The man crouches over a desk with a glaring focus, gently cradling a metallic box with a small chrome wheel that spins and clicks.
Father time abruptly stops—and restarts—over and over for Wallace Buchanan’s craft and passion.
The Hernando, Mississippi, repairman, 79, has been meticulously tinkering with wristwatches, pocket watches, grandfather clocks and other timely devices since he was a teen in Bay Springs, Mississippi.
His level of expertise draws work requests from as far away as two hours from his office, while customer demand has reached the point of being “cuckoo,” his business partner, Brooks Entrikin, 69, said.
“I’ve had to turn my cell phone off, or I wouldn’t get anything done,” Entrikin said.
Entrikin met Buchanan at a jewelry store in Tunica, Mississippi, 16 years ago where Buchanan, a horology professor at Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, was moonlighting part-time at a jewelry store.
The two opened The Time Shop in the back of an old house in Hernando five years ago just off the town square. While Entrikin conducts house calls and tackles more simpler repairs, Buchanan continues to relish solving technical challenges traced to the arrival of mechanical clocks in 14th-century Italy.
Start the Clock
Buchanan’s family were carpenters in Bay Springs. When his neighbor, a clock repairman named Carl Henson needed spare wood parts for clocks, Buchanan made the connection and then became intrigued by Henson’s intricate work.
“I mowed his grass, and as I spent more time with him, I started asking questions (about clocks),” Buchanan recalled.
Soon, Buchanan got an after-school job repairing watches at a jewelry store. After graduating, he finished a two-year horology degree program at Jones College in Ellisville, Mississippi.
The formal education would later pave his future—move his clock’s dial—after one of his college professors invited him to start up a program at NWCC starting in 1971. There, Buchanan taught nearly 300 students the science of the profession until his retirement in 1988.
“Most of my students have moved on from this kind of work,” Buchanan said, alluding to the dwindled profession and practical vanishing of it in higher education and trade schools.
And that is where The Time Shop’s demand falls into place, Entrikin said.
Clock and watch manufacturers have little allowance for repairs, he noted, and the costs to repair such are deliberately too expensive to induce consumers to purchase new items by default. Even the time typically needed to locate, ship and then wait for a manufacturer’s repair is overly burdensome.
“We have become a disposable society: We just replace the battery, and if it’s another kind of problem—people just move on from it,” Entrikin said. “We prefer to go around an obstacle most of the time instead of solving it.”
At The Time Shop, open bi-weekly, there are no email orders, only a rudimentary website, and job tickets are taken with a pen and a promise.
They deliver. Repair requests average around 200 monthly, Entrikin said.
Like A Light Bulb
During one workday, a woman entered the shop in need of a battery for a wristwatch. After a few minutes examining the Timex and then inserting a battery, Buchanan probed for information.
“How long has it been since it worked?” he asked.
“Just the other day,” she replied.
“Well, something else is wrong,” he said before writing down her name and number.
When Buchanan finds where the problem originates, he said, “It’s usually like a light bulb going off.”
Customers seek help from the two men primarily through word-of-mouth advertising, and their requests range from replacement batteries, like in the woman’s case, to restarting heirlooms.
People like the nostalgic idea of repairing an old clock that has been in the family for many years, Entrikin said, even though when it’s fixed, they may soon underappreciate it amidst a digital world. After he recently repaired a customer’s vintage grandfather clock, he cited, the customer called him to say it stopped ticking again.
“When I went back to check on it, she had no idea that you had to wind the clock up once a week,” he chuckled.
Humpty Dumpty
It’s likely that Buchanan’s personality would fit any pursuit where there is a mechanical problem awaiting a solution. He’s determined. “I always took it personally when a teacher told me that whatever it was couldn’t be done,” he said.
The pendulum parts of a clock, the gears and wheels, function harmoniously. When a clock’s interior spring explodes, any affected parts must be carefully removed, then reassembled. In other instances, repairs involve removing the pressure washer inside a clock’s hardware and redrilling the precise size to refit it, Buchanan explained.
“It takes patience and a lot of starts and stops. It’s like putting Humpty Dumpty back together,” he said.
Buchanan’s expertise as a repairman accelerated when he was a professor, he said. After classes were over, he had unprecedented access to repair equipment where he could dig deeper into the science of repair.
“I was able to devise new ways to explore answers to problems, to learn how to make the kinds of repairs I was told were unsalvageable,” he said. “You look for where the problem is, but in other instances you look for patterns to what is not working, and I had the time and resources to explore that. It was a big advantage.”
Meticulous Motivation
“Heirlooms are the best for me to work on: They are inspiring because I know how much it means when there is sentimental value,” Buchanan said. “I’ll do anything and everything to get those running again.”
One of the more challenging heirlooms Wallace has repaired in recent time include a vintage German-manufactured pocket watch.
“It was a big problem because the replacement parts were not listed in any parts catalogue,” he said. “With that watch, the only way was to take each of the broken parts and carefully measure them myself in order to find where to look on a chart.”
Cheryl Dockery’s grandfather, a sharecropper, hand-built a clock for each one of his grandchildren as wedding gifts. He passed away before her nuptials, but someone else ensured the special tradition continued.
“My dad stepped up to the plate and made a grandmother clock—a surprise for me when I wed,” Dockery said. “It was magical.” Her father chose wood from a pecan tree on the well known Jones Orchard in Millington, Tennessee, from which he carved the clock’s parts.
“Our family attended the same country church as Mr. Jones,” Dockery said, explaining the connection.
Dockery kept the six-foot-tall clock pristine and running sharp—even adjusting the mechanics herself—amid several moves into new homes. The treasure is front and center when you walk into her home.
“Recently, though, the clock stopped working, which very concerned me,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “It means the world to me.”
She discovered The Time Shop while searching for solutions on the internet, and Entrikin made several attempts to get it chiming again. Eventually, he transported the clock to Buchanan who got to work with his own magic.
During the process to repair the clock’s mechanisms, Dockery said the two men educated her further about how the clock, a weight-driven piece that works in a particular sequence, runs.
Now the almost 40-year-old clock, “runs better than it ever has,” she insisted, “and without a scratch on it (during the transportation and work done).”
“The funny thing is that when Wallace examined the clock, he told me, ‘Whoever built this didn’t know anything about what he was doing!’” she said in good humor.
Dockery remains earnestly grateful for discovering the shop within driving distance and now having both a better understanding and appreciation for antique clocks thanks to the two business partners. “They are wonderful people, and their level of knowledge of this kind of work is rarely found,” she said. “It’s a dying art.”
DeSoto County resident Chris Brown, a clock and watch collector, learned about the repair shop on Google and has since taken several items into the store.
“I recently bought a Plymouth mantle clock and took it to them, and they cleaned it up and got it running again,” he said. “They are a great value to the community, and they are right here in our backyard.”
The shop’s makeshift tables and crooked drawers overflow with tiny watch parts, gold and silver bands and tools while larger clocks hang from the narrowly paneled walls. Invariably, a clock will chime.
“I like going into their shop. It has a funky, cool ambiance and has clock stuff everywhere,” Brown said. “They are organized in a disorganized manner, and both of them are fun to talk to.”
To reach The Time Shop to request a repair, visit thetimeshopmidsouth.com.
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