Invoice Anderson was near 70 when he first noticed the clock.
It appeared like a ship’s wheel, a kitschy little bit of decor you would possibly see at a nautically themed bar. However he was drawn to it due to its maker. Timepieces from Chelsea Clock Co. had been famend for his or her design and precision. The corporate’s clocks might as soon as be discovered on Navy battleships throughout World Warfare II, and adorned mantels, partitions and desks on the White Home for presidents starting from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden.
Anderson, a retired watchmaker and collector, was notably within the base of the Chelsea Comet, which was engraved with the initials “J.F.K.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy?
Though watch collectors obsess over celeb possession, and a Camelot connection counts for lots, the prospect of a payday was solely a part of the attract for Anderson.
Retired watchmaker Invoice Anderson owns greater than 200 timepieces, together with a Chelsea Comet with a plaque that includes a “J.F.K.” engraving.
(Courtesy of Invoice Anderson)
The thriller of the clock’s provenance — might it probably be the actual deal? — has animated his life for years. This, Anderson mentioned, “is a nice game that I’ve got going here.”
He’d bought the clock in 1999 from a vendor on EBay, a New Hampshire supplier who’d picked it up at an property sale in Wellesley, Mass., for $280.
Within the intervening years, Anderson, who’s 95, has plumbed the cloistered world of clock collectors. His hunt would take him to the net message boards of watch and clock aficionados, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. It will ultimately result in a refrigerated vault 200 ft under floor in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania.
Anderson could not use the phrase “obsession” to explain his curiosity in his J.F.Okay. clock, however others do. All these many years he’s spent making an attempt to uncover its backstory are proof of its nearly gravitational pull.
Anderson, whose mother and father ran a grocery retailer, grew up in Roseburg, Ore., south of Eugene. Within the late Forties, he left the College of Oregon after only one quarter and enrolled in a watchmaking faculty run by the Elgin Nationwide Watch Co.
Anderson’s maternal grandfather had been within the commerce. “I leaned over his watchmaker’s bench and watched him as a little boy,” he defined. “He let me have the insides of an alarm clock … that was the beginning of it.”
In time, Anderson turned a retail liquidator, serving to to shut jewellery and watch shops and promote their remaining inventories. Alongside the way in which, Anderson married and began a household. He gained a fame as an sincere dealer — and for having the ability to spot the worth in merchandise that others couldn’t promote.
“Bill is like the George Washington of people — you know, ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ that type of thing,” mentioned Errol Stewart, a Maine watchmaker who has identified Anderson for about 40 years.
In 1974, Anderson paid $15,000 for the stock of a jeweler in Baker Metropolis, Ore., promoting what he might and bringing the leftovers residence. Forty years later, he got here throughout them whereas cleansing out his attic; among the many wares was an previous soccer helmet.
It turned out to be a uncommon Spalding head harness from the early 1900s. Not more than 10 are believed to nonetheless be in existence, and Anderson bought it for about $14,000.
He has retained greater than 200 timepieces for his assortment, together with a number of from Chelsea, and has watched the costs for celebrity-owned timepieces surge in the previous few many years.
The marketplace for these with ties to the Kennedys is especially robust. Jacqueline Kennedy’s Cartier Tank bought for practically $380,000 in 2017, and JFK’s Omega fetched $420,000 in 2005.
“With Kennedy you get the highest multiplication factor for any political figure,” mentioned Paul Boutros, who heads the U.S. watch enterprise for Phillips, a London-based public sale home.
Anderson knew if he might verify the possession, it might be a boon — maybe a capstone to his legacy as a watchmaker and collector. The very first thing he did was get in contact with Chelsea to request the clock’s certificates of origin.
When it arrived, the spot for the unique purchaser’s identify was marked “no record.” Might which were a courtesy prolonged to a VIP buyer? JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., had visited the corporate’s headquarters in Massachusetts — residence to the Kennedy clan — the place he bought a number of gadgets.
Chelsea had printed a characteristic on its web site about in-house grasp clockmaker Jean Yeo that touched on that celeb connection. She mentioned that she started working at Chelsea in 1951, a time when “all of the Kennedys came in here” and had particular reward for the household’s patriarch, calling him a “nice guy” who talked to her about her work.
