Inside the clock...

 While serving as a vote monitor and a vote review panelist this week, I took a break to stretch my legs. I walked from the "Old Yellow Courthouse" where the fourth Floyd County vote count of the November 3, 2020 election is being conducted, down to Broad Street, up to Fifth Avenue then up Clocktower Hill. I walked through John Paul Schulz's garden there and just enjoyed the ginkgos and pansies and our beautiful City Clock and its vista of our town. As I started down the path toward the parking lot to make my way back to the count, there came Selena Tilly. 

Selena works for the city at the Rome-Floyd County History Center, where she can pursue her lifelong interest in local history, professionally. She is now on the staff. The City Clock is a special interest with her as it is with me, and she leads regular tours of the little museum inside the tower and sometimes special ones. It turned out that she was about to lead one of those special guided tours with a visiting group of folks. As she waited for the group to arrive we talked a little and I mentioned that I had never been up into the clock structure itself. I've been to the public observation deck below the clock at the top of the brickwork. I've even been the "up top" tour guide a couple of time now. But I'd never actually been into the wooden section that once housed the original clockworks and still houses the four clock faces now run by small electronic devices. 

"Would you like to see it now?" she asked. 

Would I?! Of course I would! So she gave me the keys and as she awaited the tour group below, I climbed the 107 steps that spiral around the huge tank inside the brick facade. At the top I found the padlocked door into the wooden clock superstructure 

and entered a realm seen by mighty few folks over the century and nearly a half that the clock has stood there. 

It used to be that the clock-keeper made occasional trips up there to see that all was in good working order and the clock winder came up once a week to be sure the mechanism was well-wound so the eight-day clock would keep safely ticking for another seven days till the next winding. Other than that a few maintenance folks might do some painting up there, or woodworking repairs, or decorating for Christmas.

I was first surprised at the size of it. 

Now that the original clockworks have been taken downstairs to the little museum the space is no doubt roomier.  There's a stack of wreaths, rather unceremoniously and casually stacked, and a plastic tub filled with bunting. 

I suspect those will adorn the structure again in a day or few. There are some chains and weights left over from the old days, no longer in use. 

And a hand-cranked apparatus in one corner I'd been alerted to take note of. And the stairs leading to the clock-face level and then on to the bell level.

That hand-cranked device is part of an old fire alarm system. 

The cranking winds the spring that operates the bell-ring alarm. It was once connected to 20 or more alarm boxes around Rome's downtown. If an alarm was pulled at a box on the Cotton Block or near the opera house, a electrical impulse flowed thorugh the wires to the clock tower and triggered a special series of bell strikes. First three gongs would sound as an alert, followed after a pause by a number of peals corresponding to the number of the alarm box that had been activated. Thus the fire station was signaled where to send the fire crews.

I climbed the stairs to the clock-face level.

 I could see the moving gears of the small controls behind each face. 

I noticed a tiny hook-latched door in each clock-face. I open the eastern one an snapped a few pictures,

 then walked around to the northern one. There I could peer past the minute hand northward to the lazy Oostanaula as it lowed past our back yard on Avenue A. So a snapped a few more pictures. 

I climbed on up to the hatch that goes to the bell level, but fearing I might be pressing the limits of my permissions, I saved that for another day.

After padlocking the door again, I descended the steps trying to get some pictures through the safety mesh of the museum interior far below with uncertain results. 

The tour group was just pulling into the parking lot as I returned the keys to Selena. She said she might could use me as an occasional substitute guide there if I could take the time for a little training. I jumped at the opportunity and will do my best to observe her next private tour!

Five minutes later I was back in the halls of the courthouse where election officials under the close observation of Democratic and Republican monitors and news reporters were still recounting votes. 

As I observed our small-r republican values being so meticulously followed, I thought of the six purposes we, the people, covenant together to perform through the government we control with our votes. I'm thankful that in the very early 1870s our city forebears decided that it was a part of the common good to build a watertank atop a hill smack in the middle of town, and that it was in the public interest to make it beautiful, so they built a brick tower around it. Then what an ornament and symbol for the town it would be if that prominent twoer were crowned with a beautiful clock. I suppose the Rome City Clock has been worth millions of dollars of advertisement for our little corner of paradise over the fifteen decades. 

I urge my friends to reclaim ownership of Rome, Floyd County, Georgia, and America. Never elect anyone who says government is bad; government is us. If it is imperfect, as all human unions are,  then it is up to us to perfect our union so that we have maximum justice, peace at home and abroad, common good, and liberty for all, now and for every future tick of the clock.