As he intently adjusts one of his many timepieces, the studious looking man seems at first glance to be a typical retiree taking up a new hobby.

But looks can be deceiving.

Dr. Bill Wilkes, involved in the latest of three life careers the past 11 years as an Athens State University professor of economics, collects and repairs clocks on the side. But retirement doesn’t seem to be on the horizon.

Wilkes became fascinated with rare timepieces and clock repair while living in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Part of his collection can be viewed at the Alabama Veterans Museum and Archives on Pryor Street, where he has placed on loan three World War I and WWII era ship’s chronometers—navigation timepieces.

“Chronometers are really my passion,” said Wilkes. “But the irony is, I can fix any clock, but not chronometers because they are more like watches than clocks and I cannot repair watches.”

Wilkes explained that prior to the 1700s, ship navigators had to depend on the stars.

“If there were a storm or fog or something where you couldn’t relate times to a celestial map, you didn’t know where you were and many ran aground.

“Early in the 1700s, the British government offered an award to someone who could invent a clock for onboard ship so they could tell where they were. Chronometers were one of the more significant developments that went to make the United Kingdom the powerhouse that it was.”

Wilkes said the chronometers on display at the Veterans Museum are American made.

“Typically, one thinks of chronometers as either British or French made,” he said.

Big Easy native

Wilkes was born in New Orleans and lived his first six years in Baton Rouge, before his father was transferred to Venezuela in 1947 with the oil industry. He attended an American school subsidized by the oil industry through the ninth grade, at which time he came back to the U.S. to attend his three years of high school at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell.

After high school he attended the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, earning a degree in electrical engineering in 1963. A two-year hitch in the Army found him serving with the Signal Corps in Okinawa.