The Arkansas Factory That Helped Keep America on Time

                There was a time when just about every household in America had a Timex watch somewhere in the house. They were simple, affordable, and about as dependable as anything you could buy. As the old slogan promised, they could "take a licking and keep on ticking."

                What many Arkansans may not realize is that for more than fifty years, many of those famous watches began their journey in Little Rock (Pulaski County).

                Long before smartphones put clocks in our pockets, Timex operated one of the largest manufacturing plants in Arkansas. For thousands of families across central Arkansas, it was more than just a factory. It was where careers began, friendships were formed, and paychecks put food on the table.

                In July 1945, the United States Time Corporation, later known simply as Timex, opened its first Arkansas operation in downtown Little Rock. The company occupied the upper floor of the old Wrape Building at Capitol Avenue and Center Street, where workers assembled Ingersoll alarm clocks as America shifted from wartime production back to peacetime industry. Business grew quickly.

                By 1947, the company had relocated to a much larger facility on Crisp Drive, near what is now Clinton National Airport. It represented a different era in Arkansas history, a time when manufacturing plants provided steady work for thousands of families across the state.

                By the 1950s, Timex had become one of the best-known brands in America. Its television commercials became legendary. Timex watches were strapped to boat motors, frozen in blocks of ice, dropped, shaken, and subjected to all kinds of punishment, all to prove they could survive just about anything.

                But behind those famous advertisements were thousands of Arkansas workers quietly building the parts that made those watches possible.

                For many families, the Timex plant was more than a place to work. I know because my own family was one of them.

                When my mother graduated from high school in 1960, she left Bald Knob (White County) and moved to Little Rock, where she went to work for U.S. Time. Like so many young people starting out, she was beginning a new chapter in a new city with the future wide open in front of her.

                Over the years, she often talked about the friendships she made there. Long shifts and assembly lines have a way of bringing people together, and many of those friendships are still going strong more than sixty years later.

                One of her supervisors was a man named Darrell Barnett. He and his wife, Phyllis, became close family friends, and in time, I would be named after him.

                For decades, the Little Rock factory remained one of Timex's most important facilities. At its peak, thousands of Arkansans walked through its doors every day. Those jobs helped pay mortgages, raise families, and support communities throughout central Arkansas.

                As the years passed, production expanded beyond watches to include cameras, electronic components, and other consumer products.

                But like so many American manufacturing stories, change eventually came.

                During the 1980s and 1990s, overseas competition reshaped the industry, and production gradually moved to places where labor costs were lower. Even so, the Little Rock plant remained remarkably productive.

                When the closure was announced in 2001, Arkansas workers were still producing watch cases and components for approximately twenty-two million watches each year, accounting for roughly eighty percent of Timex's worldwide production. Final assembly happened elsewhere, but in many ways the process of making time itself still started in Arkansas.

                When the factory closed in June 2001, it marked the end of much more than a business. For many people, it felt like the closing of an important chapter in Arkansas history, one measured in lunch breaks, shift whistles, friendships, and decades of honest work.

                Timex continued operating a distribution and service center in North Little Rock (Pulaski County) for several more years, but that facility also closed in 2017, bringing the company's Natural State story to an end.

                Today, it is easy to drive past the old factory without giving it a second thought. But for those who remember, the building still means something.

                It was where people met lifelong friends, started careers, raised families, and spent their working lives.

                And for some families, including mine, it remains something even more personal.

                It was where a young woman from Bald Knob started her first job in a new city, where friendships were formed that never faded, and where a supervisor named Darrell Barnett became part of our family's story in a way that continues to this day.