For more than 60 years the bronze Chinese bell on the portico of the Allen Memorial Art Museum has been silent. Now, thanks to a gift from the class of 1930, the bell will ring again at a ceremony and reception this Saturday at 4:30 pm.
One reason the bell has not been rung is that its top support was cracked, says museum preparator Michael Holubar. Gary Gochenour, machinist and scientific apparatus maker in the physics department, has fixed that problem with a new internal support. Another reason is that there was no way to lift its 600 pounds off the ground, but now college carpenters William Annable and Thomas Strickler have built a cypress stand to support the bell, and J&R Movers of North Ridgeville have put the bell in place with a forklift. Strickler has fashioned a cypress mallet for ringing the bell.
The class of 1930's gift paid for this work. Led by Clayton Miller and class president Emma Layman, class members will formally present the bell stand to museum director Anne Moore Saturday. She will ring the bell and pass the mallet to President Nancy S. Dye for the second ring. Each member of the 1930 class will then ring the bell for a total of 30 rings; Layman and Miller will count the rings--in Chinese. (Layman lived in China as a child, and Miller was a Shansi representative there from 1930 to 1932.)
The bell, cast in 1835, was originally housed beneath a pavilion in a Buddhist temple complex dedicated to Guanyin, the Goddess of Great Compassion, in the city of Hangzhou. The surface is inscribed with more than 400 characters in low relief. Most of the text is in kaishu script, the standard script of China developed in the first century AD, and among the inscriptions are references to Buddhist doctrine. H.H. Kung '06 gave the bell to Oberlin in 1929, and the museum accessioned it in 1933, Oberlin's centennial year.
While the ceremony on the museum portico will mark the first public ringing of the bell, Miller and Holubar have tested it. It has "a beautiful tone," Miller says, and Holubar agrees. It is "very deep, though not loud," he says.
