You probably read the great story recently announcing the completion of SDSUs famed Campaniles $1.3 million, seven-month-long facelift.
Included in the work was the replacement of 1,467 bricks that had deteriorated with weather damage over the years. The story also mentioned that the huge glass cupola housing the beacon you see atop the Campanile was in need of work.
The Campanile was still rising skyward in 1929 when that large beacon arrived on campus. Officials then decided the safest place for it to be stored until the time to elevate it to the towers top was in the Presidents Office in the Administration Building.
While the iconic 95-year-old tower is back singing for us again, its original $13,000 carillon voices have been silent for years. Those 18 brass carillons, and other related mechanisms, had to be removed from the belfry. Time had dulled their tone, dried out the hammer gongs leather padding, and worn out the intricate sockets and sprockets of the timing devices.
Today, more modern, electric devices provide the chiming sounds.
For several years the brass tubes and clappers ended up in campus storage near the South Dakota Agricultural Museum. Some on campus are now trying to figure out how to use those historic chimes in some way that gives them purpose again.
Since the carillons first sang out on Sunday, Dec. 15, 1929, years often went by with them being inoperable due to a plethora of mechanical or electrical problems.
The first known silence occurred just six years after the Campanile was completed. The campus newspaper, the Collegian, in its Dec. 18, 1935, issue, reported that the chimes bonged the 8 a.m. hour at exactly 11:45 a.m.
No Christmas carol concert was played in 1948 because many of the keyboards 25 keys (10 black and 15 white) didnt work. In 1953, the DC generator in the Campanile burned out. Because it had an unusual voltage output, repairing it was difficult, and the chimes were again silenced. Similar problems became frequent, and the chimes were inoperable more often than not.
In 1972, a gift of $50,000 from long-time College of Agriculture professor Nellie Hartwig provided for the purchase of a radio tube sound system. It was described as a 305-bell system with full organ type console with a 61-note keyboard and a 32-note pedal board and four expression pedals. Even that system started to show its age by 1980. It slowly deteriorated. After about a 10-year period of Campanile on-again, off-again sound, the system failed beyond repair.
The university in 1994 installed a Schulmerich system that produced Westminster chimes sounds for class call and music from a memory diskette about the size of a credit card. Four speakers in the Campanile belfry amplify the sound.
The computerized system operated from a small room in the adjacent Lincoln Memorial Library. That system did not cancel out the option of play from a keyboard console, also in the library.
Unlike the original chimes system, that computerized, miniaturized system required virtually no upkeep. I dont know if the Schulmerich system is still the source of the Campaniles voice, and I wonder if its sounds still have the reach the carillons once had.
Can it still repeat the special sound in the arrangement programmed into the original chimes that was played only on days when the Campanile benefactor, Charlie Coughlin, came back to visit his alma mater?
On those special days for the member of the Class of 1909, the carillons chimed out a popular song of 1925 that was one of Coughlins favorites, Clap Your Hands, Here Comes Charlie.
Shortly after the Campanile chimes begin ringing out, people as far as 7 miles from Brookings could hear the pealing.
If you live some distance from Brookings today, and can now hear the carillons voices at work again, let us know.
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