A8 LATIMES.COM
book in two years,” said Friedberg,
75, a retired attorney who lives in
Irvine. “I almost fried my brain on
finishing the five-volume set.”
And among the indoctrinated
— people like “A Clockwork Or-
ange” star Malcolm McDowell —
Friedberg’s project is peerless.
“There will never need to be
another book on Illinois watches,”
said McDowell, an Illinois collec-
tor. “He covered it.”
It’s a story of devotion. It’s a
story of perseverance. And for
Friedberg, who once owned more
than 700 Illinois watches, it’s a
story, by his own admission, of
obsession.
b
Friedberg can’t explain why he
became fixated on vintage
watches. But even as a child, he
was a collector of things. Marbles.
Popsicle sticks. Pennies from 1943
that were made with steel due to a
World War II-era copper shortage.
“I have no idea why I was doing
it,” he said.
In 1988, Friedberg, then an
attorney in his mid-40s, found a
new thing to collect. He was in
Washington, D.C., on business,
and during a stroll down Wiscon-
sin Avenue, a vintage watch shop
caught his eye. “I didn’t know
stores like this existed. I was
shocked,” he said.
Friedberg went in without
intending to make a purchase, but,
of course, did just that, picking up
a delicate, rectangular model
made by Girard-Perregaux in the
1940s.
“It felt like I had found heaven,”
he said.
He began buying wristwatches
in earnest. Perhaps, he said, mem-
ories of his father’s watch — a
Hamilton with diamonds on the
dial — spurred him along. But he
dismisses high-minded explana-
tions for his interest in horology,
the study of the measurement of
time.
“I mean, I just had an affinity
for it,” he said.
But McDowell has some ideas
about the enduring allure of wrist-
watches.
“Look, none of us need watches,
we have the iPhone,” said McDow-
ell, who befriended Friedberg
around 2012. “It’s about telling a
story. A watch tells the rest of the
world who you are. And Illinois
watches really are as good as any-
thing made in Europe. These are
under the radar. You feel a little bit
special that you know something
about them.”
Unlike a mobile phone, or a
battery-powered quartz watch,
mechanical timepieces are pow-
ered by a movement composed of
gears, wheels, levers and springs.
It can seem almost like alchemy —
that simply winding a watch can
bring to life its innards, allowing
for something as ephemeral as the
passage of time to be memori-
alized.
Anachronistic? Perhaps. But
it’s also romantic to some.
For Friedberg, though, it was
more about the hunt, especially in
the beginning. He just kept buying
watches. But Friedberg also had a
young family and a big mortgage.
“I was afraid I’d put my family
in the poorhouse because every
time I went by an antique store I’d
go in and buy watches,” he said.
“I’d come home and I’d have a pile
of crap, and they weren’t working
and ... and I said, ‘This is insane.’”
b
The Illinois Watch Co. was
Friedberg’s salvation. Realizing he
needed to narrow his focus, Fried-
berg homed in on the company’s
wristwatches, their Art Deco
elegance captivating him.
“No one touched Art Deco
design like Illinois,” he said. “Plus
it was an incredible story about
American manufacturing, entre-
preneurship and enterprise in this
country.”
The Springfield, Ill., company
was started in 1870, co-founded by
industrialist John Whitfield Bunn,
who had been a close friend of
Abraham Lincoln. The company
made its name turning out espe-
cially precise pocket watches that
were used by railroads to keep
accurate time, making train travel
safer.
The factory that turned out
Illinois’ precision instruments was
a Gilded Age marvel. In a stroke of
industrial innovation often over-
looked amid praise for Henry
Ford’s later accomplishments, the
company’s timepieces were made
on assembly lines.
John Cote, a member of the
National Assn. of Watch & Clock
Collectors’ board of directors, said
the company’s standardized ap-
proach, especially when compared
to the largely hand-made pieces
coming out of Switzerland at the
time, is an important example of
American ingenuity.
