ANDOVER — Time is of the essence. It will tell. It’s also a thief and a gift and ever-present, moving too fast or too slow depending on circumstances.
Bob Frishman takes special care in accounting for it.
Right now, he’s playing the family piano. Pressing a series of soft, incisive chords on the 100-year-old Steinway, jazzy measures of “My Favorite Things” from the musical “The Sound of Music.”
His favorite things include time and movement, specifically clocks, and they are all around him here at his home in Andover. They stand, hang and sit in rooms throughout the house.
To Frishman, they possess grace and grandeur. There’s harmony in the way the pieces work together.
He wants everyone to appreciate antique timepieces and recognize the care they require to continue ticking and chiming for hours, days, weeks, months, years and centuries.
The first indication that Frishman has a penchant for time rests on his front door, a placard bearing the name Bell-Time, short for his clock overhauling company, Bell-Time Clocks.
He has retired from his paying career in clock overhauling but still repairs antique clocks, free of charge, for cultural centers, including historical societies, museums and libraries.
The only compensation he asks is the opportunity to give a free public presentation on clocks and their care.
Restoring history
Frishman has overhauled 8,000 clocks. Some 300 were of the longcase type, what some people call grandfather clocks.
Every one was different, he says.
“Even if it was the same mantel clock that was made in Connecticut by the tens of thousands, it was always something different about it because it was a hundred years old,” he says. “So different things happened to it. And they made many, many, many different versions of it.”
This year, he overhauled the 221-year-old Caleb Wheaton grandfather clock that had stood still, not working for about a decade, in Flint Memorial Library in North Reading.
It had last been overhauled in 1992.
Inside the panel door, scrawled in thick black letters and numbers, is “Caleb Wheaton long case 1802.” Below it is a “cleaned and oiled” heading and series of dates in pencil.
In April, Frishman removed the bonnet from the clock and brought it to his workshop in the basement of his home, on Poor Street, where he took it apart, piece by piece, each of which he cleaned and polished.
The grandfather name stems from a popular song written in 1876, “My Grandfather’s Clock,” about a clock that kept perfect time from the day a boy was born until 90 years later on the day the old man died, Frishman says.
Before the song gained currency, at the time of the U.S. centennial, no one would have referred to these tall ornamental timepieces as grandfather clocks.
Until electric clocks became popular, everyone knew wind-up clocks had to be cleaned every couple of years to keep them working, Frishman says.
Dust, dirt and friction are the enemies of clocks, he says.
They require diligent care and repair.
New England is filled with grandfather clocks that are no longer in operation because they have not been maintained.
It bothers Frishman to see a nonworking clock at a museum or historical society.
He says that one of the worst things that a would-be clock caretaker can do is spray them with WD-40, a magnet for dirt. And with dirt comes friction and broken gear teeth and pins and other pieces.
But a restored, well-cared-for clock gives pleasure through its presence and periodic soft chiming on the hour.
There is something more than knowing the time that an antique clock’s regular ticking offers — a sense of continuity and reassurance.
It’s like a heartbeat.
Making it count
Frishman has been tinkering since childhood.
His father was a chemist and worked in Lawrence at Malden Mills and then for a company that pioneered synthetic wigs.
In college, Frishman majored in political science. He then worked in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., from 1973-84, including as an aide and speech writer for Shirley Chisholm — the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.
In the mid-1980s, he moved back to Massachusetts and worked in a family business as he and his wife, Jeanne Schinto, raised a family.
He found a niche in clock repair and made a career of it.
It’s a fascination that endures.
Frishman owns 1,000 books on clocks. Among them is the biography he recently wrote about 18th-century Philadelphia clockmaker Edward Duffield.
His next book will be on the Mulliken family of clockmakers from 18th-century Massachusetts. He displays three Mulliken clocks from Salem, Lexington and Haverhill, dating between 1760 and 1810.
Frishman wears an Apple Watch daily and a Rolex for formal occasions, one of which took place Oct. 28 in England, where he gave the Dingwall Beloe lecture at the British Museum, a prestigious annual horological event.
Frishman is what is referred to as an horologist, a master horologist, a term that somehow sounds less dignified than the designation deserves.
At home, he showcases a jeweler’s regulator from Waltham, a clock known for its extreme accuracy due to the 40 pounds of mercury within it.
Art on the wall depicts figures like Napoleon Bonaparte with clocks.
Frishman named his company after a Winslow Homer wood engraving published in Harper’s Weekly in 1868, called “Bell-Time,” part of a series the artist did on New England factory life.
Homer’s brother was a chemist in a Lawrence mill, and people who toiled in the mills lived by the bell.
Frishman has repaired two clocks that belonged to Homer.
Frishman is a time person, a clock man, whose work ticks away on numerous shelves and floors, including the second floor at the Flint Library, lending a presence to the moment, respect for the past and anticipation of the future.