Two items of memorabilia unearthed in the back of a drawer in one of the three desks I am, very slowly and painfully, clearing out and consolidating into one small one. Behind each is a touching bit of personal history and a larger lesson from sociocultural history (mostly from the early 20th-century United States, but also from Switzerland). The neutral descriptions of these two objects, devoid of both historical context and personal and sociocultural meanings:
the watch: a men’s pocket watch
the microscope: a 20X pocket microscope
A joint photo of these memorabilia:
(#1) The watch and the microscope
Historical context: the watch is from 1944 or 1945, in any case from my grandfather Melchior Arnold Zwicky’s (1879-1965) retirement from the Textile Machine Works in Wyomissing PA, and it came to me in his 1965 will; the microscope came to me by mail order from the Edmund Scientific Company (in Barrington NJ) in about 1950.
Details about the watch. I have it in the original box, labeled on the top:
Mr. Melchior Zwicky
714 N. Wyomissing Blvd.
Wyomissing, Pa.
and on the side, the identifying information:
Hamilton 921 WATT Spec. 14K Solid Gold: Watch No. H-4931, Case No. H66532
A premium, but not ultra-exclusive, watch of the time — both beautiful and mechanically well-designed. Of real value at the time; as a relic now, capable of fetching $100 to $200. Not that I would sell it; I want my grandchild Opal Armstrong Zwicky to have it, as a gift from their grandfather’s grandfather.
As you can see, it’s a Hamilton pocket watch. From Wikipedia:
Founded in 1892 as an American firm [located in Lancaster PA, not far from where I grew up], the Hamilton Watch Company ended American manufacture in 1969, shifting manufacturing operations to the Buren factory in Switzerland.
The watch came from the Textile Machine Works in Wyomissing (west of Reading PA), one of the three Wyomissing Industries of the time (the other two were the original, 1892, Berkshire Knitting Mills, premier manufacturer of women’s full-fashioned — seamless — hosiery; TMW then built the machines that did the knitting; and the Narrow Fabric Company added to the product line). My grandfather was recruited in 1903 from Europe as a trained mechanic (aka engineer), to maintain and improve the knitting machines, by Berkshire’s German founders Henry Thun and Ferdinand Janssen, who also created Wyomissing PA as a planned community, plus a series of workers’ communities, including West Lawn, where I mostly grew up, and Berkshire Heights (within the boundaries of Wyomissing), where my father mostly grew up.
The watch in its family context. Melchior Arnold Zwicky and Bertha Waelti, both from Canton Glarus in Switzerland, arrived together in this country, more or less immediately went from Ellis Island to New Jersey, where they married and went on to Wyomissing, where, I think, they moved into an apartment within sight of the TMW gates, and commenced to have five children: Frederick 1904, Bertha 1906, Walter 1909, Lillian 1911, and Arnold Melchior 1914. At some point they moved to this house in Berkshire Heights:
(#2) 714 N. Wyomissing Blvd. as it is now, not much changed from a hundred years ago — 4 bedrooms, 1½ baths; when my grandfather retired from TMW, my aunt Lillian and her husband Al Coleman took this house; my grandfather then bought the West Lawn house (in #3 below) and passed it on to my father, as my parents were moving back to the Reading area from Allentown, and he then bought a small farm in Sinking Spring (the next town west of West Lawn), which had what I thought of, for all of my childhood, as my grandparents’ house — until, eventually, my grandmother died, the farm got to be too much for my grandfather to handle, and he moved back into 714 N. Wyomissing Blvd., where, around my age now, he descended into dementia, under my Aunt Lillian’s care, until he died there
I’m not up to tracking all the family real estate arrangements during those years, but here’s the West Lawn house, where I lived with my parents through middle school:
(#3) 2124 Highland St. as it is now, not much changed from the house in the 1940s; as an astounding retirement project, my grandfather built us a really fine two-car garage out by the alley in back — entirely by his own hands, except for having the concrete floor poured by professionals (the garage took an entire summer, but it had the advantage of causing my granddad to be around for weeks on end to talk to)
Here I pause, because the rest of this has gotten longer than I can handle today. Stay tuned for more on the watch and the microscope.
August 16, 2025 at 6:57 am |
Does the watch still run? If so, does it keep good time?
August 16, 2025 at 8:07 am |
It was fine when it came to me in Urbana, where I took up my first professorial post (while sharing infant care; it was a difficult time). Then it got moved with other stuff to Columbus and then to Palo Alto, where I rediscovered it this week. It ‘s now (still in the original presentation box) in the hands of Melchior Zwicky’s grandson’s grandchild. We can hope for a report.