#In a timely fashion free#

(Bud) Willmot, the chairman of the Molson Company Limited, a brewing corporation with a local workforce topping 800. Ten years later, as Winnipeg celebrated its 100th anniversary, the city got its clock back, and it didnвЂ™t pay a cent. Work on the new civic centre began in 1962, and it officially opened in October 1964. 'It was, in effect, the final straw.'ДЄ standup photo of the clock being installed which appeared on the front page of the Sept. 'At the end of May 1961, Council Chambers on the second floor of City Hall were closed as a result of an architectвЂ™s assessment that the clock tower was structurally unsound,' a city report says. The former city hall had a four-sided clock, which hastened the end of the Gingerbread era. When the city built its new civic complex to replace the 'Gingerbread' City Hall - a grand Victorian structure built in 1896 - there was no timepiece included. Every timepiece needs maintenance and a watchful eye. He can even look inside, where he sometimes has to rid the mechanism of dead gnats and dragonflies. He can see the patina: the yellowing panels, a football-sized smudge on the south face from an oil leak. He also gets up close to the clock, which has quietly ticked above King Street since 1974. (Bud) Willmot, chairman of the Molson Company Limited. The clock that sits atop whatвЂ™s now the Susan A.

#In a timely fashion free#

Photos by MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS He can see the way Main Street curves in a way nobody on the ground ever could. He can spot the ornate domes of the historic North End churches. From the top of the Thompson Building, he is at eye level with the cornices of the Exchange DistrictвЂ™s oldest buildings. But working with the clock is a special privilege that comes with a vantage few are ever afforded.

In the winter, the arms tend to take their time to go around the face.ДЄs a City of Winnipeg electrician, Pereira gets the chance to tinker with the wires in any of 1,600 buildings on a given day. It takes about 10 minutes for the arms to revolve one hour, depending on the wind and the temperature. Inside is a control panel, on which is a switch Pereira flips to speed up the arms of the 3.6-metre-wide, 3.6-metre-tall, 25-cm-deep timepiece. To set the clock, Pereira sidles carefully across the icy roof, where he opens up a metal panel on the clockвЂ™s south-facing side. 'If that clock is not set and Mayor (Bowman) sees it, we will hear about it.' 'IвЂ™m a very punctual person,' he says, wearing his work watch, a military-green Timex Combat Commander, which he says is one of the thinnest and lightest watches on the market. When he got to work Monday, the clocks read six when they should have read seven, and to someone who respects precision as much as Pereira, that was an issue that needed to be fixed as quickly as possible. Mike Pereira, general electrician with the City of Winnipeg, heads up to the rooftop to access city hallвЂ™s clock, which was lagging by one hour Monday morning. 'I would not mind going in on Sunday,' he says. If the 57-year-old electrician had his way, heвЂ™d have been been up there the day before. The task of saving the daylight this year fell to Pereira. The two-sided clock on the roof was an hour behind, because the day before, daylight time (often called daylight saving time) officially began. There, he put on his gloves, shimmied up a ladder, and pushed open the hatch to the rooftop, where he belatedly took the City of Winnipeg out of the past and into the present.

He opened a door on the seventh floor before climbing up a sunny flight to the eighth tier. Thompson Building - the cityвЂ™s administrative building - wearing a white hard hat. The city electrician went up the elevator from the main floor of the Susan A. At 7:40 a.m., on the second Monday in March, Mike Pereira punched the clock at city hall.