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Best of Picture from the Past
Revered town bell once sat atop a Lodi chicken eatery
By John S. Baggerly
'Bring back the bell. Please bring back the bell." This was Dorothy Canrinus speaking. As head of the Los Gatos Parent Nursery School on Lyndon Avenue, she had good reason for making this request. The town bell--shown above with Bob Bryant--had returned from topping a chicken restaurant in Lodi.
When the bell left town it was replaced in April 1949 by a compressed air horn atop the old fire house at the corner of W. Main Street and Tait Avenue--currently home to the Art Museum of Los Gatos. The horn issued a frightful sound to the ears of the preschool children and teachers. Many children would not even attend school because of the blast. Today, Lyndon Avenue leads into a parking circle, part of the parochial school at St. Mary's Church.
Across the street from the nursery school site is an armory built by the local American Legion for drilling and community dances. Paul Curtis, longtime dance instructor, once used the armory as a studio. Today the building is part of St. Mary's complex.
Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf has written much about the bell and telephone systems brought to Los Gatos from the Hume Ranch in Saratoga. Today, the bell is displayed on an abbreviated tower in the northwest corner of the Town Plaza, familiar to many as the site of Music in the Plaza, a free summertime concert series.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the bell was in a different "center of town." It sat atop a tower on Lundy Lane running behind St. Luke's Episcopal Church and into the old grammar school--now the Old Town shopping center. Besides sounding the noon hour and the 10 p.m. curfew, when all good children should be home, it also sounded fire calls by code to alert the town's volunteer fire crew, manned partly by the Sporleder family, as told in this newspaper a few issues ago.
When the tower was torn down, the bell sat unwanted in a Main Street lot east of the town bridge. Carroll Harrub, son of our town's first blacksmith, urged W. John Whisenant to buy the bell, which he did. He later sold the bell and tower as a beacon for a chicken restaurant in Lodi.
John Baggerly came out of semi-retirement to write this column.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
The 'Town Bell' had a long and interesting history before settling in at the Town Plaza. It is shown here with Bob Bryant, former director of the town's parks, forestry and maintenance department.
