CLAYBORN, IA — At precisely 2 a.m. Sunday morning, the analog wall clock that has hung crooked behind the teller windows at Clayborn Savings & Loan since 1978 will, for the first time in four months, briefly display the correct time. By 2:01 a.m., it will be wrong again, just in a fresh direction.
The clock has been running exactly one hour fast since November 3, when no one at the bank could remember which staff member had been previously assigned the fall-back duty, or where the step ladder had gone, or whether the clock’s back-panel screw required a Phillips or a flathead. The matter was tabled at a Monday meeting and then forgotten, the way most things are.
“It’s been running an hour fast for so long that some of our older customers have started showing up an hour early on purpose,” said branch manager Linda Voss, who has worked at Savings & Loan for nineteen years. “They like to sit in the lobby. We put out a coffee carafe.”
Voss confirmed that no current employee knows how to remove the clock from the wall. Chuck Hennig, who retired from facilities maintenance in 2019, is reportedly the last man living who has accessed its mechanism, and he now lives in a fifth-wheel outside Branson and does not return calls about clocks.
Clayborn County keeps time loosely under the best of circumstances. The bell at First Methodist has rung six minutes early since a 2014 lightning strike no one has felt urgent enough to address. The microwave at the Hen House Diner has been flashing 12:00 since the Obama administration. The big lit sign at Marv’s IGA reads 73° year-round, which Marv has called “aspirational.”
Mrs. Peterson, asked whether she planned to set her own clocks ahead before bed Saturday, said she had stopped doing so in 2017 and now simply waited a week for everything to feel right. “The microwave catches up eventually,” she said. “Or I do.”
County Supervisor Dale Whittaker, reached for comment, said he supported the time change in principle but had not personally adjusted a clock since his second divorce. He declined to elaborate and asked the reporter to clarify which hour, exactly, was being lost.
At the Hen House, waitress Dee Hollander said she’d been told to come in an hour earlier Sunday but wasn’t sure if that meant her hour earlier or the clock’s. She said she’d split the difference. The eggs, she noted, would not know either way.