The Bell-Ringer

(entry for 6/12/2024)

What do you call a light-gray woolen suit that’s smeared with black and brown grime? Do you simply call it 'Dirty'? I suppose you could, but somehow that wouldn’t quite cover it, because it was going to have to go to the dry cleaner, and not be washed. (There was no such thing as a washable suit in those days.)  And there wasn’t a dry cleaner handy. Or any within thirty miles, for that matter. And it was my only suit.

 My first year at Laurelwood, 1955-56, my Junior year, I worked in the bakery. (My dad tried to get me a job in the powerhouse, and failed, for which I gave many prayers of thanks. I would have been a disaster there.) I both loved and hated the bakery. I loved the fact that I was learning a useful trade and that I was producing, or helping to produce, something tasty and healthful. What I hated was the foolish ways in which my fellow-workers acted. Particularly the way they didn’t take the work itself, or the products, seriously. (I remember in particular an indoor ‘football’ game, in which the football was a loaf of bread which I had baked. It didn’t survive even the first quarter of play. Pass plays were especially hard on it, and even though tackling was off limits in a touch game, it didn’t do all that well on running plays either.)

There was also the matter of my undeveloped muscles, and my small stature, when it came to lifting the bread-bowl, as we called the large aluminum nearly-spherical bowl that attached to the huge floor mixer. It weighed eighty pounds empty, and about one twenty when full of a batch of bread dough. (Up to 100 quarts, though we usually made far less than that.)

 

So, even though I had enjoyed some aspects of the work, I was relieved when at the end of the year I was offered what I thought of as a more important job. Effective the following year.

 

I was now (as a Senior) to be the guy who raised and lowered the flag each day. I was also going to be, more impressively, the Bell-Ringer! 

 

Now to understand what that meant, you need to picture the campus. It’s on a steep hillside, facing north. As you stand on the edge of the primary east-west road facing south up the hillside, you see, first, the Administration Building, right in front of you. 

The Admin Building, complete with 'my' flagpole.

This contains the church and all the school offices, as well as almost all the classrooms. (The only exceptions being those that are in the gym and the music building.) If you walk through the Admin Building and come out of its ‘back side,’ you have to look steeply up the hill to see the rest of the buildings.

 

On your right, there’s only one, the girls’ dorm. It’s three stories tall and the left half of the first floor is taken up entirely by the kitchen and bakery, plus the dining hall.  The right half is residence rooms. The other two floors are entirely residence, end to end.

 

At the same level as the Girls’ is the Boy’s dorm. (Behind the Boys’ is the cleared hillside where the 6x6s are dug, which is another subject for another, later, post.) Below the Boy’s dorm, where the trees are now in the photo below, there used to be the Music Building, torn down after I left but before the photo was taken. When my Aunt Reba attended Laurelwood in her Junior year, that missing building was the Administration Building and contained all the classrooms. The new Administration Building was built two years after she left and six years before I arrived.

On the same level as the Boys' Dorm, and slightly to its left, is the building that when I went there was the Gym. I don't know what it is now. (The new Gym is at the extreme right edge of the picture.)

Below the Gym is the dreaded Powerhouse. On the near side of the road are the faculty residence and part of the dairy barn, where Miss Daisy lived. (Another post, another day.)

The town of Gaston, three miles away, is ‘off limits.’ Also off limits, at least at certain times, are the two dorms, so far as residents of the opposite gender are concerned. From the end of dinner to a half hour before breakfast, the boys’ dorm is off limits to the girls, and the girls’ dorm is off limits to the boys. Except for one boy.

 

Me.

 

Because the bell tower is on the girls’ side of the campus, right before the dorm, and I’m now the bell-ringer! (I don’t think there was ever a female bell-ringer in the history of the school.) You can’t quite make out the bell tower in the second picture above, as it’s too small, though it seemed big enough when you were standing at the base of it! (Or perhaps it's gone now. That would be sad!)

 

Now I should explain that the position of Bell-Ringer has its ups and downs. The ups have to do with the fact that the faculty treat you like God, if you do the job right. (Though more like Satan if you do it wrong.) The downs have to do with how the other students treat you, both boys and girls, but especially boys. 

 

Nothing in the world makes for worse peer relationships than singling one person out for privileges that nobody else has! I’m the one boy in the school that can cross the imaginary line that runs down the middle of the campus, between male and female? Welcome to the madhouse! All the skullduggery takes place out of sight, of course, and you never know who did it, but that doesn’t in any way prevent it from happening.

 

Grease on the bell rope? Tar on the bell rope? Feces on the bell rope? (Only once, but hard to forget.)

 

But after a while, when nothing that is done to the bell rope seems to faze me (if they only knew!), doing things to the bell rope aren’t quite adequate, don’t you see. What you really need is to do something to the bell itself!

 

Not that this is easy. The bell is up in a covered cupola, about twenty feet off the ground. There’s no ladder. The tower’s framework provides horizontal support pieces here and there, but they’re far apart and hard to reach one from another. Also, they’re covered with grime from lots of weathering and a complete lack of cleaning. What to do?

 

To tell you the truth, I’ll never know exactly how they went about it, or how many of them there were, but here’s what happened. One Sabbath morning, when I was due to ring the combined ‘wake-up’ and ‘get ready for breakfast’ peal, I pulled on the rope and nothing happened. The rope wouldn’t pull. The bell wouldn’t move. It was like everything was frozen in concrete, except that all I could see above me was clear air. And there was no easily-visible reason for the bell’s refusal to ring.

 

It was very early. Barely light. It was winter and the sun rises very late in Oregon in February. But the bell had to be rung. I had the faculty to keep happy and the boys to keep mad. And I had to wake the girls up so they could get breakfast ready.

 

I kept pulling on the rope to no avail, staring up this way and that way to try to determine what was wrong. Finally, I figured out what it was. Someone had rotated the bell 90 degrees so that the clapper on its hinge now needed to move north and south rather than the normal east and west. Easy solution: pull the rope to the north rather than to the east. Toward the sidewalk. But the rope passed through a sort of ‘keeper-ring’ on its way down from the bell, and I could see no easy way to free the rope from the ring, to take it to where I could pull it from the north rather than from the east.

 

There was only one possible solution. I had to climb up there somehow and turn the bell back to its proper orientation. So that’s what I did. In spite of the grime and the height, I climbed up on those horizontal tower supports, and I got to the bell, and I turned it back to where it had been before. And then I climbed down and rang the bell. I was only four minutes late, and no one ever noticed. (In retrospect, it’s highly probable that I was the only person in the world who was conscious of the bell’s ringing anyway. I could have let it go three days in a row without ringing, and no one would have even noticed.) It was very gratifying that evening, at sunset, to ring the bell in normal manner. No one would have dared to climb up and rotate it again, in broad daylight. And for that matter, no one ever rotated it again, at least not on my watch.

 

I never made it to church that morning. I pleaded sudden illness. I wasn’t at all sick. But my only suit, which I was required to wear to church, had big smears of grime all over it. I couldn’t wear it like that, and I couldn’t go without it. And it was the only suit I owned. So I pretended to be sick.

 

I wasn’t sick, but the suit was.

 

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