Joseph A. Dabbah, a well-known former Baltimore watchmaker who kept his customers' wristwatches, pocket watches and decorative clocks on time and ticking for nearly half a century, died July 18 in his sleep at his home in Delray Beach, Fla.
He was 88.
Mr. Dabbah, who had lived for more than 30 years in the Milbrook neighborhood near Pikesville, was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt.
"He was 15 when his father died, and suddenly he was the man of the house. He was the oldest and had to help his mother with the other children," said his daughter, Claudette Jacobs, a registered nurse-educator at Howard County General Hospital who lives in Dayton.
After graduating from a trade school in Cairo where he had studied watchmaking, he began working as a watchmaker during the late 1930s, when the British still occupied and controlled Egypt.
In 1939, Mr. Dabbah read an ad in a Cairo newspaper that said the British army was in need of watch and instrument repairmen to work on flight and tank instruments, and he took the job.
He recalled in a 1996 interview with The Baltimore Sun the difficulties of the World War II years when German forces invaded North Africa.
"We used to have to evacuate the shop when the German planes came over and bombed," he said. "But we were safe. They were not even accurate at putting their bombs down."
Mr. Dabbah continued working in Cairo until 1957, when he moved to Paris and took a job at Chartier & Marcus, a clock manufacturer.
A nonprofit group arranged for Mr. Dabbah, his wife and infant daughter to move to Baltimore in 1959.
Mr. Dabbah, who arrived with $300 he had carefully secreted in a tube of toothpaste, settled in Pikesville with his family.
"I didn't know anyone in Baltimore, so I didn't know who to trust," he explained in the newspaper interview. "I brought my family over here, and I'm glad I did. It's a blessed country, it really is."
He went to work repairing watches for Baltimore jewelers, and then a year later opened EXACTIME Watch and Clock Repair in the Jeweler's Building at Calvert and Lombard streets.
His fourth-floor workshop was crammed with file cabinets filled with springs, escutcheons, jewels, gears, hands and other essential parts. From the walls in a back storage room hung repaired clocks or those awaiting reactivation from Mr. Dabbah's skilled hands.
Shelves were jammed with mantel clocks, nautical clocks, desk clocks and even models of esoteric clocks. There was no cash register.
For the next 39 years in this atmosphere of hooting cuckoo clocks, striking regulators and the steady yet ponderously soft tick-tock-tick-tock works from a tall case clock, Mr. Dabbah did his work fixing vintage and new timepieces.
They included such legendary pocket watches as a customer's Illinois Bun Special, once the preferred watch of railroaders, and a Seth Thomas Regulator, not to mention a treasured Omega wristwatch.
Mr. Dabbah said at the time of the interview that he had a number of clocks he had repaired waiting for their owners to reclaim them.
"I call them and call them, and now they are no longer at the numbers I have," he said in the 1996 article. Rather than sell or dispose of the clocks, Mr. Dabbah kept them in case the day came when an owner might remember and return to his shop.
"People may forget watches, but they don't forget clocks," Mr. Dabbah said. "A clock can be handed down through generations, and people have memories of the clocks and their parents and families growing up. It can be a sentimental thing."
"He was a man who marched to his own beat," said R. Mark Mitchell, a noted certified Baltimore master clockmaker.
"I worked for him for a year after I graduated in 1977 from Bowman Technical School, a Lancaster, Pa., watch-making and engraving school," said Mr. Mitchell. "And thanks to him, I opened my own business 32 years ago."
"It didn't matter to him what the clock cost," his daughter said. "It was the person he was interested in."
Mr. Dabbah was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease about a decade ago and since 2002 had lived in Delray Beach.
Ms. Jacobs said that in the last few days before his death, relatives had removed his favorite Rolex from his wrist, thinking it would make him a bit more comfortable.
"He wanted it back on, and despite the Alzheimer's, he could tell time to the end," she said.
Services were held Wednesday in Delray Beach.
Also surviving are his wife of 53 years, the former Rachel Lichaa; a son, Dr. Albert Dabbah of Boca Raton, Fla.; two brothers, Said Dabbah of Jerusalem and David Dabbah of Delray Beach; two sisters, Ester Tanani and Berlanta Dabbah, both of Israel; and four grandchildren.