PUEBLO, Colo.—Twenty-five years after leaving Pueblo, a clock shop owner has decided to resurrect his father’s legacy.
Stevan Keller bought Keller Clock Shop on Main Street from his father, Roxa, for $1 in 1970.
Keller said he was fascinated with the science of clocks because his father was interested in them, and Keller has never done any other kind of work.
Keller moved the shop to Aurora in 1983 when the then-CF&I Steel Corp. mill underwent massive layoffs. He then moved to Bend, Ore., where he opened another shop.
Keller said he wanted to return to his hometown after being gone for so long, to be around family and friends and because he missed Pueblo. So he decided to reopen Keller Clock Shop in town. Keller said he is pleased to see the changes that Pueblo has undergone since he left, and he has enjoyed seeing longtime friends.
Keller, who repaired the clock in front of the Pueblo County Courthouse in the 1970s, said “time has passed me by” because mechanical clocks are becoming lost pieces of functional art.
“Clocks used to be essential in a home, and now they’ve become more of a luxury,” Keller said.
He thinks that many people still enjoy the old-world craftsmanship of a mechanical clock.
“I remember when battery clocks were new and now they’re standard,” Keller said.
Keller enjoys preserving clocks that are part of history and have sentimental value to their owners by bringing an old piece back to life.
Keller is a machinist and can rebuild a clock mechanism and duplicate any part of a mechanical clock, such as the gears and springs.
“I haven’t run into anything I can’t fix on a clock yet,” said Keller.
Keller not only repairs clocks but makes prototypes of products that use small machinery. He built a machine for a company in Denver called an orrery, which has a miniature moving part inside a globe that simulates when the sun will rise in different parts of the world and the patterns of the moon.
Although Keller is certified as an electronic watchmaker by the American Watchmaker Institute, he prefers old clocks that have mechanical parts. The newer watches and clocks are “no fun,” he said.
Keller said he began learning clock repair from his dad when he was 14 years old.
“But it was a couple of years before I was worth anything to him,” Keller said.
The original Keller Clock Shop on Main Street also made jewelry and china, items normally found in a clock shop at the time.
Keller said his father studied horology, which is the science of timekeeping, and taught him how to repair and manufacture clocks.
Timekeeping depends on gears and ratios, according to Keller. He uses ratios to figure out when each gear will move.
For example, if one gear with 50 teeth is turning against another gear with five teeth, he knows the small gear will turn ten times by the time the large gear turns once.
The gears move the hands on a clock, and the pendulum makes a clock tick. Depending on how long the pendulum is, the clock can tick at different speeds, and the faster the tick, the more accurate the clock.
A quartz watch ticks approximately 32,000 times a second, according to Keller, who has a habit of buying old clocks that he plans to restore. Keller has about 100 old clocks at home that he’ll get to someday.
The shop walls are covered with more than 300 clocks that range from battery-powered to mechanical and from grandfather to cuckoo clocks.
Keller said he plans to repair and restore clocks as long as he can.
“This is all I know how to do,” he said. “I’m too old to learn something new.”
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