Nodding a greeting to those on the way to an early class, Norma Fitzwater was already on her rounds. Bent over her grocery cart, she pushed through the alleys, stopping at refuse bins, sorting through student trash to scavenge her treasures. It’s a daily ritual, and more. It’s a labor of love that pays off in her retirement years.

It’s the way she bought her refrigerator for $735 and her television for $528 and her prized grandfather clock at $2,400.

Norma Fitzwater is known lovingly as the grandma of the ghetto in the University of Dayton neighborhood where she lives, and she marks the precious commodity of time in her 74th year with the help of 54 clocks and 13 wristwatches.

Many were retrieved from dumpsters in the UD ghetto, as the area of off-campus housing catering mostly to students is known. When she found the timepieces, all they needed was batteries. They all work now. The Elvis clock that announces “Elvis lives on” was a birthday present last April. But most of the clocks – the Budweiser clock, the Monopoly clock, and the square blue clock that reads “For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness” – are relics of her rounds.

Along with the stuffed animals, ceramic figurines, and other colorful knickknacks that fill shelves in her clean and orderly home, the clocks are testimony to one woman’s self-satisfying lifestyle.

“Don’t really know why or how I came to like the clocks,” she said, sipping coffee at her kitchen table, taking a rest after her rounds. “When I go to a department store, I always wind up looking at clocks.

“With all these clocks,” she said, laughing and waving a hand at her collection, “I am never late. But it takes a whole day to set them back this weekend. Grrr! I hate this time of year.”

When Fitzwater moved into the white frame, two-story, five-room home on Lowes Street 38 years ago, she was just five blocks from NCR, where she ran a drill press in the shop for 21 years. Her neighbors then were quiet, mostly middle-aged folks, and many of them also worked at NCR.

Retired now, divorced for many years and living alone, she says she enjoys the new variety of neighbors that arrived with the population explosion at the university more than two decades ago.

The house to the west of her has six male students, the house at the east has four. Across the street is a fraternity house.