After 120 years, historic Kansas City business has moved out of the city
Like an orchestra led by some demented conductor, the clocks begin announcing themselves around 2 in the afternoon. Cuckoos and chimes and gongs. It’s like this every day, all day, at the top of every hour. Life in a clock shop.
Beth Woolsey barely registers the cacophony. She’s talking about that Herschede grandfather clock over there. The price is steep, yes — $3,000 — but it’s mechanical art. Look at the thing. It has tubular bells for chimes and a filigree dial with a moon face that rotates each day, simulating the lunar cycle.
“So when there’s a full moon, it’s centered on the face,” says Woolsey, the fifth-generation owner of The Clock Shop.
For 70 years, pieces like these ticked inside Woolsey’s family’s shop at 62nd and Oak streets in Brookside. But a 2017 fire forced a relocation around the corner. In January, the landlord announced other plans for the space, sending Woolsey hunting for yet another home.
She landed at a low-slung unit next to a pizza place in Independence: 17201 E. U.S. Hwy 40, Suite 115.
“We looked around Brookside but couldn’t find anything that fit what we needed,” Woolsey said. “Plus, we all live out this way in Blue Springs. It’s closer to home.”
Closer to home, but farther from where the story began, back in 1905, when a German immigrant named Joe Beverley started fixing watches and clocks on West 12th Street in downtown Kansas City. From there, it passed through sons and marriages, eventually to Eldon Falke, who moved the shop to Oak Street in 1955 and built out the interior himself.
He handed the keys to his son, Dave Falke, in the early ‘90s. Woolsey, Dave’s oldest daughter, took over operations in 2014. Her son, Chris Hutson, has been apprenticing at the shop for four years and will likely be The Clock Shop’s sixth-generation owner one day.
Most of their business is repairs. A grandfather clock from an estate sale. A cuckoo clock that stopped singing. A shelf clock inherited from an aunt, wound once a week for half a century.
Woolsey and Hutson fix it all at benches in the back of the shop. Tools hang from pegboards — pliers, tweezers, screwdrivers — while a bushing machine, jars of clock oil, tiny brass parts, and half-dismantled movements crowd the surfaces. It is a small, mechanical sanctuary where time is disassembled, cleaned, and coaxed back into motion by steady hands.
“There’s just something about taking a 100-year-old clock and figuring out how to make it work again,” Woolsey said. “And then we get to share that with the customer who’s had it in their family for ages. It’s a special thing.”
Up front, the clocks are for sale. They go for anywhere between a couple hundred bucks to several thousand dollars. A row of Vienna regulators hangs tall and narrow, their pendulums swinging behind glass-fronted cases. A tall-case grandfather clock from Austria is the oldest in the shop, built in 1784. Falke is partial to their selection of French portico clocks: 19th-century timepieces with classical columns and gilded pendulums.
“During the Civil War, American clocks still had wooden wheels,” Falke said. “Meanwhile in Europe, the French were making these incredible pieces.”
Technically semi-retired, Falke still works most days, driving to Topeka or Odessa or Raytown on service calls. He walks around with a small headlamp clipped to the top of his ballcap and a Clock Shop polo with his name stamped on the left breast.
Business is better than ever, Falke said. Several clock shops in the area have closed in recent years — Northland Time, The Clock Center in Lenexa — leaving just The Clock Shop and Thompson’s Clock Manor in Overland Park to handle Kansas Citians’ complex clock needs.
Would-be horologists come and go. They buy the tools, learn the basics. But the patience required to bush out plates and repair antique mainsprings day after day isn’t something everyone is born with.
“A lot of the new people that get into this business treat it like a hobby, and that doesn’t work,” Falke said. “We’ve been around 120 years, and we have all the knowledge that comes with that. It makes a big difference.”
