Bill Lohmann: A watch with a tale to tell

The old watch keeps good time and a great story.

"It keeps time very well, actually," said Jon Mitchell, in a phone interview from Chicago, about the gold pocket watch. "Still works great." 

Mitchell, 23, received the gold watch as a gift at Christmas from his grandfather, Stuart K. Beal, who had received it almost 50 years ago as a gift from his father, who won it as a prize 50 years before that when he was a boy growing up in Hanover County.

Stuart Beal — no middle initial — was 12 years old when he competed in a 1913 contest selling subscriptions to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Young Stuart finished third in his district, winning a $30 gold watch. The first-place winner won a pony. A pony! The prize for second place was a bicycle.

As Stuart K. Beal, the son, wrote in a letter received by The Times-Dispatch last week, "I note that the pony is long dead, the bicycle has probably rusted away, but the watch is still ticking 99 years later."

Beal wrote the letter, hoping to find a copy of the 1913 article announcing the winners that he might pass along to his grandson so he knew the full story of the watch. Beal knew the story about the contest and the subscriptions and the date when the article appeared — April 16, 1913 — because his father wrote it on a note he gave him along with the watch, but he knew little else.

Our newsroom researcher, Heather Moon, dug into the microfilm of our library and found that day's paper, but it wasn't just an article. News of the contest filled an entire page. And what a contest it was!

Prizes given away — and these clearly went to adults, too — included 11 cars, diamond rings, Victrolas, kitchen cabinets and trips, in addition to the aforementioned ponies, bicycles and gold watches. Total value of all the prizes: $20,000, which clearly went a bit further in those days.

We may have inadvertently stumbled upon the very thing to turn around the newspaper industry: free ponies with every paid subscription!

But back to the Beals.

Stuart K. Beal remains amazed his father was able to sell enough subscriptions to win anything, simply because he lived on a farm in the Old Church area of Hanover, and neighbors were not exactly right around the corner.

"He must have ridden a horse," said Beal, who lives in Annandale. "They didn't have a car or anything. I remember him talking about how it was an all-day trip to go to Richmond."

Beal's father was one of 12 children. None wanted to be farmers, so the farm that had been in the family since the 1760s was sold in the 1920s. Beal's father took a job with a gas company in New York, which is where Beal was born. The family moved to Richmond in the late 1940s when Beal's father became head of the city's gas department.

Beal went on to school at Virginia Tech, graduating in 1954. He earned his master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1963, the occasion that prompted his father to present him with the watch, which had been engraved with a Latin phrase meaning, roughly, "Completed work is pleasant."

The watch is a Jahnke, a prominent Richmond jeweler and watchmaker in the early part of the 20th century.

"It's a very nice watch," said Mitchell, who is now the proud owner of it. "A fantastic keepsake."

Beal gave the watch to his grandson when he saw him over the holidays, in advance of Mitchell completing his graduate degree on his way to becoming a paleontologist. ("He's wanted to be a paleontologist since he was 4 years old," Beal said. "He didn't know the word 'paleontologist' when he was 4, but he knew he wanted to work with dinosaurs.")

"Theoretically, I should have waited until he graduates, but I thought I better do it now," Beal said with a laugh. "I'll be 80 next year, and I thought I better give it to him, just in case."

Mitchell is working on his doctorate in evolutionary ecology and paleobiology at the University of Chicago. He's in the second year of a program that usually takes five years, so it'll be a while before he receives his diploma. But the watch is safely in hand.

"I'm hesitant to carry it around in my pocket, so I keep it at my desk in my office," Mitchell said. "But If I ever need to look fancy …"

He added with a laugh, "You've got to take a man with a pocket watch seriously, right?"