“The American system of man-
ufacturing things, it prevailed over
the British and the Swiss, who
were the watchmakers of the 1700s,
1800s and up to about the 1850s,
when America started taking it
over,” said Cote, an Illinois expert.
Illinois hit its stride during the
boom years after World War I.
Following the war, wristwatches
became popular among men, in
part because soldiers had grown
accustomed to strapping pocket
watches to their arms to more
easily tell the time on the battle-
field.
According to Cote, during the
1920s, Illinois was the third biggest
American watch company by
production volume, trailing only
Elgin and Waltham. It’s an inspir-
ing era for modern American
watchmakers including Cameron
Weiss, who founded his epony-
mous Torrance-based watch
brand in 2013.
“The inspiration for Weiss
Watch Co. really lies with compa-
nies like Waltham, Elgin and Illi-
nois,” Weiss said. “They were
supplying all of America and many
other countries with watches.
Before that, watches were really
only for the wealthiest of individu-
als who could afford a handmade
item.”
But for Illinois, and later the
rest of the American watchmaking
industry, the boom years would
soon end.
After its purchase by rival
Hamilton in 1928, Illinois was
buffeted by a series of changes and
ultimately shut down during the
Great Depression. Or, as Fried-
berg writes, the company’s “new
corporate parent, faced with life-
and-death choices, elected to
allow only one watch operation to
survive in the face of the most
tumultuous economic conditions
in the history of the United
States.”
And by the end of the 1960s,
Hamilton, Elgin and Waltham had
all ceased operating as American
companies, either shuttering or
selling to the Swiss.
While Illinois’ story ended on a
melancholy note, Friedberg reck-
oned it made for a great tale.
Before “The Illinois Watch &
Its Hamilton Years,” there was an
opening act. In 2004, Friedberg
released “The Illinois Watch: The
Life and Times of a Great Ameri-
can Watch Company.”
But he wasn’t satisfied with the
book, which checks in at a compa-
rably scant 272 pages. He began to
fixate on the things he left out of
the history, and friends noticed.
Television producer Greg Hart
recalled visiting Friedberg’s home
after the book’s release.
“I saw all of his material from
the first book — he had boxes and
boxes of things,” Hart said. “He
said, ‘Look at all the stuff that
never made it into my book. It’sbeen driving me crazy.’ I don’t
think he could’ve died a happy
man unless he told this story.”
So Friedberg started anew in- By then, he was nearly two
decades into his career as general
counsel at Toshiba America Medi-
cal Systems. Eventually, Friedberg
served as chairman of that com-
pany and two related ones head-
quartered in Chicago and in Edin-
burgh, Scotland. Regular travel to
those locales — he visited Edin-
burgh at least once a month for
eight years — afforded an opportu-
nity to write. He always traveled
with a hard copy of a chapter in
progress.
“I never watched movies, but I
would sip wine and work on the
book,” he said. “I wasn’t good at
sleeping on planes anyways.”
Friedberg worked his way
through a trove of material: corpo-
rate minutes, patent applications,
old advertisements and more.
But his meticulous approach
could be a burden.
“There were times where he
said, ‘How am I ever going to get
this done?’” Hart said. “He took on
a project that was never at-
tempted in the history of the
brand. I said, ‘Fred, how does a
mouse eat an elephant? One bite
at a time.’”
“The Illinois Watch & Its Ham-
ilton Years” was released by Schif-
fer Publishing in May 2018. The
$295 five-volume set is both sump-
tuous and encyclopedic, its in-
depth history of the brand supple-
mented by a guide featuring every
wristwatch model made by the
company and essays from collec-
tors, among other features. Vol-
ume Five even includes a 750-
question quiz, and Friedberg
writes that readers can email him
if they “get stuck on any question.”
