Time-tested tradition continues for Perkins family
Watchmakers have been in business 61 years, still love work
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BY AMANDA O'TOOLEPublished: October 19, 2009
PERKINS — Richard Coate works behind magnified lenses at his worn wooden desk, wielding a tiny magnetic tool inside the guts of a dainty watch face. Pieces of other watches scatter the desk’s surface, sacrificed for their spare parts.
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The vanishing trade of watchmaking is a Coate family tradition.
Richard Coate shares his workspace with his father, Burt Coate, and some of the tools he uses belonged to his late grandfather, Omer Coate.
He works in the shop his father opened on Perkins’ Main Street in 1958, where the younger Coate started helping out when he was in high school. The family business started 10 years earlier in the house next door, where Richard and his four sisters grew up.
Of all of his siblings and all their children, Richard Coate, 55, is the only one who has picked up the trade.
"It’s a sense of pride that we can do a service that not everyone can do,” he said.
Watching history
Their shared passion for fixing watches is evident in how the men talk about their work."When you open a watch, it’s like you’re opening a door to a room you’ve never been in,” Burt Coate, 85, said. "You know it’s going to have furniture, but every room looks different.”
Sometimes he ponders the journey each watch has taken, especially pocket watches, he said.
Burt Coate comes to the shop less and less as the years go on, but father and son still have coffee each day, and Richard Coate still seeks advice when a hard fix has him stumped.
The best lesson he’s learned from his father is to know when to walk away, Richard Coate said.
"When his father comes here and works on a watch, it’s like extra training for Richard,” Janice Coate, Richard’s wife, said. "(Burt) has had a little bit more experience than him.”
Richard and Janice Coate bought the business in 1998. They service watches from all over the state, a practice Burt Coate started in the 1970s.
A vanishing trade
Richard Coate trained at Oklahoma State University-Okmulgee, which continues to be one of a handful of schools in the country to teach watchmaking.The school, which teaches the prestigious Swiss American Watchmakers Training Alliance curriculum, enrolls a maximum of 12 students each year, said Jason Champion, one of the two faculty members who teach watchmaking at the institute.
Although the cell phone has reduced watches’ importance, he said heirloom timepieces are still being passed among families, and high quality watches still need regular service.
"It’s kind of interesting to be able to take a watch that may not be running and bringing it back to life,” he said. "We have to be in some instances a psychiatrist, in other in-stances a mechanic and at other times, an artist. It’s a very illustrious craft where you can combine different arts into one skill.”
He estimated the demand for professional watchmakers is 400 percent above the number of people learning the trade at a time when many people are preparing to exit the workforce.
"There’s not very many people in (the watchmaking profession) right now, and most of them who are doing it are in their 60s,” Champion said. "There’s a lot of information that people have got in terms of vintage timepieces and vintage brands, and a lot of skill sets that are not being passed down from generation to generation.”
Richard Coate is hoping that although watchmaking skipped a generation in his family, his 7- and 8-year-old granddaughters will take a deeper interest in the field.
They come to the shop from time to time and rubber stamp the company envelopes with the store’s mailing address.
"They’re amazed what their Papa works on,” Janice Coate said.
She said Richard Coate plans to run the family business for several years before passing Burt’s Jewelry to one of his daughters.
Although she’s unsure whether the store will always offer watch repair, the important thing is that the store stays in the family.
"I really don’t know how long the watch repair trade will last,” she said.
Read more: http://newsok.com/perkins-family-continues-tradition/article/3410261?custom_click=lead_story_title#ixzz0UOdFd7Ay
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