Keeping Time, and Stories, in Bar Harbor
Once a concert pianist, Alexander Phillips, 80, now spends his days repairing clocks and reminding his town that every second and every experience counts.
BAR HARBOR—Alexander Phillips keeps time going and the ticks and whirls and noises from the clocks that hang along his Main Street shop and that sit, waiting for his care, on the work bench all know why. His hands steady over tools and gadgets meant to keep time counted, clocks and watches running. His brain knows all these tools, all their histories, and all the stories that go with them.
“I keep thinking about being eighty, because you know when you’re fifty, eighty is way the hell out there,” he said on his birthday last May.
Phillips used to be a concert pianist. He’s a boater. He was quite the shooter and he is always a master storyteller. He used to be a little boy in Connecticut listening to his family tell tales of how they came to America. The homes along the streets were a litany of languages and tales. He used to listen to those sounds, those voices, and stories. He had dreams though.
Ever since he was ten years old, he dreamt of clocks.
“Connecticut was the mecca of clockmaking,” Phillips said.
He is now eighty, having a birthday this past spring and customers still come into his shop—fellow Masons, strangers, strangers-that-are-soon-to-be friends. He is eighty, yes, but for a man who makes sure that others can keep time, age doesn’t mean too much to Phillips.
He keeps on ticking and fixing and going.
What looks like a box of scraps to most people are pieces of a clock that Phillips can easily put back together, no matter how small, how intricate, the pieces.
The clocks are no relics of the past, but pieces of stories, bits of history meant to be cherished and remembered. So, is he. To hear Phillips’ laugh is to feel like you’re hanging out with an old friend. Phillips harkens from a time when business was always about more than a transaction; it was about connection. Enter into his clock shop on Main Street in Bar Harbor and you’ll get more than your clock or watch fixed, you’ll get a friend, a connection, an education, and a joke or two.
That’s how it’s been at his shop on Main Street for over 35 years. That’s how it still is.
A shop of love.
The walls are covered with things that tick, mechanics and beauty combined to create instruments that tell time.
A LEGACY OF TOOLS
“I’ve got to keep going. So, I built a machine shop.” There’s a milling machine that came from his father’s machinery shop from 1942. “Folks like my old man would make widgets.”
He makes replacement gears with the equipment there. Phillips is a horologist, a skilled artisan who works in the intricate world of time pieces.
“I have my many tools,” Phillips laughed.
There is a 1920s heavy-duty grinding wheel, cleaning brushes, mainspring let-downs, winders, stalking sets, micrometers, vise sets. Lathes that harken back to the 1880s. A 1935 milling machine came from his own father’s machine shop. A topping tool, came from a mentor six or more decades ago. There are textbook and tools that he has inherited from horologists he never had the pleasure to meet.
“If you use this stuff, you’ve got to have it.”
“It would take 3-4 years” to learn, “but it’s got to be hands-on.”
In another life, Phillips was a concert pianist. But his love? It was clocks and he studied with Norman Steinkritz at Hennor Jewelers & Clockmakers on Lexington Avenue in New York City in 1969.
“It was the hardware city of the world,” he said of New Britain, Connecticut. “They made everything there.”
As he grew up there were different languages spoken in all the homes up the street.
His grandfather was Kaiser Wilheim’s blacksmith.
“He didn’t like the Kaiser at all,” he said. “He knew how to make tools for cutting instruments. The Germans came up with a fantastic lathe. He knew how to do all that. He was from Bavaria and Bavarians were different. They were ‘eat, drink, and be merry.’”
His grandparents lived across the river from each other in Bavaria. In a world war, his father was a diver and would go down to fix buoys. His family members worked at Pratt Whitney and then bought an International Harvester dealership.
“I was in love with that. These huge monster trucks. The power!” he enthused. “I saw myself being a part of it. My father said, ‘Over my dead body.’”
But the working of machines, what they do, how they work, the mechanics of them fascinated Phillips. The National Watch and Clock Collectors Inc lists just ten horologists in Maine.
THE TIME OF THE PIANO
His uncle taught him piano. “I could play Liszt, Beethoven, all the big ones, with tiny hands, yet.”
Ross Dupont, President Lyndon Johnson’s surgeon, took Phillips under his wing and sponsored him. He wanted him to go to Juilliard. They settled on the Manhattan School of Music.
“That’s when I was shipped to New York,” he said. He fell in love. “I thought, ‘What an operation this is.’”
But at the time, the concert scene in the United States was falling apart and it was becoming harder and harder for talented pianists to make a living touring. He did tour and went through Knoxville, Tennessee and to Nashville and Mississippi. He also played every other day at the Metropolitan Opera to keep the piano exercised. He also played for the American Opera Society.
During the piano years, he met Earl Wilde, concert pianist, who was invited to play for six different presidents. The two became friends.
“No! Earl Wilde. He played with Toscanini.”
It was a big deal. Toscanini was one of the most influential conductors and musicians of the time.
“He said, ‘You have it, but you’re losing here and here and here.’” Phillips said. Phillips had a car. Wilde didn’t. “He said, ‘I’ll give you lessons if you bring me around when I have to do things.’”
Then he got to know Arthur Fiedler, who was the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra for 50 years.
“He loved martinis. He was the most fun guy,” Phillips said. “I really liked that guy.”
THE TIME OF THE CLOCKS
He was offered a job at a university, but he didn’t feel like he was the teacher type.