However Anderson wasn’t positive what to assume. The rising attract of watches with A-list historical past was engaging individuals to hawk doubtful timepieces.
In 2005, a Rolex that was mentioned to be a present from Marilyn Monroe to Kennedy was auctioned for $120,000. The gold Day-Date, allegedly given by the actress to Kennedy in 1962 on the event of his forty fifth birthday, featured an inscription that reads, “Jack / With love as always / from / Marilyn.” However collectors and watch students have famous that the timepiece in query featured a serial quantity that dated it to 1965.
At one level in his search, Anderson had a breakthrough when he found a web based {photograph} of the long run president and his spouse at residence in 1954. A clock was positioned on a desk, and it appeared identical to Anderson’s Comet, however the low-resolution image was so blurry that any engraving it could have had was unimaginable to discern.
Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and his spouse, Jacqueline, at their residence in Washington, D.C., in 1954. A Chelsea Comet clock sits on the desk.
(Bettmann Archive)
James Archer Abbott, co-author of “Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration and Its Legacy,” mentioned there was no file of the Comet having been displayed on the White Home, and cautioned that if it had been vital to the household, it possible would have been earmarked for Kennedy’s presidential library. A consultant of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum mentioned that it has no file of or data on the Comet clock.
However Tony LaChapelle, president of Chelsea, was open to the chance that it had as soon as been owned by Kennedy.
“Could somebody who had nothing better to do in their life take that photo of JFK, Jackie and that clock, and get a Comet clock and try to capitalize on that? I suppose they could,” he mentioned. “We look at [Anderson’s ] clock and we look at that photo of [Kennedy’s clock] sitting out on the table, and in our opinion it is highly probable” they had been one and the identical.
Anderson tried to search out the unique high-resolution picture for years however couldn’t flip something up. Nobody appeared to know the supply of the photograph. There have been tens of hundreds of images of Kennedy to comb via on-line. Or extra.
However ultimately, after a serpentine, multiyear effort, the whereabouts of the unique unfavourable had been lastly uncovered. It was in a photograph archive saved inside a Boyers, Pa., facility generally known as the Iron Mountain, a formidable place that securely maintains information of all kinds, together with for the federal authorities.
The Bettman Archive, which contains thousands and thousands of images and is managed by Getty Photos, is housed in a piece of the Mountain that’s greater than 10 tales underground.
Final yr, an archivist positioned the unfavourable and introduced it to one in all Bettman’s labs, the place she positioned it on a flatbed scanner. Quickly, a brand new, ultra-high-resolution model of the 1954 picture glowed on her laptop display. The readability was outstanding.
The Comet could possibly be clearly seen within the photograph, together with the clock’s wood base.
It was clean.
However he supplied no lamentations and later he mentioned he wasn’t disenchanted: “Not a bit.” He’d come to comprehend how vital the hunt had been for him, particularly after his spouse, Sallie, died in July 2023. She was 93.
“She understood that I loved that kind of stuff,” he mentioned.
The analysis made a darkish time just a bit simpler.
Throughout a latest interview, Anderson sat at his eating room desk, the place there was an array of images of his spouse. The Comet was there too. He defined that during the last yr or so, he has requested every of his 5 youngsters to pick out clocks from his assortment that they may inherit when he dies.
Marilyn Monroe, seen in a 1962 {photograph}, is claimed to have gifted President Kennedy a Rolex that was later auctioned for $120,000.
(Cecil Stoughton / White Home Pictures / John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum / Related Press)
“I don’t know how many more miles down the road I’ve got,” he mentioned.
However Anderson has but to supply the Comet. “Why that hasn’t happened yet, I don’t know,” he mentioned.
One among his sons, Mike Anderson, a watchmaker who owns Anderson Jewelers in Corvallis, Ore., has an concept. “There’s no doubt in my mind he wants to link [the clock] to JFK — he wants to believe that that was on his desk,” the youthful Anderson mentioned. “That’s what drives him.”
In spite of everything these years, Anderson nonetheless loves the chase.
