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I hooked up a rope to the school bell so that visitors could ring it.
The rope came down from the tower through a hole in the porch ceiling.
Guests stopped ringing the bell sometime in my final year. The reason was
vandalism or at least over exuberant rope pulling. The kids or Guests just
plain rang the stuffings out of it. The rope didn't break, the mechanism
did. Jim Fox (Maintenance Director) and I kept trying different ways of
reinforcement, but I was climbing up the tower (to make repairs) once or
twice a week. Finally we discontinued the bell ringing feature. When I first started work on the schoolhouse, someone (Joe maybe?) gave me a narration tape previously recorded by some other guy. (I don't know who it was.) It was probably written for Laurie Hollings' proposed exhibit. (I wondered if Laurie had done a schoolhouse exhibit somewhere else and was going to use the same recording?) I listened to it once and thought, "Cool, that's all taken care of". Later, when I was nearly finished with the project, I listened to the tape again and realized that, now, it was inaccurate. I never saw a script, so I just transcribed the tape and then rewrote the script to fit the new exhibit. Then I rehearsed it (talking like an old man) and then went to a studio and taped it. Yes, that was my voice you heard as you toured the exhibit. As far as I know, everyone loved the end result. Out of respect, I never staged a gunfight there. I really enjoyed working on the project and (if I may brag) it was brought in under budget and before deadline. It was great! |
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