Fixing 100 Clocks Is His Job

From The American Horologist magazine, January 1939

Fixing 100 Clocks Is His Job

Keeping 100 clocks in trim is a task any day, but when everyone of them suddenly has to have its hands moved forward 11 hours it's immense.

William Morrison, master clockman of the University of Pennsylvania, has quite a chore of changing all the university clocks from daylight saving to standard time.

He's more or less resigned to the task by this time, having done the job for 17 consecutive years now. It's not so much the number of hours he loses that worries him, but the number of steps he has to climb to get to the clocks.

If he isn't climbing five flights of steps to adjust the time of the clock in the Provost Tower in the university dormitories, he is climbing 35-foot ladders to lift the faces of the clocks in Weightman Hall facing Franklin Field.

Morrison is also university locksmith. "I like locks," he says simply. "They don't have hands." But he is really proud of pinchhitting for Father Time.

"For think of the number of students my clocks have helped put through college," Morrison muses. "I keep the clocks accurate, and the boys can't help getting to classes once in a while because there are so many clocks around." 

When time changes from daylight saving to standard and vice versa, twice each year, Morrison spends all day Sunday changing time at the university.  Then he sighs with relief as he starts for home - until he remembers he has to wind his own watch.