Daytona Beach - Boardwalk Clock - Jim Zeisler of Portsmouth Ohio ... Thx Pidge F!

Good job, Jim Zeisler, Pidge's brother!  Jim and Pidge were born in Portsmouth, Ohio and lived four houses north of the Kegley clan on McConnell Ave.  Jim looks just like his dad did back in our day.

Portsmouth should have some sort of similar landmark, maybe with P-O-R-T-S-M-O-U-T-H-W-A-L-L for the Clock numbers.  We are very proud of the Floodwall murals  which show more than two thousand years of history on over two thousand feet of floodwall.

SamKat



 Daytona Beach -  Boardwalk clock

http://www.news-journalonline.com/article/20130825/COLUMNS/130829653/0/search
 Hour has come to fix the Boardwalk clocktowerPublished:
 Sunday, August 25, 2013 at 5:30 a.m.Daytona
 Beach does not have an official timekeeper, but it does have
 Jim Zeisler.  Zeisler, a retired Ohio firefighter, clock aficionado and vice
 president of the Daytona Beach chapter of the National
 Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, is the guy who,
 twice a year, when Daylight Saving Time begins and ends,
 ascends 30 feet in a cherry-picker bucket and sets the hands
 on the four faces of the Boardwalk's clock tower.The
 clock hands are made out of titanium and bolted on with
 stainless steel bolts to resist the wet, salty sea winds.
 Zeisler removes and repositions each one to put the hour
 right. It's not like spinning the hands around your
 kitchen's Kit-Cat clock dial.At
 this hour, though, Zeisler is alarmed at the clock
 tower's overall condition and told the Daytona Beach
 City Commission about his concerns Wednesday night.“I
 don't think it's structurally sound,” he said.
 “I've been up there more times than you can count on
 your hands and feet ... and it needs help.”Built
 as a make-work New Deal project and dedicated on the Fourth
 of July 1938, the clock tower substitutes the letters
 “D-A-Y-T-O-N-A-B-E-A-C-H” for the 12 hours on the dial.
 It's been a defining local landmark and an image on
 hundreds of postcards ever since. Along with the Bandshell
 and pier, it's been a symbol of the city's signature
 beachside district.The
 whole clock tower project cost $268,000 to build, which
 would be $4.5 million in today's
 dollars.
 The
 local NAWCC chapter has been maintaining the clock's
 insides over three decades now. Club members undertook major
 overhauls to the clock's electric motors in 1989 and
 2008.But
 even though the insides are running fine now, the outside is
 not so good, according to Zeisler.“The
 structure is pitiful, but it runs,” he said.And
 a quick look at the structure backs him up. Some stones are
 blackened with mold. The water in the fountain at the base
 of the tower is milky and nothing you'd want to dip your
 legs in even on a hot August day. Stones are loose.
 There's algae in the fountain and pigeons perch on the
 tower's sculpted scallops.And
 then there's the matter of the weather vane.If
 you look at the model of the Boardwalk in the Halifax
 Historical Museum — and you really should, the whole place
 as it looked in the 1930s is rendered in brightly painted
 clay and looks like a scene from a Wallace and Gromit movie
 — you will notice a weather vane atop the clock tower.
 This surprised me since I didn't remember seeing a
 weather vane there.But
 according to Ziesler, the weather vane, with an eagle
 perched majestically atop, came down in a storm in the
 1970s. And even though the column that the weather vane
 rested upon now has chunks missing, he hopes to see a new
 one go up.Warren
 and Ruth Trager, who have long been active in preserving the
 area's heritage, already have donated $500 toward a new
 weather vane and have pledged another $250 toward topping
 the project in style.“Before
 we can really put the weather vane up, we've got to put
 some work on the structure itself,” said City Manager Jim
 Chisholm.But
 the good news is that the city now is planning to do
 something about
 that.“What
 we're learning is that any pre-World War Two coquina
 structure needs continuous monitoring and maintenance,”
 said Deputy City Manager Paul McKitrick.In
 addition to recent renovations to the coquina Bandshell,
 McKitrick noted the city recently spent $100,000 to restore
 the coquina walkover at the base of the Daytona Pier.“If
 it could look like the Bandshell, we'd be thrilled to
 death,” said Zeisler.And
 he's encouraged enough by the city's response that
 he's looking forward to the day when that will
 happen.
 Jim Zeisler, with the National
 Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, holds two of the
 large titanium clock hands before he installed them in 2010
 in this file photo. Last week, Zeisler urged the city to
 renovate the Bandshell’s clock tower structure.



The clock tower on the Boardwalk
 as it looked in 1961.
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