In 1971 I acquired a cuckoo clock. It actually worked and kept pretty good time, so I put in on the wall and every hour it would announce the time with a little bird coming out of the swinging door and going cuckoo.
It was powered by a falling weight on a chain, so every so often you had to run the weight (that looked like a long pine cone) up to the top so gravity could pull it downward again and keep the gears turning.
After a while I just forgot about winding it, but left it on the wall anyway. Here is a picture of it:
The clock and the cuckoo
Not long afterwards, I was listening to a New Orleans radio station, one that used the sound of a cuckoo clock as a sound effect to introduce various segments or to punch up a particular joke being told. The radio station announced that it needed to record a new cuckoo clock sound effect, and it was now taking "auditions" from area cuckoo clock owners.
I called the station, got on the air, and told them I had a slightly-malfunctioning cuckoo clock I would like to audition. The disc jockey asked me what was wrong with it, and I told him that when it strikes the hour, it doesn't sound the first part of the cuckoo, the "kook," but it did sound the second sound, the "oou." In other words, instead of going "cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo" at the top of the hour, it just went "oou, oou oou."
The disc jockey declined to make a recording of my clock. He said he thought he knew where the kook was.
I soon took the clock down off the wall, since it was getting embarrassing to have friends over and all of a sudden the cuckoo clock going "oou, oou, oou."
