Don't miss the next drop
Ludington, Michigan sits on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, a long way from Saint-Imier in every sense that matters. From 1905 until the early 1980s the town was home to the Star Watch Case Company, founded in Elgin, Illinois in 1897 and moved north to build cases for much of the American trade: Elgin, Hamilton, Gruen, Waltham, Bulova. And for Longines.
This vintage Longines automatic is cased in one of them, and the reason is customs arithmetic. American duty treated a watch movement and a watch case as two separate imports, so the Swiss houses shipped movements, dials and hands across the Atlantic and had the cases fitted on this side. Lift the back off and the whole arrangement is stamped inside: the New York distributor, the Michigan casemaker, the gold content, the reference number. On the outside of that same back, beside the gold filled mark, Star signed its work with a small star.
The same arithmetic left a second mark. Across the movement, beneath the jewel count, Longines stamped UNADJUSTED. It reads like a confession and it is nothing of the sort. The Tariff Act of 1930 required every watch movement entering the United States to be indelibly marked with its country of origin, its importer, its jewel count, and whether it had been adjusted. Duty scaled with those answers, which is why so many American-sold Swiss movements of the period stopped at seventeen jewels and declared themselves unadjusted.
What no tariff schedule asked Longines to declare is the part we care about. The 19AS inside this vintage Longines automatic is a full-rotor caliber, its winding weight traveling the complete circle rather than knocking between buffers, a path Longines had committed to since 1945 while Omega, Universal Genève and Movado were all still building bumpers. We read its serial to 1956. Longines thought well enough of the caliber to send it to 150 meters a few years later in the Nautilus Skin Diver, their first dive watch. The dial it drives is the reason to look twice. Two fine lines cross at dead center, a crosshair, and the effect is less decoration than measurement: the visual grammar of the instrument panel brought onto a dress watch.
The case runs 35mm across and 43mm lug to lug in 10k gold filled, round, with faceted lugs that flare wide before dropping hard to the strap. Applied gold numerals hold the even hours and faceted markers the odd ones, with gold dauphine hands sweeping over a fine printed minute track. Seventy years have freckled the dial, warm copper blooming at the hour positions and a darker halo where the hands stack at the center. None of it has been retouched. The back has collected the scratched marks and numbers of the watchmakers who opened it across the decades, which is its own kind of service record.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, it arrives on a blue leather strap. A movement from Saint-Imier, a case from Lake Michigan, and a tariff schedule for a matchmaker. Not the romance anyone put in the advertising, and a better story for it.
