Time has run out for one of the most famous clocks in the city.

In this day and age, few have seen the clock and fewer know the story behind it.

For decades, it was a grand and remarkably precise timepiece that dutifully kept time atop The Oregonian clock tower in downtown Portland. It was made more than a century ago by the E. Howard Watch & Clock Co., an elite clockmaker in Boston.

The newspaper’s owners paid $1,845 for the clock, known as the No. 4 Striker. It was designed to strike a bell on the hour, but the model installed in The Oregonian building was silent.

A dozen of its kind were produced; only four remain, including the one in Portland. The others are in still running in towers in New York City, Buffalo, New York, and Lawrence, Massachusetts.

The No. 4 Striker was destined for the trash heap when The Oregonian building was demolished in 1950, but an engineer paid $300 for the clock and used it as a teaching tool at Oregon State University.

By the late 1950s, the clock made its way to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, where it remained ever since.

Here’s where its story may come to an end.

Young people raised on smartphones don’t quite know what to make of the No. 4 Striker with its mass of brass gears and jigsaw puzzle of intricate parts. To them, it looks like a lot of effort just to keep track of the time.

That’s not to say visitors to OMSI’s Turbine Hall didn’t stop to check it out. They just didn’t linger.

As one museum staffer put it, the No. 4 striker was cool but not quite a “crowd pleaser.”

“I have never seen people clustered around it or people drawn to it like they would be a dinosaur skeleton,” said John Farmer, an OMSI spokesman.

When the museum staff decided the Turbine Room was ready for a fresh look with more hands-on exhibits, their plans didn’t include the No. 4 Striker.

So last month it came down.

The museum called in a local group of clock and watch enthusiasts to help prepare it for storage. It will then go into a crate and sit in storage unless another venue wants it. Kerry Tymchuk, the executive director of the Oregon Historical Society, on Tuesday said he would explore whether the clock could go on display at the society’s museum.

The prospect of the No. 4 Striker vanishing from public view is a sad development for people like Bill Butcher, a retired hospital pharmacist from Tigard who has carefully documented the rare clock’s history.

Butcher is one of the clock experts who have volunteered to decommission the timepiece.

He worries something is lost without the No. 4 Striker on display. Portlanders won’t learn how the clock once kept time atop what was once the city’s tallest building and how in the early 20th century people set their own watches by glancing up at the clock as they bustled along Southwest Alder Street and 6th Avenue.

“The Oregonian newspaper and its building were iconic in its day,” he said. “It’s part of the history of Portland.”

Added Butcher: “I just hate to see a timepiece like that, that’s iconic, go out of view and into storage.”

-- Noelle Crombie

ncrombie@oregonian.com

503-276-7184

@noellecrombie

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