MENTION “THE BELL” AT WABASH and we know what you mean: The Monon Bell (now resident in the Allen Athletics Center seven years straight, thanks to this year’s 45-17 Little Giant victory over DePauw.)
But another bell once heard at Wabash went silent not long after the Monon Bell became the trophy for the Wabash-DePauw rivalry in 1932.
That silence was heartbreaking for Dr. James Kirtley ’29.
Filling it again with a joyful noise may yet be his legacy.
KIRTLEY’S MOTHER WORKED in the Montgomery County Courthouse when she was raising him and his siblings as a single mom after his father died. Kirtley could hear the courthouse clock tower’s resident bell chiming off the hours from his house.
He could hear the reassuring bell at Wabash when he was a student.
He carried it in his mind to Normandy Beach, where he served in the Army 4th Infantry during World War II.
When he came home to Crawfordsville a medical doctor and a decorated veteran, the 25-foot tall Victorian clock tower had been torn down. The 1,200-pound bell of his youth had been melted for the war effort.
“He was absolutely sick,” says Sandy Lofland-Brown, president of the nonprofit group Kirtley founded in 1996 to rebuild the structure—the Clock Tower Restoration Project. “He told people, ‘I’m going to restore that tower someday.’”
When he retired after 50 years of service as a beloved physician (he delivered more than 5,000 babies!), city council member, county commissioner, and state senator, he decided it was time to make good on that promise.
“He remembered exactly what that bell sounded like,” Lofland-Brown says. “When he’d come by our house he’d play the note—F sharp—on the piano and say, ‘That’s it!’”
Loflund-Brown helped take care of Kirtley the day before he died of leukemia in 2000.
“That’s when he made me promise I would see that the tower project was finished,” she says. “I made that promise and I intend to keep it.”
Today after nearly 20 years and more than $250,000 raised, the restored tower, clock, and bell are within $150,000 of becoming reality. The Indiana Bicentennial Commission has endorsed it as a Legacy Project for that celebration in 2016.
“We just hope we can get it ready for the Bicentennial,” says Lofland-Brown. For her the project is both a promise fulfilled and a bellwether of a brighter future for her hometown.
“Doc used to say, ‘If we can get the bell ringing again, all will be right in Crawfordsville.'"