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Endless Winter

Endless Winter

Town Keeps Time After Hundred-Dollar Bet

After a fire in 1943, a new clock for Canterbury Church was built on a dare by a machinist

By Marshall Hudson

There had been a hard driving rain, and now the roof was leaking inside the steeple on the Canterbury Church. The maintenance man invited me to go up inside the pointy spire with him to see how bad it really was.

This steeple wasn’t built for easy access. You needed to be part monkey and part contortionist to crawl up the ladders and squeeze through the tiny passageways, while navigating obstacles and avoiding banging your head.

Tiny access door to get up into the church spire.
Photo From Canterbury Historical Society

We reached a narrow claustrophobic platform at the level of the three-faced clock, where I wrote my name on a whitewashed board mounted there for just that purpose. Reading the short list of people who had been there before me, I discovered the story of Ralph Keeler, the talented man who built this clock on a hundred-dollar, “bet you can’t” dare.

It was 1949, and the small town of Canterbury was still rebuilding after a fire in 1943 burned most of the buildings in the town center to the ground. The old church was completely lost, and the townspeople had been building a new one over the last few years.

Church members donated logs cut from their farms and then held work parties where they sawed the logs into useable boards and beams. When enough lumber was stockpiled, volunteers organized barn-raising-type gatherings and erected the new church building. All that was left now were a few finishing touches, one of them being a clock for the steeple.

The Building Committee had solicited bids for a new clock, and the low bid had come in at a staggering $3,600 — well beyond the reach of the community. Shocked and exasperated at the amount, Keeler, the church treasurer, blurted out, “Ridiculous! Why would we pay $3,600 when I could build one for 100 bucks?” Frank Plastridge, the road agent, suggested that if Ralph could in fact build one for $100, he’d give him the $100. “I’ll bet you can’t do it,” Plastridge said, and the dare was on.

Keeler knew nothing about clocks, but he had a degree in electrical engineering and was employed as a machinist at Rumford Press in Concord. In the basement of his house, he had a small workshop with some metal-working tools.

Ralph Keeler works on the clock in his basement workshop.
Photo From Canterbury Historical Society

Without fully realizing what he was getting himself into, he accepted the bet. Keeler quickly discovered the clock he would be building was really three clocks, one for each face of the steeple, which would triple the expenses and add to the difficulty of the dare.

For the next three years he worked in his basement workshop building clock parts in his spare time. He machined almost every part of the clock himself and personally cut out the brass numerals for the three faces.

There were more than 500 individual clock parts to be created, and the slim budget left little room for trial and error. Keeler could not afford to waste any material, so each part had to be carefully thought out, designed and sketched before construction. Keeler scrounged materials here and there, buying outright only the components he couldn’t manufacture himself. Three WWII surplus electrical motors, procured at no cost, would drive the hands on each face of the clock, and a fourth motor would provide the synchronization necessary to keep the time consistent on all three faces.

The fourth motor was removed and saved for history, it also provided the synchronization of the three driving motors. The cotter pin can be pulled to disconnect the linkage, and the drive mechanism manually rotated, to adjust the clock for daylight saving time and more.
Photo From Canterbury Historical Society

A saved clipping from the Globe Fiction Magazine dated June 7, 1953, indicates that the toughest problem for Keeler “was finding a way to lock the hands in position yet leave them free to move in a continuous flow to keep them from hurrying on the downhill side of the face and loafing on the uphill side. In desperation, Keeler turned to a 300-year-old device known as the ‘worm drive,’ never before used on the face of a clock. In the years since its completion the clock has never missed a minute even in the heaviest snow and sleet.”

The clocks have Roman numerals of weathered brass set directly on the building. Keeler’s original idea of having them made of ground glass with illumination behind the face proved to be too expensive. The hands were cast by Keeler and reflect his own design. To stay within his designated budget, no bell-striking element was included, but he left the option open, hoping this feature could be added later.

Keeler completed the clock and installed it just in time for the town’s 1951 Old Home Day celebration. The final cost: $147.

Ralph Keeler climbs a ladder while installing the clock. Raymond Glines, driving the wagon, donated much of the lumber which built the church. Ralph’s wife, Lucille Keeler, is also in the wagon as Eva Schmidt looks on.
Photo From Canterbury Historical Society

Despite his best efforts and three years of donated labor, Ralph Keeler lost the bet, but he didn’t really mind. Keeler said he did it for the challenge, and the fun of the project was to carry it out as inexpensively as possible. Frank Plastridge declared it the best homemade tower clock in the country, and was so pleased with the result he happily forked over the entire $147, even though he had won the bet.

An oversight in Keeler’s well-thought-out design is that it took two people with walkie-talkies to adjust the hands for daylight saving time or correction after power outages. One person up in the steeple working blindly and the other on the ground outside communicating, “just a little bit more,” or “oops too much, go back a little” as the hands are adjusted.

Age and the elements have taken their toll on Ralph Keeler’s clock, and it no longer functions, even though portions of it have been replaced over the years to keep it running. The old WWII surplus motors no longer work. One has been removed and tucked away to preserve the historical tale.

A new committee has been looking into the options and expenses of repairing or replacing the old clock, but budgets are tight, and the committee hasn’t yet found someone willing to fix it on a $100 dare.

Fundraising for clock repair tends to always take a backseat to more urgent needs, and now we must contort our way back down the ladder and tell the pastor funds are needed for a leak in the steeple roof.

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