“I went to a couple clock makers and they threw me out,” he laughed. “But the clock thing was gnawing at me.”
And then he found Norman Steinkritz who couldn’t understand why Phillips would want to stop being a pianist, but he gave him a chance.
He’d say, ‘I’d want you workin’ up in the front. I don’t want the Department of Labor coming around,” Phillips said. He learned the nomenclature in about five months and would be able to talk shop with suppliers.
“You’ve really got it now. I think you’ve found your way,” Norman told him.
“Good, because I want to buy into this,” Phillips said.
Phillips told him he wanted to buy into the business. He bought half.
They went up into the tower clocks of New York City, which gave him industrial clock knowledge, which has helped give him the skills to maintain Bar Harbor’s two iconic clocks: one at The First National Bank of Bar Harbor and the other on the town’s village green.
“We took off. It was a good partnership, like a father and son almost,” Phillips said. “We had our benches to each other and at noon one of his favorite things to do was to argue.”
They’d eat their sandwiches and debate.
One time, Phillips got Norman going so well, he thought he was having a heart attack, but it wasn’t that at all. Norman was so worked up that he’d swallowed his teeth.
According to Phillips’ website, “The business of fixing clocks and watches is almost like being a solo musician. You really must love it in order to make a living at it. Years upon years are spent perfecting your craft. Success can only be measured by your reputation.”
People are like that, too.
THE TIME OF LOVE
“It was easily twenty years we worked together,” Phillips said of his time with Norman. “Then I fell in love.”
That happened when he was 42. She was in Connecticut. Phillips had a cottage there on the river, but he lived in New York.
“Red-head. Blue eyes. Irish,” he said.
Eileen was running an office of three doctors. They were together for six months or a year.
“She told me the place she’d love to be is Maine. I said, ‘Maine! It’s cold up there.’”
She said, “Well, they do have heat, you know.”
But he’d heard of Bar Harbor, where her parents used to visit.
A lot of the people in his New York neighborhood, the Silk Stocking District, were high-level millionaires, who sponsored a lot of his piano soirees.
He did Mrs. Rockefeller’s clocks, American clocks passed down through the family, he said. “What a nice lady.”
They talked about Mount Desert Island.
He imagined Mount Desert Island would be like Staten Island.
“It was two o’clock in the morning and we went to the Bar Harbor Inn,” he said. It was in the late 1980s, likely. “I saw these mountains coming out of the ocean and thought, ‘What the hell?’”
There was a little earthquake, some kind of tremor, and they drove around the island, exploring.
“I was falling more and more in love with it, every second,” he said.
Back in New York, Norman’s health was failing and Phillips packed it all up and moved to Maine with Eileen. She convinced him to trade in his old boat for a Boston whaler.
“I said, ‘Small towns don’t recognize people just sleeping together. I think it’s better we get married,’” he said.
So, they were married. “She was a hippie but I was a greaser. I’m the heart and she’s the head. She was very smart.”
Keating Pepper sold him the last house lot in his subdivision.
“You could see why it was the last lot,” he said.
It had a lot of rocks. It didn’t matter.
“Eh. I’m not much of a gardener,” he said.
It has swamp in there. That didn’t matter either.
“I like water.”
It was the year Frenchman’s Bay froze over. It was a cold winter as he moved everything from New York and Connecticut. They built a house. Eileen worked at Mount Desert Hospital and Alexander built their home with help and built his shop.
He made a sign for the shop, brought his tools, and set up next to the Argosy Gallery, which was next door.
“They had never had a real clockmaker,” he said. “People would come here and say, ‘People fix clocks?’”
THE TIME OF STORIES
In that Main Street shop, Phillips tells stories so full of voice and happiness. Others share their stories with him, too. The chuckles come from the bellies. The stories are from ancestors, his own history books, his customers.
“I’m really not crazy about wrist watches, but I’ll do it,” he’ll tell someone.
He’ll ruminate over one of the clocks. “It’s incredible. A guy cut this.”
But some of his most lovely stories are about growing up the child of people from Germany and Poland in the time after World War 2, about survival, fitting in, and the lessons he learned.
”I was not allowed to speak what I heard because I mostly heard cuss words,” he said of his childhood with his German and Polish relatives who spoke those languages in the home “I can fake German, too.”
He said once he made up German and two people came into his shop. He made up a little German.
“Ich nein auf es auvedersehn,” he said, reenacting the event. “She turns around and says, ‘What did you say?’”
Alexander Phillips is a character, a storyteller, a keeper of time. He has animal friends in the woods. A turkey Esmeralda will come up to him; there’s a crow that once was his pet, a squirrel, the much beloved Tyler, a chocolate lab, or his dogs Finn and Whiskey. It’s easy to imagine him talking to them, telling stories, maybe speaking a little fake German.
“Readers often point out that the recipients of the Editors’ Choice endorsement represent the rustic, the refined, and everything in between, then ask what criteria we use to select them,” said Mel Allen, editor of Yankee in a press release when Phillips won the magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award in 2007. “Whether it’s a farm stand, a lobster shack with paper plates, or a restaurant that serves its meals on fine china, they all share a singular quality. These are places that travelers will remember, that locals love, and that promise visitors the opportunity to experience New England’s unique character firsthand.”
When you talk to Alex, the phone will likely ring.
“I have the watch. I sent the form to the people,” he says. “Wow! Yes! Bring it. Bring it here. I”ll hang around.”
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Acadia Brochures of Maine.
