Meet the Neighbors: Changing times: Athens State professor shares wealth of years

March 17, 2008 09:31 pm

— 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.
After being discharged from the Army, Wilkes attended the University of Chicago, earning a master’s in business administration.
“I then spent a year studying at the London School of Economics, earning a master’s in international economics,” he said. “I finished there in ’69 and started with an American company in London as a staff assistant to the manager of the Food, Mechanic and Chemical Corp, which manufactured pumps and agriculture harvesting equipment.”
Two years later, in 1971, the company transferred Wilkes to its Mexico City plant as supervisor.
“That wasn’t a pleasant place—it wasn’t a happy job,” said Wilkes.
He left Mexico and moved to the Houston area, where he was hired by a company to justify the building of a plan to manufacture oil field drilling equipment for the North Sea in Scotland, which the goal of eventually becoming manager for the Scotland plant.
However, with shifting oil priorities, Wilkes found himself in North Africa, where he lived for seven years, serving as manager for company building oil field equipment.
“That was a wonderful time,” he said. “My boss was 7,000 miles away. And it was an interesting job to be involved in the start up of a plant, build it, buy the tools and get if up and running. It was quite a challenge.”
In 1981, his company wanted to transfer him to California to become involved in building military defense equipment, which he said, “did not make me happy”
Wilkes accepted a managerial job with Cameron Iron Works who manufactured sub-sea oil drilling equipment.
“The reason they hired me was to go to Venezuela to take over a plant there by I was Spanish speaking manager,” he said. “I was not fluent in Spanish, but I could get by. But in 1985, the oil industry collapsed and they wound up mothballing the facility. That was not a pleasant task.”

Handwriting on wall

Wilkes said he could see “the handwriting on the wall” where it came to his career path.
“I knew I’d better start looking around,” he said. “I was offered a job in Oklahoma City by Gulfco, which is now owned by Cameron Iron Works. “At one point I was assigned a joint venture in China and put in charge of justifying building a facility in China. It didn’t come through because of the oil collapse. The market price of oil fell to $8 a barrel and people stopped drilling. It just collapsed. There was a change of management and I was out.”
Wilkes decided to change paths and began a clock repair shop.
“But then the company who laid me off approached me and hired me as plant manager and I did that for about a year when I was approached by headhunters from a Huntsville company, a subcontracting firm producing hydraulic systems for the defense and aerospace industries.
But the end of the Cold War and the country’s shifting defense priorities once again signaled a change in direction for Wilkes.
“With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War, our contracts were canceled and I was on the street again,” he said. “I worked in Birmingham for 18 months for a hydraulic filter company, but then I was fortunate enough to be hired by Motlow State Community College in Tullahoma, Tenn., as an instructor in economics.
“When I started teaching, it fulfilled a dream.”
Wilkes once more felt the need to re-educate himself and enrolled in the Tennessee State University doctoral program in economics.
“I earned my doctorate in 1999,” he said. “I was the oldest person to have earned that degree.”

ASU

His doctoral degree brought him a position with Athens State University where he now teaches a full four-course load.
Wilkes said he stopped purchasing clocks several years ago, but now has about 20 in his collection from the United Kingdom, Holland, Germany and France.
“I do a little repair work for the public, but I’ve pretty well stopped buying,” he said.
Wilkes and his wife of six years, Patty, a social worker with the Mental Health Center, have three children each from previous marriages.

Photos

Bill Wilkes, a professor of economics at Athens State University, learned clock repair while living in London in the late 1960s.