Jack Schoff and his award from Guinness Book of World Records
Just a small portion of Jack Schoff's collection
Jack Schoff, North Berwick, Maine, November 2010
Any visitor to Maine might think they had landed in Paradise if all they did was drive up and down coastal Route One or dropped in on the L.L. Bean Headquarters and Outlet at Freeport, which is what most Maine visitors and tourists do. It reminds me a lot of Australia: life, population, and marketing capital is on the coast with very little but great expanses of wilderness once you get off the Maine Turnpike. But even life on the coast is a charade, as watermen and lobstermen struggle to make a decent living off a life-style which has been a Maine tradition for hundreds of years. I love Maine and have spent a lot of time there. But I'm just a visitor. I'm not from Maine, and therefore from the Mainers' point of view, can lay no claims to really knowing anything about Maine except for what I've read in books on the subject. Get a bunch of locals together and they'll start arguing about which is the better town, or township, or who's getting screwed the worst through Maine's exhorbitant taxing policies. If you want a good lesson in American civics go to any local Select Men's or Town Hall Meeting - they go on for hours over literally nothing and every town malcontent shows up monthly to air his or her latest grievance against authority. I remember an argument in particular way back in the early 70's and it was over granting a permit for the first MacDonald's in Freeport. L.L. Bean had just moved from its original location down-town and was now located on Route One. An old geezer got up in the meeting and made the pronouncement, "If we let this go through it will be the end of Freeport. We'll never see the end of it!" There was much laughter. The geezer got the last laugh. So much for urban planning. Within two years after MacDonald's landed every other discount grease-joint soon followed. Within a few years the area surrounding L.L. Bean looked like so many of those mega-strip malls and gasoline alleys you see along Route I-95 South. So much for retaining "Quaint" over rampant bang-for-the-buck.
But I'm letting negativity get in my way. Like any tourist destination there is always an upside to the story. The best way to utilize a tourist destination is first, get away from all the other tourists and try not to go where they are going. This is the way we've utilized Maine for the past 38 years. There is always something new to see and do in Maine and the baked beans, fresh lobster, and fried clams taste just as good today as they did 38 years ago. This is how we ran into the "Clock Guy" on our most recent trip to Maine in the first week in November. That's right - November! - another lesson you learn about traveling to Maine. It's a good idea to go there (and enjoy it privately and cheaply) when everybody else is NOT there. With a very cheap and very fast flight out of Baltimore's BWI we can be up on the coast of Maine (via Manchester Airport, N.H.) within two and a half hours. Talk about convenience!
We had heard a story about a guy up in Berwick, Maine who owned a fabulous collection of clocks and they had to be seen to be appreciated. His name is Jack Schoff and the point of the story is, that living in a very small apartment, his obsession for clock-collecting kind of got the best of him. To the point of being recognized by the Guinness Book of Records people, who awarded him with the record for having the biggest private collection of clocks. The runner-up was some guy from Germany, who Jack says he's never met or been in contact with. The story of Jack's collection broke a few years ago and all the local news media came over to Berwick to see what was going on. Quiet and unassuming, Jack took it all in stride. When you meet him, you're immediately struck with his cordiality and his attitude of "It's just me and another day of living with all these clocks."
There are clocks everywhere - on every inch of wall space, on all the furniture tops and shelves, and the small bedroom space, kitchen, and bathroom haven't been spared. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. We sat on whatever sofa space that was available and surrounded ourselves in Jack's world of his amazing clocks. You would think the noise would be deafening but it was not unpleasant. He owns every kind of clock imaginable - spring-driven, weight-driven, battery-driven; he hasn't an inventory of what he has and says he wants to get rid of all of them but doesn't know where to start. He says it's not about the value or collectability of what he has. "Some of them are worthless, some are expensive and maybe historic, I just don't care," he says with a small laugh. He says he spends a large amount of his income on batteries to keep them all going and spends most of his day setting them properly and repairing the ones lagging behind. Since daylight savings time was fast upon us, we wondered how in the world he re-set all of them.
We had entered his place on the half-hour, so we waited in anticipation for all the walls to come alive with clanging and gonging and activated Cuckoo birds. It wasn't as glorious as we expected, but it was an experience, none the less and it was great talking to Jack as he showed off his award and talked about his hunting pictures displayed about his little apartment. There were pictures of he and his son bagging trophy black bear and moose, and especially interesting pictures of a big black bear he had to chase out of the back of his pick-up truck. That's life in Maine, away from Highway One and the Coastal tourist traps.
We couldn't leave without buying a clock from Jack, and it's a beauty - a Seth Thomas pendulum model which worked perfectly after the plane-ride back from Manchester, New Hampshire and looks great on our living room wall. After such an interesting afternoon I should have had Jack autograph it for me. I regret that I didn't ask him.
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