As promised in my previous post, here is an introduction to our 1967 Sexton sunflower clock.
We have a bit of an obsession with sunflowers around here. During the year, our farm is sprinkled with a wide variety of heirloom sunflowers, so when I saw this Sexton Sunflower clock paired with the Sears Merry Mushroom clock featured in the previous post, we of course had to have it.
I got the clock for my mother, who is the world’s biggest sunflower fanatic. She named this cheery clock Sunny Sunflower in honor of our beloved cockatiel, Sunny.
While Sunny’s personality wasn’t exactly cheery, her quirkiness always cheered us up, she loved sunflower seeds, and her coloration was very similar to this clock’s.
Speaking of coloration, the only strange thing about this particular Sexton sunflower clock is the color of the dial numbers. All the others I’ve so far seen have light brown numbers whereas the numbers on ours are quite dark.
It is normal to see different number colors on some of the ’70s porcelain clocks like the Arnell’s mushroom clock. Arnell’s sold molds rather than finished clocks, so the clocks’ coloration is highly variable, depending on the preferences of the individuals who made them.
It seems odd that Sexton would have released multiple dial colors the same year, so maybe a previous owner got creative and painted the numbers darker so that they were easier to read. If so, they did a lovely job of it and either way it’s simply a lovely clock.
On top of being adorable, the Sexton sunflower clock is a very sturdy clock. I’m always paranoid about making sure my vintage novelty clocks are securely mounted to the wall because many are ceramic or glass, which can easily shatter, or acrylic that can easily crack. But this Sexton sunflower clock is metal cast, and you could probably use it as a weapon in the case of a zombie apocalypse.
This particular clock came with a Quartz brand movement, which is not original to this Sexton model. Some of the available Sexton sunflower clocks have metal plug-in movements with gold hands, which from what little information I’ve found on this clock seems to have been the original movement.
There are also Sexton sunflower clocks floating around with a variety of other replacement battery-powered units. As mentioned in the Merry Mushroom post, the nice thing about these vintage novelty clocks is that it is usually very easy to switch out the movements should you get a vintage quartz clock that isn’t functioning.
But before you pull out a broken movement, it’s always a good idea to check if the movement is really broken. There are several minor issues that can make a perfectly fine quartz movement seem non-functional, as was the case when we first started up Sunny Sunflower.
In the next post, we’ll look closley at some potentional quartz clock second hand issues so that you can keep those clocks ticking!