Part One – Those Russian Clocks: A First Encounter
This is the first part of an essay on the Schulz Clock by Liza Kroeger that we are publishing in instalments. Read the introduction here.
That’s me, in the middle, the one with the pixie cut.
An ode to the Beatles. It’s 1967, just a few months after the Summer of Love descended on Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. But this is my party and it’s taking place almost 2,000 miles away. What did I know about ‘flower power,’ then? Not much, I’m thinking, given that my friends and I are decked out in our Sunday best, ties and all, a far cry from hippie fashions and behaviour. It’s a coming-of age-party. I’m turning thirteen. And we’re in Winnipeg, a modest, unassuming town in the middle of nowhere. The only home I’ve known until then. I’m first-generation Canadian, and, I’m guessing, so are most of my friends.
“Like the wall clock that is glinting down at us, we are descendants of Russian Mennonites.”
None of us kids in the room probably cared much about that then. In fact, for some, it may have been an embarrassment. We were children of refugees, or, as our parents were referred to then, ‘DPs’–Displaced Persons. The old clock, made by my ancestors, is as much displaced in this suburban basement rec room as my parents had been when they arrived in their new homeland of Canada seventeen years earlier.
I distinctly remember the summer the clock came into my life. It wasn’t glamorous. It was about as unglamorous as this family photo. I’m on the far left. And that’s my maternal grandmother’s brother, my great-uncle Peter Schulz, on the far right, the man we picked the clock up from. It was in the summer of 1964. My parents had decided it was time for another family road trip.
Our destination: Vauxhall, Alberta, a town with fewer than a thousand people. My mother loved to travel, and it didn’t matter that–as always–it would be on a budget. We’d be camping, better said, tenting along the way. Our once bright red, now very faded, tent, five air mattresses, and five sleeping bags tightly folded and fitted in a car-top carrier made of wood, and by my father’s own hands. (If that doesn’t smack of refugees.) Luckily, we were virtually certain not to encounter many on the Trans-Canada Highway with very discerning tastes, if not to say hardly a soul.
“…we had to make room in the trunk of our 1960 Ford Falcon [for]…crates containing rusty clocks, pendulums and such…”
By sunset the second day we had made it to Uncle Peter’s farm. And I can’t remember a lonelier place. Not that he was alone. He had his wife, Aunt Irene (second from right on the photo), four lively and fun-loving teenagers of an indeterminable age to me who was considered too young to be taken notice of, and farm animals. What, I remember thinking, oh what fate had befallen the Schulzes that they should be stranded in a place such as this? For reasons I have never been able to fathom I am afraid of all animals, including farm animals.
Needless to say, this was not my favourite summer trip. To add to the challenges, the day we said our goodbyes we had to make room in the trunk of our 1960 Ford Falcon by taking out travel bags and stuffing them in the already crowded back seat with me and my two sisters, so that two dusty old crates containing rusty clocks, pendulums and such could travel back with us. I was not amused. On the long road back, did my father attempt to impart to his daughters the story of the Schulzes? I’m believing he did. He was always telling stories about the old country. But I didn’t make the connection then between those stories and the clocks in our trunk. In fact, I was less than happy to be reminded that I was a child of refugees.
What went on with the clock between its homecoming to Winnipeg and the day it went up in the family rec room I don’t recall. Only now, decades later, have I discovered this tracing my father must have made before he began repainting the clock dial. Where had he found the pattern he would use to restore this clock? Is this the way the clock looked when he saw it as a boy, hanging in the home of his grandmother, Anna (Zacharias) Schulz, in a place so far away, in a time so distant, as to make it impossible for me to imagine, back in that summer of ’64, when it first arrived in my life?
“From my father’s notes, I realise now that this was the very first clock he would restore.”
I can imagine how much time he would have spent in preparation. This study on parchment alone attests to that. I fantasize now that the ‘regal’ motif on the clock dial of golden scrolls against a dark burgundy background appealed to his sensibilities and the responsibility he must have felt as the heir to the Kroeger clockmaking legacy. There was always a hint of fancifulness in my father’s work and lifelong passion.
And so, the ‘Schulz’ clock took its place in our family home. From its rather mundane surroundings in the basement rec room of our earlier family home it travelled to the very centre of attraction in the entry hall of the next. Always ticking as the pendulum swung back and forth, always chiming as the bell struck the hour, ever a witness to the story of its owners, so much older than they and so much longer to carry on after them.
“For my father, it was always the ‘Schulz’ clock. But what stories did that name hold for my father? And what do they now hold for me?”
To be continued…
The author, Liza Kroeger, celebrates her thirteenth birthday in 1967 overseen by the Schulz clock.
Liza Kroeger with her family visiting her Uncle Peter and Aunt Irene
Arthur Kroeger’s tracing of the Schulz Clock on parchment paper
The Schulz Clock in the hallway of the Kroeger family home