SLO County town’s landmark clock is heading to an out-of-state collector. Here’s why
Something big is missing in front of 555 Main St. in Cambria, something that’s been there since 1991.
One of the small coastal town’s two massive “town clocks” is now on its way to its new owner and home in Wisconsin.
Sue Foreman — who owns the Once Upon a Tyme clock-and-doll shop/museum adjacent to the historic timepiece standing guard nearby — recently sold the massive town clock that was nicknamed “Big Time.”
Why now, after all those years?
The clock’s Victorian-era mechanism hadn’t worked for years, she said in a March 4 phone interview.
She said that a long time ago, the antique clock was damaged when someone either drove into the base or threw a rock at one side of the clock’s face, shattering the glass.
“And then it rained,” Foreman explained, and the mechanism rusted.
Since then, the timepiece had “just been standing there, not keeping time,” she said, but still functioned as a beloved town landmark and a reminder of Foreman family history.
While doing difficult repairs was a joyful challenge for her husband and the shop’s co-owner, master horologist Jay Foreman, he died suddenly in 2011.
After the clock was damaged, his bereaved wife and his longtime second-in-command horologist Phillip Ehorn lost any desire to fix “Big Time.”
Wisconsin collector asks to buy clock
Then a few months ago, Sue Foreman said, “I got a call from a guy in Wisconsin, asking if I was interested in selling the clock,” she said. “I’d never thought about it before. I told him it needs to be restored.” She said she didn’t know how much to charge him for it.
Finally, she and the buyer settled on a price that repaid her for the expenses the Foremans had incurred to move the big clock to Cambria in 1991 from their backyard in Hollywood, where they’d installed it in 1976.
It was a big, nerve-racking job.
“That was in our youth,” Sue Foreman said with a rueful chuckle. “We still had energy then.”
She estimated the clock is about 11 or 12 feet tall. Ehorn said the cast-iron housing and the clock “are crazy heavy,” too.
By the time the deal was sealed, Foreman was ready for the clock to leave, she said. “For a period of years, you keep and keep and keep. Then you wake up one morning and say, ‘It’s time to let it go.’”
“And the fact that someone wanted it and was going to restore it?” she added. That was the perfect impetus for her decision.
Foreman wasn’t comfortable revealing what the buyer paid or any more information about him, although she did add that “he loves restoring things and wants to bring it back to how it used to be.”
Cambria’s other big timepiece, the Rotary Club town clock, is on the grounds of the Cambria Historical Museum, near the East Village intersection of Burton Drive and Center Street.
Clock disassembled and shipped
With the deal done, on Monday, Feb. 28, native son Josh Warren and Billy Thomas of Morro Bay brought a big flatbed trailer and a Caterpillar bucket rig to the clock’s West Village location and began the meticulous task of disassembling the treasured timepiece, before lifting the heavy pieces onto the trailer and securing them.
Foreman said the clock’s buyer apparently had located Warren thanks to a tip from Cambria Hardware.
Warren “did an incredible job,” Foreman said. “I could not believe how well he handled it, and the care he gave it. It was amazing to watch.”
She said a Santa Maria shipping company will make sure it gets to Wisconsin safely.
‘The clock is gone!’
Now, people are noticing the clock’s absence.
Some immediately recognize what’s missing at the busy corner right before the notorious “Spaghetti Bowl” stoplight intersection of Main Street/Charing Road, Highway 1 and Windsor Boulevard. Other passersby say there’s just a sense of something being different there.
As one anonymous resident said as she drove by, the corner seems empty, lacking and a bit lonely somehow.
“Oh, the clock is gone!” she said ruefully. ““A piece of history is gone.”
This story was originally published March 8, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
