The Clock Watcher
Few people are aware that Kenneth Hagberg has kept the library clock running and on time for the past 45 years. He usually goes to the library before it's open and is gone before anyone gets there.
|Princeton Library Director Wendy Pape calls Ken Hagberg a "silent treasure."|
Hagberg has been taking care of the 123-year-old clock in the tower at the Goodnow Memorial Library since 1961, shortly after he moved to Princeton.
Every week, like clockwork, he climbs the steep stairs up to the tower, where he checks on the timepiece and winds the clock.
That isn't as easy as it sounds. After inserting the heavy crank-handle, Hagberg really gets his cardio-vascular exercise turning the handle steadily for about 10 minutes to rewind the hundreds of feet of cable. When he's finished, one weight consisting of sixteen 50-pound iron blocks has been lifted up to the clock tower.
"The weight for the strike goes all the way to the first floor," says Hagberg.
He then inserts the handle into a slot on the clock to rewind another weight: a box partly filled with stones that rises to the ceiling in the clock tower. There are two separate windings, one for time and one for strike. The wooden box weight was made from the original crate the clock came in when it was delivered in 1884.
Hagberg oils the clock every two months and every five years dismantles it and cleans the parts.
The pendulum is eight feet long and goes down through a hole in the floor. The clock is weight driven and the pendulum regulates the time keeping. The clock strikes once an hour and the speed of the strike mechanism is kept constant by a fan-type governor which spins about 80 RPM while raising the bell hammer tolling the hours.
A wooden ladder leads to the bell tower where the bell hangs mounted in a cradle. The inscription on the bell reads: Goodnow Memorial E.A.W. Goodnow AD 1883 "Knowledge is Power."
Hagberg first started working on clocks when he was a freshman in high school.
"I got a job working in a jewelry store in 1940. Back then everyone had a wind-up alarm clock and I repaired thousands of them and worked on wall and shelf clocks along with watches. Everyone had a wind-up watch or a pocket watch back then," he says. "I worked for Brad Cheney, the clock man in Worcester, from 1954 until 1960. He was a great guy and I learned a lot from him. He serviced the City of Worcester school clocks and the City Hall tower clock for many years.
"When we moved to Princeton in 1960 Mrs. Passage was the librarian and the clock wasn't running," he says.
Hagberg took the clock apart and overhauled it, and has done that several times since. If the clock stops for any reason, Hagberg does whatever it takes to get it running. Now and then in the winter, ice builds up on the hands of the clock faces and the mechanism will stop.
"Sometimes I can open the access panels and knock the ice off, other times I just have to wait until it melts," he says.
The library clock was "built to last forever" says Hagberg. And with the loving care he's given it for the past 45 years, the clock is likely to do just that.