They're almost all grandfathers making grandfather clocks in an electronic age, at the Kuempel Chime Clock Works and Studio Inc., an Excelsior, Minn., firm where the average employee age is 68. Since 1916 the firm has sought out and hired older workers, nearly all retired, to handcraft their timepieces.
Employees have their own reasons for working here.
He took to craft clocks 20 years ago after retiring as a dairy farmer. The shop, in a village of 2,400 on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, is one of just a handful of U.S. companies still crafting grandfather clocks. But it has another distinction. Virtually all the grandfather-clock makers are grandfathers, with an average age of 69. Mr. Barnard occasionally drops clock weights into colleagues' coat pockets.