They had fought in Italy and Normandy and North Africa and left pieces of themselves behind. At war’s end, few employers would touch them. So one by one, the men made their way to New York — to a red-brick schoolhouse in Woodside, Queens, built expressly for them — to become watchmakers.
For more than half a century after it opened in 1945, the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking trained disabled veterans in the horologist’s painstaking art. The very idea of rehabilitating the severely wounded was just entering the national discourse then; in wars past, such men often languished in hospitals to the ends of their lives.
The Bulova school, considered a model of its kind, was a noteworthy example of industry playing a crucial role in veterans’ rehabilitation. It became the basis for similar programs throughout the United States and around the world.
“A man does not have to be an athlete to repair watches,” Stanley Simon, one of the school’s founders, told The New York Times in 1946.
Mr. Simon, a former Bulova executive who was among the last living people to have been intimately involved in the school’s creation, died on Aug. 5 at 93.
His death, in Manhattan, was of pneumonia, his sister, Hope Simon Miller, said. Mr. Simon had homes in Manhattan and Newtown, Conn.
The school was the brainchild of Arde Bulova, then the president of the Bulova Watch Company. Conceived near the end of World War II, it was named for his father, Joseph, who had founded the company in New York in 1875.
Mr. Simon, Bulova’s industrial relations director, shepherded the school into being. Long before the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 made such amenities familiar, he oversaw the construction of a building specifically tailored to the needs of disabled people.
A handsome neo-Georgian structure designed by the Boston architectural firm Perry, Shaw & Hepburn, the Bulova school was on 62nd Street in Woodside. It had ramps and wide doorways to accommodate wheelchairs, and cork floors to give traction to crutches, among other features. In the lobby, murals depicted the history of timekeeping.
The school charged no tuition in its early years; the craft it taught could be performed sitting down and, most important, rendered its students fully employable.
Within months of its opening, jewelers around the country had pledged more than 1,400 jobs to Bulova school graduates.
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