It is a standalone former bank power-thru in the Transitown Plaza at Main Street and Transit Road in Clarence, in a automobile parking space close to a pizza parlor, shoe restore shop and nail salon. Not an awful lot larger than a complete bathroom, the shop boasts cuckoo clocks, table clocks, wristwatches, pocket watches, damaged watches harvested for elements and work benches that hold their equipment. Customers who need assist with their timepieces can walk in or use a force-thru window.
But the force-through isn’t always the handiest factor that makes the enterprise stand out like a vintage Patek Philippe timepiece. So does the tale in the back of that plaza kiosk and Brooke and Rosa Stanley, the couple who run it.
They very own a horse farm in Lockport. Brooke Stanley used to offer carriage rides at Canalside. They ran a pawn save for years in downtown Buffalo.
Oh, and this: Brooke Stanley was a paid FBI informant in a homicide-for-lease case. And each Stanleys had been accused of receiving stolen belongings at their pawn shop.
Both acknowledge beyond errors, however say they need to depart the beyond in the back of them. But they’re glad to talk about their lives collectively.
“I could tell you tales all day,” Brooke stated.
“About watches.”
Learning the exchange
Brooke Stanley, 58, stated he does not put on an eye, however he had on – one on either wrist – on a wet recent weekday to test that they kept accurate time.
“I simply usually understand what time it is. I even have thousands of watches. They’re everywhere,” Brooke stated. “I even have clocks – you can’t imagine the clocks we have.”
The Stanleys opened the shop approximately 16 years in the past and work facet-by means of-aspect, literally and figuratively. They were married for 29 years and have interaction within the kind of playful banter common among humans who have visible every other at their exceptional and their worst.
“That’s my first wife, Rosa,” Brooke quips.
“I by no means recognise a way to reply to that,” Rosa, 55, responded, “so I simply form of let it go over my head.”
Brooke, with Rosa becoming a member of him in 1992, commenced out in retail rings income earlier than shifting into repairs. Brooke offered the Perfect Time watch restore enterprise from its previous owner.
It takes years of training and on-the-process exercise to restore complex watch mechanisms and delicate pieces of jewelry.
“A lot of hours,” Rosa said.
