WAUKESHA — Is there a time before time? Is there a time after time? It’s all hard to understand, but it does like there will always be a ‘time.’ Except for one business -- it’s running out of the very thing it sells - time.
"I've gotten a lot older in those 51 years and my feet aren’t as they use to be,” Karen White, the owner of Little Swiss Clock Shop in Waukesha, said.
White started a watch repair shop 51 years ago with her husband. Now, it sells and fixes watches and clocks.
"A lot of times people are bringing relatives that are visiting from Germany. They bring them to the little Swiss Clock Shop. They use it as a museum.”
People come for the grandfather clocks.
“It's not only functional its also decorative and there is a lot of beauty to it so you just can’t go wrong you have function and beauty and what more can you ask for,” White said.
The clocks will soon stop ticking for this downtown Waukesha store. It’s closing. White is heading into retirement. Now the clocks that cost more than $10,000 are on sale for 50-70 percent off. White has too close soon, but first needs to sell off the remaining clocks.
It’s been a long run. White has seen clocks from the colonial days, and has a handful of century-old pocket watches on display too.
"Pocket watches have worn cases and I know a lot of them did belong to train engineers and train conductors.”
While White made a living selling time, she never learned how to hold onto it. Despite being surrounded by clocks her entire life, she still looses track of time.
While she won’t hear chimes of the clocks in her shop, she will still listen to the symphony of jumbled dings and dongs and tick and tocks of the purposefully miss-timed clocks. She said she wants to hear everyone that's in her house. The only one she can’t listen to, is the watch she wears everyday on her wrist.
