Steven Sukkau
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Winnipeg Sun
In a basement, somewhere between the scent of sawdust and the ticking of something handmade, a man named Roy Friesen lives on.
He made clocks. That was his thing. Not professionally, but in the truest, most maddeningly beautiful way: by hand, with soul. Roy’s clocks weren’t just timepieces. They were intricate, wooden love letters. Stories carved into pine and oak, whirring behind humble quartz movements you could buy at the hardware store. And more often than not, he gave them away.
Traci Nickel remembers her grandfather best through the things that still tick.
After Roy’s wife died in 1990, grief found him in the garage. Some men drink. Some run marathons. Roy started cutting tiny wooden moose. And RCMP officers. And steam trains. And 1,000-piece jigsaw mosaics that disguised themselves as clocks but weren’t they were memory machines, assembled with a surgeon’s patience and the affection of a man who believed in making something last longer than he would.
Each clock was different. Always.
He made one for a family reunion. One clock had backward numbers. Another had a Northwest Mounted Police officer on horseback. Yet another commemorated the Canada Trail south of Morden, where Roy lived and farmed into his 90s.
Nickel is looking for the clocks now. She’s collected eleven. But she knows there are more, dozens, maybe, and she’s hoping that someone, somewhere, will read this and say, “Wait. I remember that one. My aunt had it. It had a train on it. I think it’s in a box in the garage.”
She posted on Facebook:
“I am looking for clocks. A specific one for sure. My grandfather Roy Friesen handcrafted clocks… He made lots and gave them to friends of his or donated them.”
The comments started pouring in. “The one with the numbers backwards.” “The one with the Mountie.” “He made a moose one for my uncle.” It turns out Roy’s clocks are like Mennonite horcruxes, bits of soul scattered across the prairie.
Her husband found two at thrift shops: MCC and another somewhere else. One clock, likely now lost, made its way to the U.S., where it vanished after someone passed away. Nickel has tried reaching out. “I would have liked to have that one too,” she says, quietly.
Roy wasn’t warm in the way you might picture. He wasn’t a jolly clock elf. He was stoic. Old-school. Nickel remembers sitting at the table, nervous to tell him she was expecting a child out of wedlock. His response floored her.
“Well,” he said, “these things happen.”
It was his way of offering grace.
Roy lived to 94. He shoveled snow off outbuildings in winter, farmed in summer, built clocks in between. He didn’t go to town. “If he moved to town, he wouldn’t last long,” Nickel says.
His name’s still etched in the local dinosaur museum, if you look for it. He helped dig fossils once. Of course he did. Roy was the kind of man who preserved time in all its forms: geological, mechanical, familial.
Traci is still looking. Still hoping.
She’s not just collecting clocks. She’s trying to reassemble a memory.
And maybe that’s the point of these old things. You don’t really collect a clock. You collect the hands that made it, the reason it was made, and the silence it breaks each time it ticks again.
