Last week, I was in Columbia, Pennsylvania to remove wristwatches, historical artifacts, and related materials from the “James Bond Originals” kiosk and James Bond Wore the Quartz Revolution™ gallery that I had been curating at the National Watch & Clock Museum.
It was time. Proverbs 16:9 comes to mind as I reflect back.
I’ve been a member of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors (“NAWCC”), since 1993 [1]. That would have been sixteen years after its Museum opened in 1977, “with fewer than 1,000 items” [2]. Later in the 1990s, I visited for the first time. This past February 23, I updated my records and renewed while there in-person.
This is an investment that spans over three decades.
Our “James Bond Watches period” began in 2008, and I believe is amply characterized through references to Bulletin article contributions, displays, and presentation that variously appear throughout this site. But I’ll summarize the magic of that collaboration, and the first ten years in particular, as key to delivering both engagement, substance, and enjoyment to all of those who visited. The essence behind that was the people that I came to know there, from senior executive to cabinet-maker out on the floor.
But nothing lasts forever.
My primary interface, dedicated collaborator, and, I’ll say, friend, Noel Poirier [3-4] moved on to his next, greater career challenge in 2018, and remains sorely missed. Too many other key contributors have gone on as well.
By 2022, NAWCC had been through a full-blown pandemic [5] and was two executive directors later [6-7], when I first met Rory McEvoy, hired into the now-combined role as head of both that parent association and the “Museum of Time.”
That June, he and I sat down for a meeting in Dayton, Ohio, during the National Convention there. We discussed the terms of the loan agreements that I had signed with Mr Poirier. Mr McEvoy then asked that I commit to run through Christmas season of 2023.
Of course, I did so.
I went on to underscore that I had brought “James Bond” to the Museum because of my commitment to the organization and its mission — not the other way around. That said, he reached out to me again in January of 2023 to reconfirm our agreement to run through the end of that calendar year.
Last Thanksgiving marked the six-year anniversary of my “James Bond Originals” kiosk in the National Watch & Clock Museum Wristwatch Gallery. And that was the newer of the two platforms that I had been curating for them. That’s a relatively long time, per se [8-9].
On top of that, its bookending of Sean Connery and Daniel Craig appears to be on borrowed time, with the 2021 release of No Time to Die as swan song for the latter. Rory McEvoy said as much (though not specific to 007) in a December 29, 2023, appearance on his local Fox station [10].
As I wrote at the outset: It was time.
With my own move into new opportunities already underway with development work on Version 5 of James Bond Watches, Mr McEvoy and I began to negotiate an orderly decommissioning of all exhibits under my curation. Ironically, it was a newfound access to original records pertaining to the development of a James Bond watch during the early 1970s that drove late-February timing.
Reporting on the half-century-0ld James Bond watch, however, will have to wait until 2025.
— Dell Deaton
off-site
References
- “Watches– James Bond Watches” / March 5, 2010 / Dell Deaton (via Internet Archive, accessed February 29, 2024).
- The Watch and Clock Museum / January 26, 1997 (via Internet Archive, accessed February 29, 2024).
- “About Me” / Tuscarawas County Stories: Noel B Poirier (accessed February 29, 2024).
- “Our Shared Horological Heritage: The National Watch & Clock Museum, by Noel Poirier” / February 1, 2016 / Noel Poirier / Horological Society of New York (accessed February 28, 2024).
- “National Watch & Clock Museum is Columbia Pennsylvania is scheduled to re-open for visitors today” / January 6, 2021 / Saline Journal (accessed February 28, 2024).
- “Tom Wilcox, Esq, MBA, SPHR, AB” / LinkedIn (accessed February 28, 2024).
- “Important Executive Director Announcement from NAWCC” / May 2021 / National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors (accessed February 28, 2024).
- “What Is a Museum? A Dispute Erupts Over a New Definition” / August 6, 2020 / Alex Marshall / The New York Times (accessed April 2, 2023).
- “Reasons Why It’s So Important To Preserve Artifacts Properly” / July 19, 2021 / USA Art News .com (accessed April 10, 2023).
- “National Watch and Clock Museum helps people travel through time” / December 29, 2023 / Fox43 News (via YouTube, accessed February 27, 2024).