You are at Marshall Field & Co.’s State Street store, gazing into a bushel basket of more than 900 parts that once made up the case of a beautiful mantel clock. It’s the early 1960s and a man named Philip G. Dibble is asking you to reconstruct this dismantled mess.
If it were just anyone’s bad dream, it might end with a fantasy fall through the gears of Big Ben. But because it really happened to master clockmaker Henry Frett, the result was the restoration of a 24-inch-tall French-movement clock made in the image of the Notre Dame cathedral in Reims, France.
“I brought it home from Field’s,” Frett said, “just to be polite. I didn’t think there was any hope for it.”
“(Henry) said it was junk, and when I first brought it back from Scotland, that’s what it was,” recalled Dibble, who came into possession of the puzzle in his position as Field’s vice president for fine arts and special collections.
As other projects came and went, the basket of parts was shunted aside in Frett’s Palos Heights workshop. But each time he passed it by, it bugged him a little more. What did the clock look like assembled, and was it worth the effort to find out?
“Henry had an insatiable curiosity about everything, and I thought he would be challenged by that basket of parts,” Dibble said.
Frett said he could see the cathedral clock was something special because it had a rosewood base inlaid with African boxwood, supporting a brass case decorated with tiny statues of the kings of France and of saints. Someone, probably in the early 1800s, had made the clock with enviable skill, even including chimes that played the Angelus at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Two years after he first saw the basket of parts, he returned the restored Reims cathedral clock to Dibble, who, on Field’s behalf, sold it to an Elgin-based inventor and clock collector for between $8,000 and $10,000, Frett recalled.
Both retired now, Frett occasionally works on clocks destined for charitable fundraisers in his virtually empty workshop, and Dibble lives in Florida. In the course of their 25-year partnership, when Frett was repairing damaged timepieces and designing and building new ones, they helped “put the (Field’s) clock department on the map,” said Dibble, even expanding their regional base to include a select national market for the department store’s clocks through advertisements in New Yorker magazine.
“Henry could make wonderful pieces of hopeless cases. He really was a genius at improvising to restore clocks,” Dibble said.
“With few exceptions, I looked to European clockmakers for influences, and that’s where Phil Dibble bought the clockworks for our new pieces,” Frett said. “The European quality was better (than the American) for clocks, but by the turn of the century, the Americans were turning out watches that were of the highest quality.”
That’s where the 72-year-old Frett’s career began, with watches. After his World War II tour of duty in Northern Italy was interrupted by a sniper’s bullet that tore into the side of his face and through his ear, he was sent home. He already had had three operations in Italy, and while he made plans for his post-war future, his medical treatments continued at stateside hospitals in New York and Little Rock, Ark.
The G.I. bill helped him pay for training at watchmaking schools in Elgin and Chicago, and he spent five years working in a “trade shop,” where jewelers sent watches they couldn’t fix themselves. He also worked as a watch inspector for the B&O and Rock Island railroads when those big, round timepieces were the ticket to punctuality.
As a hobby, in the early 1960s, Frett had built a barometer clock for a friend who thought he could sell it in his jewelry store in the Pittsfield Building in downtown Chicago. When the clock didn’t sell, Frett, on a whim, walked it over to nearby Marshall Field’s to see if he could generate interest in it there. Told that the person to see was in Europe, Frett was sure he was being brushed off, and returned home with his clock.
Not long after, once again on a whim, Frett thought he’d give Field’s a second chance. That time, Dibble was in and told Frett he’d take that clock and wanted a look at any other pieces Frett might have.
By 1965, Frett was working exclusively, except for an occasional private commission, on Marshall Field & Co. clocks. He estimates that he spent half his time on painstaking restorations and the other half on new timepieces that he designed with input from Dibble.
Some of the original designs included a pendant barometer clock with a fruitwood finish that sold for $125 in 1973 and that “went like hotcakes whenever we could get a big piece of zebrawood, coco bolo or teak,” Frett said; a $1,500 banjo clock decorated with gold leaf and an $85 drop octagonal wall model, also known as an American school clock; a battery-operated octagonal wall clock in walnut that sold for $45 in the 1960s and that “management said would never sell, but people ate them up”; an eight-day, chiming walnut mantel clock priced at $150 in the 1960s that would cost at least $500 today, Frett said, “though you can’t get the wood at all.”
Fine wood is a continuing theme for Frett, and he became renowned for making beautifully lacquered clock cases as well as for the mechanical work he did on clock innards. Several of these cases were commissioned by Raymond Warpeha of Oak Brook, who obtained the wood after the demise of a neighbor’s walnut tree that had a 20-inch diameter.
