Bob Bryant, a former director of the Parks, Forestry and Maintenance Department, is shown with the town's old fire bell in this 1987 photo.

Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph

Picture from the Past

The old fire bell in Los Gatos enjoyed long, varied history

By John S. Baggerly

A vaudevillian of the early 20th century once sang the comic song The Cat Came Back. No matter where the owner ditched said feline, the canny cat came back through a series of funny incidents.

Los Gatos' beloved town bell went through its own variety of incidents, except that there was nothing funny about enduring fires, discard, neglect and deportation.

Today, the bell hangs in the northeast corner of the Town Plaza, with mechanism and text viewable at ground level.

But let's start from the beginning. The bell bears the date 1899 and was made by the W. T. Garratt Co. of San Francisco. The striker operates by a weight-and-clock mechanism. The bell is in good shape, save for three cracks that have been there since the bell fell from its wooden tower in the Oct. 13, 1901, fire. The fire destroyed a large part of downtown, which was just about all the wooden buildings in the vicinities of what are now
N. Santa Cruz Avenue and W. Main Street.

According to historical reports, the cracks did not affect the bell's clear tone. Not long after the bell's fall, it was mounted on a lofty steel tower, according to Los Gatos historian Bill Wulf. The tower was located on Lundy Lane behind the Methodist Church property, facing University Avenue as it does today. There, for many years, it chimed out the noon hour and 10 p.m., when youths were supposed to be off the streets and at home.

Most importantly, the bell was systemized to tap out code numbers that indicated where a fire was in progress. Since this code was printed in the village telephone book, excited citizens would often rush by foot, horse or automobile to the location of the blaze, often clogging streets and hindering fire engines' and firefighters' progress.

The bell was used until the 1930s, when it gave way to a horn that often frightened children at Los Gatos Parent Nursery School on nearby Lyndon Avenue.

In 1947, the bell and mechanism were removed and set on a lot on the east side of the town bridge. There it was found by
W. John Whisnant, founder of Los Gatos Pharmacy, who was by then retired and in the real estate business. He was a lively collector of ephemera and acquired the bell for safekeeping.

He later sold it to the Chicken Kitchen restaurant in Pollardville, a small community north of Stockton. After some time, Andy Kinyan, a painter and former Los Gatos resident, was given the bell in exchange for painting the restaurant. Kinyan, in turn, gifted the bell back to Los Gatos, where it hangs, but doesn't ring, today.

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