Schiffer Publishing printed
around 1,000 copies, and about 500
have been sold so far. Among the
buyers have been a handful of
notable institutions and organiza-
tions: The Abraham Lincoln Presi-
dential Library and Museum, the
Abraham Lincoln Research Li-
brary and the National Assn. of
Watch and Clock Collectors.That’s a point of pride for
Friedberg, and the book set also
has won praise from a notable
group: people in the family tree of
Bunn, the company’s co-founder.
“We admire him tremen-
dously,” said Andrew Taylor Call, a
Bunn great-great-great grand-
nephew. “I would say in absolute
faith that Fredric Friedberg knows
more about the Illinois Watch Co.
than anyone alive today.”b
The decades were laid out in
front of Friedberg on the kitchen
table of his Irvine home.
More than 200 wristwatches in
all, they told the story of 30-plus
years spent buying, selling, cata-
loging, researching, writing and
publishing.
Friedberg delighted in canvass-
ing the array, which he keeps at a
bank and brought home for a
recent interview. He bobbed
around the table as his wife, Joy,
cooked vegan hamburgers she
insisted Times journalists try
(verdict: surprisingly meaty).
While Friedberg fussed over the
watches, Joy said she has long
known that he would “dedicate
himself to whatever he gets into.”
But five volumes?
“I don’t think I could’ve seen
that far,” she said.
Still, she was reluctant to call
her husband’s work an obsession.
“Maybe to him it’s an obses-
sion,” she said. “To me, it’s like —
there are people who have hobbies
and people who have avocations.
This is an avocation.”
The table glittered and flared
as sunlight strafed it through the
kitchen windows. Every so often,
Friedberg would snatch up a rare
piece to explain its provenance.
One of them was a 1928 Illinois
Consul given by inmates of Michi-
gan’s Marquette Branch Prison to
the prison doctor on the occasion
of his retirement. The solid white
gold watch, which has been
dubbed the “Convict Consul,” may
have been a gift from imprisoned
members of the Purple Gang, an
infamous group that terrorized
Detroit, Friedberg said.
Among the assemblage was the
one that started it all: the Girard-
Perregaux he bought in 1988. A
paper label affixed to it read “#1.”
Friedberg has numbered all the
watches that have passed through
his hands. No. 3,729, No. 3,810 and
No. 4,779 gleamed alongside doz-
ens of others.
There were gaps in the num-
bers, owing to those he has relin-
quished, some as part of an on-
going unburdening.
Friedberg began winnowing his
collection a few years ago. After his
sons made clear they were not
interested in his watches, he
moved to sell off the bulk of them.
His new book set has made it
easier.
“If I want to see them I can go
open the book,” he said. “I don’t
have to possess them. I can’t be
selfish. I want it to go into the
hands of someone who will appre-
ciate it.”
But McDowell doubted Fried-
berg will ever really stop collecting.
“No, I don’t believe it — he’s just
giving you a bit of Shinola there,”
said McDowell, laughing.
“Of course, he’s satisfied at
having completed a task that took
five times longer than he thought
it would. But I happen to know
there is a watch that he’s trying to
get.”
When pressed, Friedberg con-
ceded he isn’t quite done. When
asked about his next purchase, he
wouldn’t say much, but he knows
one thing: it’ll be No. 4,989.Collector’s work was time well spent
FREDRIC FRIEDBERG and his watches at his Irvine home. The collection represents 30-plus years of buying and researching.Photographs byAllen J. SchabenLos Angeles Times[Watches,from A1]
THE ILLINOIS WATCH Co.’s assembly-line approach, especially when compared to the
hand-made Swiss pieces of the time, is seen by one expert as an example of American ingenuity.‘There were times where he
said, “How am I ever going
to get this done?” He took
on a project that was never
attempted in the history of
the brand.’
—GREGHART,
watch collector, on Fredric Friedberg’s struggle to complete his opusFRIEDBERG with a prized watch. The Illinois Watch Co.’s
elegant Art Deco designs were what first captivated him.