“I met Henry through a friend, and I showed him this walnut, which he said was very fine wood,” Warpeha said. Among the equally fine clocks eventually made from the wood were a 7-foot tall-case (also known as grandfather) and a 4-foot tall-case clock, the former with an elaborate Bavarian-made dial that tracked the phases of the moon and incorporated three types of chimes.
John Van Kampen, a broker for Smith-Barney Co. at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, said he, too, values his Frett-made tall-case clock for the beauty of the wood and the sound of the musical chimes. But his clock was made by William E. Frett, Henry’s only son.
“I got interested in clocks through Bill. I’ve known him since our high school days, when he was at Marist and I was at Morgan Park,” said Van Kampen, who added that he also has given Bill Frett’s mantel clocks as wedding presents to special friends.
Since 1980, when Bill left his 13-year apprenticeship in his father’s shop, the two have worked together only on exhibitions of their work, one of which was a February 1992 display at the Orland Park Civic Center.
Most of the clocks on display were from Bill’s workshop, where he builds richly decorated cases for top-of-the-line clockworks from Germany. The main difference in his and Henry’s woodwork, said Bill, is that he prefers more complex, innovative designs.
“I really like doing something that no one else has done before,” said Bill, “like taking part of an architectural design and figuring out how to make it work in one of my clock cases.”
To get his clocks to his customers, the younger Frett favors a station wagon because vans ride too rough, he said. Installations and adjustments had sent his father as far north as Mundelein and Lake Forest, according to Don Mowat, an interior designer at Field’s who became acquainted with the elder Frett when his clocks were displayed on the Field’s selling floor.
Mowat remembered some real headaches from the 1970s, when deep-pile carpeting was in vogue and tall-case clocks sometimes settled unevenly, throwing off the movement.
“But it didn’t really matter with Henry what the problems were,” Mowat said. “He could work well with even the most exacting clients and circumstances.”
Mowat, too, has Frett workmanship in his home: a circa 1770 Scottish tall-case clock with cross-banded inlay and antique cylinder glass in the bonnet. It’s the kind of restoration that Mowat said would send the folks at Field’s running to Frett.
“Restoring the clockworks was interesting, but I loved working with the woods, matching just the right lacquer to the different types, like rosewood, mahogany, or Italian olive ash. There’s an art to it,” Frett said.
The toughest part of his job, he added, was working with very old clocks, because by the time he got hold of them, “everything was out of square, warped and twisted.”
Such challenges have taken their toll. After years of working with sharp tools and tiny pieces of wood, his hands have needed more than 50 stitches.
A more severe injury landed him in the hospital when the contact cement he used to fasten veneer caused damage to his nervous system. The substance entered his body through the skin of his fingers and hands, and he was in physical therapy for about a year before he regained the full use of his hands.
In gratitude for the treatment he received at Maywood’s Hines Veterans Hospital, Frett, who is a past commander of Blue Island’s Patrick Hallinan Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3580, gave the staff a custom-made wall clock. It incorporates the VFW emblem and is similar to a pentagonal wall clock that he and Edward Derwinski, then secretary for veterans affairs, presented in 1990 to President George Bush.
Derwinski, another longtime friend, also was on hand for perhaps the high point of Frett’s career. In 1976, Frett was made a fellow in the British Horological Society when he traveled to London for the installation of an English bracket clock in the House of Commons, crafted by Frett at Derwinski’s suggestion. It was a replica of a clock at the royal governor’s residence in Williamburg, Va.
“The British were awed by the authenticity and workmanship in Henry’s clock,” said Derwinski, former U.S. representative from the 4th Congressional District and now honorary consul general to Iceland.
Nineteen years later, Frett said he still gets lots of calls for commission work, but he has to turn down almost all of them.
“This stuff about getting better as you get older is baloney,” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of fine touch over the years. The nerves on one side of my right thumb are shot. And your eyesight gets worse as you get older. That’s important because as you fine-tune a clock, you watch the light off the gem stones, not the movement, as you adjust it in thousandths of an inch to get it just right.”
Now he keeps busy with his VFW activities, visits to his daughters-Lynne Frett in Carbondale and Peggy Strand in Midlothian-as well as shop talk with Bill. He also builds birdhouses and deer-feeding devices so that he and Shirley, his wife of 49 years, can enjoy the wildlife that visits their spacious back yard.
“I don’t remember it as lonely work,” he said. “When you’re really absorbed in your work, you’re not lonely. But times change and so does work. Now, I just try to keep up with the work that Shirley tells me to do. When she says I should take out the garbage, I know I still have the right touch for that.”
