Clocking Out
6o years after landing his job, watchmaker Bob Elskamp retires
HYANNIS - Bob Elskamp hunched over his wooden workbench for the last time yesterday and popped the back off a quartz watch.
While other employees at Guertin Brothers Jewelers ate his retirement sheetcake, the white-haired 87-year-old watchmaker held the timepiece just inches from his face. He rooted around for parts in drawers stuffed with tools. And he shook his head as he offered a final diagnosis.
"It's not going to make it," he said.
You could say Elskamp's time is up. In an era of disposable everything, he practices the increasingly obsolete craft of watch repair. Trained at the Waltham Watch Factory, he took a job at the Hyannis jewelry store 60 years ago and has been there ever since. He drives a red moped to work and has attained local legend status. A steady stream of customers came to his service window in the shop yesterday to say goodbye and wish him well.
"I'm Linda Kelly's daughter," one customer said, leaning into Elskamp's hearing aid. Her parents have been dead eight years, but when they were alive, they "wouldn't go anywhere else to get their watchbands fixed."
Elskamp smiled. For his last day on the job, he dressed in his typical work clothes: a suitcoat and a tie - this one sporting a Mobil "On the Run" logo. If he felt wistful, he didn't show it.
Elskamp once dreamed of becoming a dentist but ended up joining the Navy during World War II, becoming a second lieutenant, and leading combat missions in the Philippines. Jumping off the bow of a boat onto the rocky shore of Leyte Gulf, he injured both feet. Unable to stand for long periods of time, he gave up the idea of dentistry and latched onto watchmaking.
He doesn't sugarcoat it.
"This was a livelihood for me."
He graduated from a two-year program at the Waltham Watch Factory just as TV was becoming a household staple. Many of the tools and parts that crowd his tiny office in the back of Guertin's are artifacts of that era. The drawers of his worn oak desk are also full of unusual devices, most of which gather dust in the age of high-tech quartz watches. There are yellowed boxes of Seiko and Bulova parts. He wears thick gray glasses with a jewelers loop to see the tiny screws. But these days, the glasses mainly help him to replace watch batteries.
"They're not training watchmakers anymore," he said. "A young man can learn to drive a truck in a few weeks and make more than I ever did."
On his own wrist, Elskamp wears an inexpensive 12-year-old Pulsar that was discarded by a customer. Its metal backing regularly falls off, but Elskamp simply glues it back on. And in his free time, he also likes to think up visual puns, of which he has dozens. Yesterday, as a joke, he offered a customer a bottle of spring water in which he had placed a metal spring. "That's as springy as it gets," he said of his creation.
"That's Bob," said shop owner Michael Hale, whose office is next door.
More like beloved Bob. Hale also named yesterday Free Watch Battery Day in honor of Elskamp. And he draped a large banner over the service window that read: "We'll Miss You, Bob!" Two other store owners, Dean and Virginia Smith, came in for lunch and to say goodbye. Dean Smith said he was surprised when Elskamp said on Tuesday that yesterday would be his last day.
"I just figured he would up and die [on the job] one of these days," Smith said.
Elskamp said simply it was time for him to go. He "retired" once before, after his wife of 40 years died. But after six months, he leapt at the chance to go back to work. Elskamp, who remarried 17 years ago, said that he's not sure what he'll do to keep busy now, but that he enjoys teaching his son clockmaking.
Yesterday, staff members at the store fixed his favorite lunch: a platter of American chop suey. And when the clock struck 2:30 p.m., Elskamp clocked out for the last time.
