OSPREY – When Eastern Standard Time kicks in at 2 a.m. Sunday and most Americans enjoy an extra hour of sleep, Scott Paddock may find the annual silence eerie, if not downright unnerving.
For 11 weird hours, Paddock will go without the ambient drone of the classic machinery that has provided a soothing soundtrack to his life since he was a teenager. Today, Paddock and partner Terry Tubaugh share their immaculate gated home with 58 timepieces in a veritable museum of history and craftsmanship.
Unwilling to risk damaging their fragile movements by cranking the hands back an hour, Paddock will turn them off for nearly half a day and wait for time to catch up. When the house goes quiet for that long, Paddock says, one word applies — “odd.”
“Well, they’re like having elderly children in your home,” he says of the eclectic clocks, some of which have been marking time since the mid-19th century. “They require attention. They don’t like temperature change. They don’t like humidity change. They can be finicky.”
Far from being inanimate objects, these clocks move, they chime, Westminster tunes and more. They ring, they bong, they tick and they tock. They have faces; some have three faces to reflect lunar and solar positions. They have outlived generations of long-forgotten owners whose own stories died with them in locales as distant as Austria, Germany, England and France.
Wall clocks, floor clocks, grandfather clocks, balcony clocks, shelf clocks, clocks made of alabaster, bracket clocks, Gothic clocks, Second Baroque, Biedermeyer style, open-well, categories and sub-categories — Paddock can identify each one blindfolded by their signature sound.
