John Wayne Saw A Marine’s Widow Turned Away In Oklahoma 1965 — Then He Wrote The Check. D
September 1960 Harlan Kentucky, a watch and jewelry repair shop on Central Street, two blocks from the courthouse, where the Cumberland mountains press in close on every side, and the coal company offices are the tallest buildings in the county and have been for 30 years. The shop has 12 pieces left in the display cases, and the rent is 2 months past due.
The chain jewelry store opened on the other end of Central Street in April. It was called Regent Jewelers and it had plate glass windows and fluorescent lighting and watches laid out on white velvet under glass with the prices printed on small cards in a uniform typeface. It had a manager named Dennis who wore a tie and had been trained in Cleveland.
It had a selection of 17 styles of men’s watch and 11 styles of women’s watch and a repair department that sent the work out to a shop in Cincinnati and charged accordingly. The men of Harlan County had been going to Regent Jewelers for their anniversary presents since May because it was new and clean and the prices on the cards looked reasonable to a man who had never priced a watch in his life.
What they were buying was an appearance and what they were losing without knowing it was access to a man named Cecil Drummond who had been fixing watches in Harlan for 31 years and whose hands knew things about a movement that could not be learned in Cleveland. Here is the story. The shop had been Cecil Drummond’s for 31 years.
He had learned the trade from his uncle in Middlesboro a watch and clock man who had learned it from an English immigrant in the 1890s and who had passed it to Cecil in the years between 1921 and 1927 with the patience of a man transmitting something that could not be hurried. Cecil opened on Central Street in 1929, which was the worst possible year to open anything, and he survived the depression by doing what every craftsman who survived that decade did.
He repaired instead of sold. And he repaired anything that could be repaired. And he charged what people could pay, which was sometimes not much. And he kept the doors open. He had a wife, Eunice, who died in 1948, and a son, Martin, who was 19 in 1960, and working at the coal company office, and who came to the shop on Saturday mornings, the way he had come since childhood, because the shop was where his father was, and that was reason enough.
The shop smelled of clock oil and metal, and the particular aged velvet smell of the display case linings, which were the original dark blue velvet that Cecil had cut and fitted in 1929, and replaced only once, in 1951, with the same fabric from the same supplier in Louisville. Multiple clocks ran on the shelf behind the work counter, each at its own tempo, and the sound of them together was not noise, but texture, the way a room sounds when the things in it are alive.
The work counter itself was lit by a single angled lamp that threw a bright cone on whatever Cecil was working on, and left the rest of the room in relative shadow. The loop he used was his uncle’s, brass mounted, the lens ground in Germany before the first war, and he wore it with a particular unconsciousness of a man who has used a tool so long it has become part of how he sees.
The front window displayed the remaining pieces on a length of worn velvet, pocket watches, a few wristwatches, three brooch pins his uncle had made that Cecil had never been able to price high enough. And the window faced east and caught the morning light and held it until noon. Have you ever known a craftsman who fixed the things people used every day? The watch a man’s father had left him, the clock his grandmother had brought from somewhere far away.
And who charged what was fair because the work was what mattered. Not the margin. Some of you have worn a watch Cecil Drummond repaired. Some of you know what it means to hand a broken thing to someone who looks at it and understands it completely before he touches it. The Regent Jewelers opening had taken what it took quietly and without any particular cruelty.
By July, the walk-in trade, the man wanting a battery, the woman with a chain that needed shortening, had moved to the plate glass windows. By August, the new watch sales had gone entirely. What remained for Cecil was the serious repair work, the movements that Regent Cincinnati shop sent back as non-serviceable.
The pocket watches that came in from the old families of the county. There were not enough of them. He had $240 in the account in September. The rent was $60 a month. And he had not paid since July. His landlord was a man named Vickers who owned four buildings on Central Street and who had come to the shop in August with the polite discomfort of a man who owes someone a kindness and cannot find a way to deliver it.
He gave Cecil another 30 days. The 30 days had run out on September 4th and Vickers had not come back yet. Which meant he was giving Cecil more time without saying so, which was its own kind of kindness and its own kind of weight. The shop had two customers in the first week of September. One brought in a carriage clock that needed cleaning.
