'We're a rarity': Why Watertown watchmaker Tim Makepeace remains part of a special breed

The first thing watch enthusiasts notice are wrists. When the person you are talking to happens to be wearing a vintage, gem mint Rolex President Day-Date you take notice.

To provide context, the Rolex President is the monetary equivalent to wearing a new car on your wrist. This is exactly what was on Tim Makepeace's wrist, which he paired with a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts.

Makepeace, 64, is a watchmaker whose career is slowly being phased out by modern technology, like the infiltration of smart phones and smart watches in lieu of restoring and maintaining vintage watches.

Makepeace surmises there is only one other Certified Master Watchmaker left in South Dakota.

A watchmaker is a catch-all term for those who design, engineer and develop watches. The second is an artisan who specializes in watch repair. Makepeace is the latter. Most of the time, due to quartz, or battery powered watches, Makepeace finds himself mostly changing batteries, because automatic and hand-wound pieces are relegated to vintage and retro watches.

Makepeace's foray into watchmaking started early, when he began sweeping floors at a jewelry store. His life was at an impasse when he became old enough to vote.

"The jewelry store indicated that if I went to school in watch repair, jewelry repair, they would be happy to hire me," Makepeace said. "At that time a lot of people were going to college or Vietnam, and I really didn't want to do either."

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The Watertown native enrolled in a specialty school in Quincy, Ill., to learn the trade of watchmaking. There were few schools which taught watchmaking then and there are even fewer now. Brew Watch Co. founder Jonathon Ferrer, 29, who hails from from New Jersey studied the craft in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

"There's not many people, even at that time who were going into training," Makepeace said. "There were a lot of Vietnam veterans because they had a lot of miscellaneous injuries. They looked for a job where they could sit at a desk and fix stuff."

Makepeace uses the analogy of old cars, like Model-T's to describe watchmaking in the past. Though modern entry level watches have a quartz movement, expensive brands and vintage brands have an automatic movement or hand wound movement.

Automatic watch movements use a rotor that oscillates within the watch. The rotor transfers in energy which winds a mainspring, propelling the hands of the watch. High end watches such as Rolex, Patek and Tag Heuer still use this methodology, but with all of the moving parts they require the maintenance of someone with specialized skills.

Makepeace sees fewer and fewer of these watches, he said.

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Makepeace Jewelry was birthed in 1982, and in is one of the few independently owned jewelry stores left in South Dakota. It's currently at 27 E Kemp Ave.

"The old time jewelry store, the mom-and-pop's stores are definitely a dinosaur," Makepeace said. "They just don't exist anymore. So we're a rarity."

"Jewelry stores used to have watch repairmen and clock repairmen," Makepeace said. "And that's days gone by, because if you research, there's just not people getting into the business, it's not done anymore. It's easier to make a living doing other things."

30 years ago Makepeace would get watches to work on, but said that the modern person uses their phone.

"The jeweler may appreciate someone who wears a watch. It's just kind of classy." Makepeace said.