Cathedral's old clock runs on divine time

By Mary Kaye Ritz
Advertiser Religion & Ethics Writer

The Rev. John Berger is the administrator of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, site of what writer Robert Schmitt said is Hawai'i's oldest tower clock. Its exact age is unknown. Photos by Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

The clock on the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace was installed around 1846.

The Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace's clock has Roman numerals on the inside and Arabic numerals on its face. The clock's movement must go to the shop for maintenance every 10 years.

The top of its glass case is covered with dust and what looks like gecko droppings.

There's also a note reminding someone to fix the glass, "To do. 2-23-81."

The Rev. John Berger, administrator for the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, gently taps the vein where the broken glass pane had been taped decades before.

"Is that Hawaiian time or what?"

The first account of any clock on Hawaiian soil dates to 1812, when among a list of goods received at Lahaina, Maui, by Kamehameha I — "clothing, swords, mirrors, saddles, casks, lamps, fishing rods, and rockets" — appears the entry, "1 large clock for the house," reports Robert C. Schmitt in a 1992 Hawaiian Journal of History article.

He goes on to explain clock towers: "Large public clocks first appeared in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1842, James Hunnewell presented Kawaiaha'o Church with the large church clock on the gallery wall below the new organ."

Schmitt notes another was erected later in the tower, and hailed as "Honolulu's first town clock."

Bruce Sinton-Hewitt of Kawaiaha'o said the church's first tower clock was donated by King Kamehameha III and installed in 1850, but didn't start ticking until Jan. 10, 1851.

Notes Schmitt: "The oldest tower clock in Hawai'i, however, is the one installed in Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace around 1846."

In contrast, Aloha Tower's four-faced clock was installed in May of 1926, making it at least 80 years younger than the cathedral's clock, itself a hand-me-down.

A history of the cathedral compiled in the late '40s by the Rev. Robert Schoofs, a Sacred Hearts priest, gives the clock's story.

Shortly after the cathedral was finished in 1843, Bishop Louis Maigret, whose remains now are buried underneath the cathedral, decided it would be convenient "not only for resident priests but for the people, as well, to have a clock installed in the tower, as is the custom in Europe," Schoofs wrote.

Maigret asked his superior at the Valparaiso Cathedral of Chile to send to him a clock similar to theirs.

One was ordered from France, but when the new one arrived in Chile for inspection, the superior liked it so much he kept it and sent theirs — an older and smaller one thought to have been made in England — to Maigret.

So no one in Hawai'i knows exactly how old the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace's clock is, though Berger is hoping to have someone who speaks Spanish contact a church historian in Chile.

It has been Bill Brown's job every Thursday morning for the past dozen or so years to hand-crank the clock's movement.

A clock's movement (in this case, 3 1/2 feet by 3 1/2 feet by 2 1/2 feet, about the size of a minibar) is "the most important part, like a car engine," explains Mei Wu, Brown's boss and the owner of the Clock Collection in Kaka'ako.

"Now and then, it stops," said Brown. "No problem, I just wind it."

Every 10 years, the entire movement goes to the shop for service, though that's no easy job.

"It takes two to three men to just move it," Brown said.

On the front side facing Bishop Street, the clock is refurbished in Arabic numerals, but on the back, visible only from inside the dusty bell tower, are Roman numerals.

Yesterday, the clock was running nine minutes fast.

Hawaiian time, indeed.