Host Lou McNally discovers the world of antique clocks and timepieces, as he hosts the show from Yankee Clocks in picturesque New Harbor. Owners Bob and Chris Williams have developed a successful internet-only business – which they will soon pass on to their son – buying and selling rare antique clocks and nautical instruments, many of which run in price into the tens of thousands of dollars.
We’ll also meet Rockport’s James Lea, who combines a love of antique clocks and woodworking to produce some of the finest reproduction American clocks available today. Mr. Lea bought a clock for $5 in 1958 and proceeded to take it apart and put it back together again, and when it actually worked he thought it might be a fun vocation. He and his wife Barbara moved to Maine in 1970, and according to Mr. Lea, “we haven’t had a bad day since.”
Made in Maine also visits the quaint Bar Harbor shop of master clockmaker Alexander Phillips, showing viewers a world of treasured timepieces lovingly collected, restored and repaired. Mr. Phillips, a trained classical pianist whose career might have gone in another direction but for the fact that, as he puts it, “I didn’t like any of the schools I got thrown out of,” often fashions new parts for clocks that haven’t been made for a hundred years or more out of scrap metal he finds at the local landfill.
