It is pretty rare to see someone using an analog watch nowadays- most people rely on their smartphone or smartwatch to help them get places on time.
However, it recently worked to the benefit of Hall County to have Tom Hertel around. Hertel is a retired aerospace engineer who back in July repaired the analog clock at the top of the old Hall County Courthouse.
Hertel's clock-repairing business, Hertel's Clock Repair, is right here in Gainesville. Originally from Tucson, Arizona, Hertel retired from Aerojet Rocketdyne in January of last year and decided to open a clock repair business in February as another source of income.
He said his business had only been open for five months when he got a call from Kevin Ivey with building maintenance for Hall County Government.
"I had just started repairing clocks, I had put up my website and Kevin Ivey from the maintenance department for Hall County saw my ad and said, 'Gee, there's a clock repairman in the local area,' so he called me up and wanted to know if I wanted to work on a tower clock," said Hertel.
Hertel said the old courthouse clock tower is the first tower he ever repaired. He said he went to school to learn to repair clocks in the 1970s; he earned a certificate of completion in watchmaking from Eastern New Mexico University at the Roswell Campus.
Although he left watchmaking to pursue an engineering degree, both pathways taught him skills that came in handy for repairing the tower.
"I spent one day just looking at it and going through it and figuring out how it worked," said Hertel. "I'm a pretty good puzzler, so once I figured out how it worked, it wasn't really that hard. [I was] just looking for places that needed lubricant, needed polishing."
Hertel said the main issue with the tower was its old age and the fact it had not been working for some time. He made several pieces using his lathe machine to replace the old ones, a process that took about two-and-a-half weeks to complete.
In addition, he gave special attention to one of the tower's four clock faces that was frozen.
"We had a frozen face and that was quite exciting," Hertel chuckled. "I was inside kind of lubricating it and I asked [another man] to go outside and wiggle it a little bit. And finally, he wiggled the hands free, so it was just lubrication."
While repairing the clock tower itself was a process, Hertel said reaching the tower from inside the courthouse was a process, as well. He said it was not a straight shot for him, Kevin Ivey and another man to reach the tower.
"I started almost in the basement of the old courthouse, we had to climb up all of the stairs to the top, we had to climb a ladder to the roof and then we had to go across the roof to another ladder and go up that one, go into an access panel, then go into above the old courthouse and there was a ladder, we had to crawl across the beam and get to another ladder and that ladder went up to the clock tower," Hertel explained.
Hertel said once the group reached the clock tower, it took him about eight hours to complete the repair.
Katie Crumley, public information officer for Hall County Government, said she heard secondhand from Ivey and others involved with the repair that Hertel handled the process like a "champ".
"He was so gracious and understanding and willing to sort of be flexible and get up there and make the repairs that were needed," said Crumley. "I can say for a fact that our staff has gone on and on about how much his skill set and knowledge were needed and how valuable and instrumental they were in getting this clock back up and working again."
It is unclear how long the clock had been inoperable, but the clock tower and the courthouse itself dates back to 1938.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Gainesville to dedicate the new courthouse; a courthouse constructed previously was destroyed during the tornado of 1936, according to information sent by Crumley.
Now Hertel, Ivey and those who helped them repair the clock tower have etched their own names into history.
A previous version of this story has been corrected to reflect that construction of the courthouse was completed in 1938, at which point President Roosevelt returned to Gainesville for a dedication ceremony. Roosevelt had previously visited Gainesville following the tornado of 1936 and delivered a speech that is known locally as the 'Good People of Gainesville' speech.
