By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

When there's a big wind in Our Honolulu, the hands of the Aloha Tower clock get tangled up and Herman Allerstorfer, 79, master watchmaker, has to climb out at 10 stories up like Quasimodo on the Cathedral of Notre Dame and unlock the hands so the clock can start again.

This is one of the essential facts I learned from Allerstorfer as we stood on the 10th floor, just below the observation balconies, where the clock mechanism ticks away tirelessly like an Energizer battery.

Another essential fact is that the Aloha Tower is not, I repeat, NOT 10 stories tall as everybody thinks. Nobody counts the floor the clock is on. So the observation balconies are on the 11th floor and there's another floor above that where the motor for the elevator is housed.

Are you ready for another essential fact? OK, here it is: They decided to give the Aloha Tower elevator, which is the slowest in town, a new motor a few years ago. But the motor was too big to fit in the elevator, so they had to overhaul the old motor by sending parts up and down.

You can see that I got a Ph.D. in Advanced Aloha Tower Science on this assignment. What got me started was the Aloha Tower clock. It's not the oldest clock in Our Honolulu, but it's surely the highest. And any relation between it and digital watches is purely coincidental.

The Aloha Tower clock doesn't even have a spring to keep it going. Instead, it has an iron weight the size of a small suitcase hanging at the end of a chain. The force of gravity from the weight makes the clock run. Allerstorfer used to have to crank the weight up to the ceiling again when it sank to the floor. Now it trips a lever and a motor automatically raises the weight.

I think the Aloha Tower clock is one of the best bargains Honolulu ever made. It's been ticking away since 1926, and the only money we spend on it is to pay Allerstorfer $50 once a month when he comes to check it and oil the parts.

You can count on your fingers the times the Aloha Tower clock has stopped. Once was during the making of "Tora Tora Tora" when the movie company paid Allerstorfer $275 — not to keep the clock running, but to stop it at 7 a.m. for the filming.

The clock also was stopped when it was strafed by a Japanese warplane during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack. Allerstorfer found a machine gun slug in one of the metal tubes that supports the clock. Then there was the time a clock hater broke into a clock room, kicked out the glass clock window dials on all four sides and wrecked the mechanism.

The Austrian master watchmaker who keeps the clock running has been tending it since 1967. He came to Hawai'i by way of Bombay, Argentina and California. Allerstorfer is retired from his jewelry store in Kailua, now operated by a daughter. He said his wife keeps him busy in the yard. He sails in his yacht on Kane'ohe Bay on weekends.