One came to look at the brooch pins and left without buying. On the Friday of that week, Cecil came in at 8:00 in the morning, lit the angled lamp, and sat at the work counter. And for the first time in 31 years, he did not reach for a movement to work on. He sat and looked at the room, at the clocks running on the shelf, at the 12 pieces in the display case, at his uncle’s loop on the counter.
He sat like that for 20 minutes. The man from the neighboring hardware store had seen the lights go on and come to the window at 9:00, the way he sometimes did, and had stood there a moment, and gone away. A woman who had brought work to Cecil for 15 years walked past the window slowly and did not come in.
Nobody could do anything about what was happening to the shop that any amount of coming to the window could fix. You know what that kind of witness is. The kind that stays at the edge because there is no edge closer that would help. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments.
I want to see how far this story reaches. The man who came through the door at half past 9:00 that Friday had stopped in Harlan the night before on his way through Eastern Kentucky toward the Virginia line. He was doing preliminary location scouting for a picture that might shoot the following spring in the Cumberland country, and he had walked Central Street that morning looking at the light and the buildings the way men in his line of work look at places, as material, as possibility, as a question about what a camera would find there. He had stopped at Cecil’s window for the reason anyone stops at a good window. The morning light was on the velvet and the things on the velvet were worth looking at. He came in. He stood inside for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the dimmer interior. He looked at the clocks on the shelf. He listened to them. Cecil looked up from the counter. The man said,
“Those all keeping different time?” Cecil said they were not. He said each one was set to the same time, but each movement had its own character and therefore its own tempo. And the art of a clock is to keep them close enough that the differences become texture rather than error. The man stood still for a moment listening.
He said, “I understand that.” He came to the display case. He looked at the pocket watches for a while, then asked to see a railroad grade Hamilton that was in the near corner. Cecil took it out and opened the case back and held it under the angled lamp. The man looked at the movement the way a man looks at a movement when he knows what he is seeing.
Not a tourist’s look, but a reader’s look. He said, “What are you asking?” Cecil told him, “85 dollars.” He said, “I’ll take it.” He looked at the other pieces in the case. “What else do you have?” Cecil showed him everything. Each piece one at a time lifted from the velvet and placed under the lamp. The man held each one and examined it and set it on the glass counter when he was done.
He did not hurry and he did not haggle and he did not put anything back in the case. When Cecil had shown him the last piece, a lady’s pendant watch on a gold-filled chain, his uncle’s work, 1914, the man looked at the row of 12 pieces on the counter glass and was quiet for a moment. He said, “What’s the total?” Cecil added it on a pad.
He showed the man the number. It was $740. Cecil Drummond has not moved. He is standing behind the counter with the pad in his hand and the 12 pieces of his shop’s inventory between him and a stranger. And the clocks on the shelf are keeping their various textures of time. And the morning light is moving off the front window as it does every morning at this hour.
And he does not know yet what he is looking at. The man said, “I’ll give you 800 for the lot. The extra 60 is for the showing. You handled every piece as though it mattered.” And it did. He paid in cash. He took nothing with him. Cecil looked at the empty counter. He looked at the man.
He said, “You’re not taking them.” The man said, “I bought them. They’re mine to do with as I choose.” He set his hat on the counter. “I choose to leave them here on consignment. You’ll sell them better than I will.” He looked at the clocks on the shelf. “Keep what you need for the rent. The rest is yours when they sell.
” He picked up his hat. “I’ll come back through in the spring if the picture goes forward. I want a reliable watch for location work. Something that won’t fail me in the mountains.” He did not look back. He lifted one hand at the door, easy and loose, the way a man raises a hand to answer a question he already knows the answer to.
And then, he was gone. Cecil paid Vickers the back rent that afternoon, September and October and November in advance besides, which came to $240 and left him $560 toward stock and the supplier he owed in Louisville. He sold the Hamilton railroad watch within the week to a coal company engineer who had been looking for one.
He sold the pendant watch the following month to the granddaughter of the woman it had originally been made for, which was the kind of sale that happens in a small Kentucky county and nowhere else. He sold everything on the counter by February, piece by piece, each one to someone who wanted it specifically, the way Cecil had always sold things, not to the first buyer, but to the right one.
