the case. Among American clocks, Seth Thomas models seem to be a workhorse. “Everything had to move west,” Anderson said of many such East Coast products. “They were made to be strong.” 

The Seth Thomas clock isn’t original to the Central School building, but it earned an excellent Kalispell pedigree after it left a Connecticut factory in 1917. In 2014 it then traveled from the former post office on First Avenue East (the current, temporary digs of the Kalispell branch of Flathead County Library) to the Swanberg Classroom at the museum, where it oversees hundreds of events as well as the kids eating up 1895-style education (a student last spring said, “I wish school was like this all the time.”). 

Anderson’s people, like many of the clocks he works on, moved west, too, landing in Bottineau, near the Turtle Mountains in far-north North Dakota. 

A U.S. company sent him to work in Germany, where he came upon a clock repair shop that held more than passing interest when the proprietor begged him, “Help me out, help me get caught up.”  

Since then, Anderson has brought hundreds of timekeepers back to life, including a 1600s Swedish clock with all wooden gears. Back in St. Regis, he says, “I’m only allowed one per room.” It must be a cacophony at midnight. 

I hope the time-traveling kids notice that our Seth Thomas finally ticks and tocks. The secondhand spins with purpose. Anderson says some of these clocks (not ours) have a nook in the back for a stack of hundred dollar bills. Now, that’s gangster. 

Anderson winds it up and he’s off, like clockwork. 

Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at mdavis@dailyinterlake.com.