WESTPORT, N.Y. — At 1:58 a.m. Sunday, retired millwright Wendell Krepps clipped a headlamp to the brim of his Carhartt cap, climbed 41 iron rungs into the bell housing of the Essex County Courthouse clock tower, and on the federal government’s instructions deprived his neighbors of an hour they will not get back until November.
Krepps, 71, has performed the springtime adjustment to Westport’s only public timepiece every March since 1998, when the previous custodian, Lyle Mertensen, fell off the rungs and onto a Buick. He receives a stipend of $42 from the village, payable in two installments, and a thermos of coffee from Donna at the Galley.
“It’s a four-faced Seth Thomas from 1903,” Krepps said Sunday morning at the diner, working through a short stack. “You can’t just turn it forward an hour. You have to walk it forward — eleven hours back through the chime cycle — or you’ll snap the strike train. Took me four hours and twenty minutes. I got home at 7:18, which was technically 6:18.”
The Essex County Department of Public Works confirmed in a statement that Krepps remains the only person in the village trained to operate the mechanism, that no successor has been identified, and that the contingency plan, in the event of his incapacitation, is “a conversation we are not currently having.”
Reaction in Westport was, as usual, divided along lines no one fully understands. Marlene Hoke, who runs the antique store on Pleasant Street, called the practice “an absolute treasure.” Her husband Burt, watching the Syracuse game on his phone, said the clock has been running seven minutes fast since 2011 and Krepps refuses to discuss it.
Krepps does not refuse to discuss it. “The mechanism wants to run fast,” he said. “I am not going to fight an instrument older than my mother to please Burt Hoke.”
The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, which fixed the second Sunday in March as the springtime transition, makes no provision for hand-wound village clock towers, mechanical strike trains, or men named Wendell. A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation, which oversees time zone policy, did not respond to a request asking who, in their understanding, was supposed to do this.
Donna at the Galley, refilling his coffee, said Krepps comes in every second Sunday in March looking “like a man who has just been to war with a year.” She has worked the breakfast shift since 1989. She added that the clock is correct now, more or less, and that ought to be enough for anybody.