Cecil Drummond ran the shop for 17 more years. Regent Jewelers closed in 1963 when the chain retracted its smaller locations in a cost reduction cycle. By then, Cecil had rebuilt his inventory through the Louisville supplier and through two estate sales in Harlan County, where the families had known him long enough to trust him with the valuation.
Martin left the coal company in 1965 and took a bench in the shop, learning the trade the way Cecil had learned it, slowly, under instruction. Beginning with cleaning and ending with movement work, which requires years before the hands are confident. By 1970, Martin was doing the primary repair work and Cecil was doing the appraisals and the estate valuations and the Saturday morning clock winding circuit for four households in the county who had clocks too old to be trusted to anyone who had not been winding them for 30 years. Cecil handed the shop to Martin in 1977, the same year he turned 69, and Martin ran it until 1994. Think about what $800 on a glass display counter on a September morning in 1960 became. Cecil ran the shop from that morning through 1977, 17 more years.
Martin ran it 17 years after that. Between them, father and son, the shop on Central Street served Harlan County for 34 more years from the morning the display case went empty and came back full. That is 34 more years of pocket watches opened and read and repaired and returned. Clocks kept running in households that would have had no one to call when they stopped.
An estate sale in 1968 where the family knew who to trust with the valuation because Cecil had been there for 40 years and his name meant something. Martin learning the bench correctly, the way it has to be learned, and carrying it forward. The shop’s outstanding debt in September 1960 was the back rent and the Louisville supplier.
$800 on a counter cleared enough of both to keep going and Cecil Drummond knew how to keep going. In the back room of the watch shop on Central Street, Martin’s son Daniel runs it now, has run it since 1994, a third generation on the same block. There is a shelf above the parts drawers where the account ledgers are kept.
Between the 1959 ledger and the 1961 ledger, there is the 1960 ledger. And on the September page, in Cecil’s careful hand, there is a single entry unlike any other in 31 years of accounts, consignment inventory, $800, one buyer, no name given, pieces to be sold and proceeds retained by shop. Below it, in smaller letters, as though added later as a reminder to himself, he said, “Come back in the spring.
” He has not come back yet. The afternoon light comes through the back room’s single window and lies across the shelf for about 40 minutes each day around 3:00. The ledgers are still in sequence. The 1960 ledger is still between 1959 and 1961. If you find yourself in Harlan and walk down Central Street, the shop is still there. Two blocks from the courthouse.
Daniel keeps the original display case. The velvet was replaced again in 1988, but it is the same dark blue, the same fabric, because that is what the case takes and always has. The clocks on the back shelf are still running at their various tempos. You will know the shop by the window, which still faces east and still catches the morning light.
Some of you have known a craftsman who kept a thing alive through every reason it had to die. Not loudly, not with complaint, but with a daily decision to come in and light the lamp and put the loop in, and do the work. This story is for them. John Wayne never told anyone. Not the shop on Central Street.
Not the name Drummond. Not the $800 or the consignment arrangement or the clocks on the shelf that he had stood and listened to for a moment in a way nobody who was only passing through would have done. He drove east out of Harlan that morning and rejoined his crew in Virginia and said nothing to them about the town or the watch shop or anything else that had happened on Central Street.
There is no record of it. What is known is what Martin wrote in the margins of the 1960 ledger in 1977, the year he took the shop over and reviewed all the old accounts to understand the business he was inheriting, the man in September. I asked father about this entry once. He said he was a large man who knew how to listen to a clock.
That is all he would say. A man stopped on a Kentucky street and looked through a watch shop window because the morning light was on the velvet and the things on the velvet were worth looking at. He went inside. He listened to the clocks. He asked about a watch and looked at the movement the way a reader looks at a page and understood what was there.
Then he asked to see everything and he bought it all and left it where it was and said he would be back in the spring for a watch that would not fail in the mountains. He did not explain. He did not need to. That is most of how it ever got out at all. If this story meant something to you, subscribe. There is another one like it every week and unfortunately they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
