Chapter One

Chapter One

This Ravenswood neighborhood was beautiful.  Old brick buildings, with tall oaks lining the streets. I hadn't been sure what to expect, but it was lovely.  It was a perfect Summer day in Chicago, 72 degrees, and not a cloud in the sky.  I was driving my rusty, crappy old convertible, happy for the rare opportunity to enjoy the weather and have some time behind the wheel.

I was here to meet a fellow car & watch nerd, and he'd given me directions to his office parking garage, where I'd be able to park my old Fiat next to his old Land Rover, where we would debate the pains & foibles of trying to maintain two wildly different kinds of notoriously unreliable cars.  After comparing engine bay views and animated discussions of Marelli VS Lucas wiring, we went upstairs to his office & workspace.  As an independent watchmaker who I'd become friends with, I'd brought a number of watches to show and talk about on his podcast, which frankly, I wasn't too sure about.  I don't own any high-end "legit" watches, but I had a few that I'd been gifted or inherited over the years.  They might not be worth anything to anyone else, but nevertheless, they were priceless to me. 

His office was a typical Chicago loft – high ceilings with large wood beams, brick walls, a soft old Persian rug covered the wide-plank floor.  Slightly battered Eams lounge chairs flanked a bar cart with an old silver-faced stereo, and a loft area above the large, open steel-framed casement windows held his watchmaking space. A slight breeze and birdsong permeated the light, airy space, and it immediately felt like home.

After setting up the camera & microphones, he poured us a couple of drinks and I un-rolled the leather sheath.  Each watch had a story, and it seemed like most of my major life events were tied to one or another.  I'd arranged them chronologically, and he pointed at the first one, asking "what the heck is THAT thing?" It was a large, very worn watch, sitting next to a diminutive Heuer chronograph that bore the Abercrombie logo on it's face.  We both chuckled, and I took a sip of my drink before telling him about my grandfather Clarence and his two watches.  The Bourbon warmed my throat, and briefly I considered it a good omen.

My grandfather Clarence had grown up on a Tennessee dirt farm during the depression, believing his only way out was through education.  His mother had been a school teacher before the burdens of multiple children had brought her home full-time.  The other children, while diligent about chores around the farm, none of them showed the spark that young Clarence did, and she fanned that flame.  Too far to walk, the county library would send books via the local postal service, and each week Clarence traded old for new, as the postman cursed his heavy load.  Once he was in High School, Clarence earned straight A's, and the guidance counselor wrote him a glowing letter of recommendation, with little doubt in his mind it'd go nowhere, just like every other dirty white-trash  kid that had been through his school.

Timing and luck were on Clarence's side though.  President Roosevelt's depression-era Works Progress Administration had recently spawned the Tennessee Valley Authority with the newly minted awesome task of bringing electricity to every corner of the state.  To do this, they were granting scholarships to rural farm kids that showed promise, allowing Clarence to matriculate in far away Knoxville in 1937.  Clarence would graduate with his degree in civil engineering, just a few months before WWII started.  The US Army was desperate for engineers, and Clarence became a 2nt Lt.  Just before shipping out, his mother gave him the watch her father had carried through The Great War, in France.  Considered overly large and unfashionable for the time, it had laid unworn in a drawer for many years, but once Clarence wound & set it, he was pleased to find the old Elgin kept good time.  Originally the pocket-watch for a conductor on the Tennessee Central Line, an enterprising jeweler had welded loops on either side, allowing it to be worn on the wrist as many young Army officers had learned in the trenches of France.  Clarence considered it a lucky family talisman that had gotten his father home safely, and so he wore it all through Africa, and then Italy, as he and his section used their engineering skills to create bombing maps from grainy reconnaissance pictures for the 8^th Army Air Force, and indeed, the watch came safely home with him.

He'd always admired the sleek new chronographs worn by the bomber pilots, imagining that they made his trench watch look clunky and old-fashioned, no matter how well it kept time.  When he came home and began his career with the TVA, evaluating areas for potential hydro-electric projects, he put the watch in a drawer as his father had done, and got himself a handsome chronograph from the era's best outdoor outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch.  His new job saw him walking off into the woods for weeks at a time as he'd camp & live off the land while surveying valleys.  He needed quality boots and outdoor gear, and he'd seen the watch while shopping at the new downtown Abercrombie in Memphis.

Clarence gave me his father's trench watch when I got orders deploying me to the middle east.  A short decade later, I inherited his Heuer chronograph with a note that he'd been incredibly proud of me, saying I should keep these watches together for the next generation, so they could come home as safely as we'd done.