Downey watchmakers are a story of survival

Garo at work inside his Downey store. Photo by Lorine Parks

“I can’t stay away.” Ten days ago, Garo the watch repairman reopened the door to his shop.

“My uncle, he learned this when he was a boy of 15, in Damascus. And he’s been doing it for 60 years,” said Rita, Garo’s young niece.

Garo the watchmaker was born in 1944 in Syria, where his grandparents had fled from the Armenian genocide. 

“That disaster must have been a hundred years ago,” I said. “1915,” said Rita. “Survivors don’t forget.”

Garo, who goes by his first name, drives here daily from Montebello and before the coronavirus, Rita, also born in Syria, came here from Tujunga. She is apprenticing in her new profession, a family business now being handed down from uncle to niece.  

Downeyites will remember another well-loved Armenian family in Downey, Harry and Sarah Garo. “We are all cousins,” says Garo.

“I learned watchmaking from watching my uncle,” Rita said. Garo, she said, knows all kinds of time pieces, including the big standing clocks with pendulums, not batteries. 

“He used to go to houses,” Rita said, “to wind them. But he’s getting older now, and doesn’t do it, so I can’t learn that. I have to see him work, to learn.  If you can’t see it, you can’t do it.”

I spoke to Rita back in early April. “My uncle used to have a booth in the Paramount Swap Meet,” said Rita. “He was busy there. But he thought he would like to be secure in a building, and lock up his wares at night and leave them there. So he came here.”

But about six months ago, at 1:45 am, Downey police responded to an early morning solo-vehicle crash in the 8000 block of Paramount Boulevard.

“Fiery Crash into Downey Strip Mall Leaves Driver, Passenger in Hospital” said the KTLA headline.  Witnesses said a red car was going at speeds up to 80 mph. The car was sent crashing through the watch store, where it landed on its side and caught on fire. Officers managed to rescue two men by cutting their seatbelts. 

Undaunted by broken windows and smoke damage, Garo moved his goods into an empty storefront next door to his shop, so the business could continue without closing for even a day. Surviving runs in the family.

Now rows of wristwatches, from elaborate chronograph sport watches to dainty lady’s wristlets, fill the glass cases.  On the walls hang intricate wall clocks with pendulums, some with their inner works visible, 

“We don’t have any really expensive watches,” Rita said. “No Rolexes, with diamonds and gold, we don’t carry those. People today are starting to wear watches again, all kinds, so business is steady.  People like to be able to say, ‘my father gave me this watch on my wrist.’” 

Downey is lucky to have a genuine watchmaker, who knows the mechanisms of timepieces, from big grandfather clocks that stand on the floor to pocket watches and the ones you wear on your wrist.

In spite of political persecution, a vehicle that crashed into his storefront, the coronavirus and now the threat of looting in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Garo’s door is open again and he stands behind the display counter filled with gleaming watch faces, welcoming new business.

Garo is located in a small strip mall on the southeast corner of Paramount and Telegraph Road where he practices his almost lost art, right here in Downey.