Their name came from Ned Ludd, a youth of weak intellect who had broken a lot of frames used in stocking manufacture in his frustration at not finding another boy with whom he was having a fight. The frame-destructing idea caught on; these pieces of equipment were costing jobs.

Today, we are seeing jobs disappear because computers and related devices enable one person to do the work of many. And no, I'm not advocating the smashing of computers. The nearest I ever came to Luddite-thinking involved, of all things, the bell of the Federated Church. For some reason, as I listened to that bell I thought the peals were coming from a recording, and I visualized a giant loudspeaker in the belfry with a disc providing the sound. Completing the mechanization would be a timer that set it off automatically.

On checking with the pastor, the Rev. Keith Potter, I found that I was completely wrong. He assured me that the bell is there and someone is still pulling that rope. This triggered my overactive memory, and I got to thinking about the days when I was the one pulling that rope. This all started back in 1939 when I was a junior at Los Gatos High School and odd jobs at 25 cents an hour were much in demand.

In 1939 the Rev. Dr. Burton M. Palmer left his 10-year pastorate at the Federated, and this meant somebody had to take over some of the menial chores he had handled. I got the job, at 75 cents a Sunday. The duties included getting up at 2 a.m. to light the furnace--no thermostat back then--which involved a short bike ride from our house on Orchard Road. Then I had to unlock various doors to the church and Sunday school and lock up and tidy up after the services. When crowding required the Sunday school to hold some classes at the Foothill Club across the street, the opening, setting up and locking up of those premises became part of the job.

Bell-ringing was also among the duties. There was an advance ringing, some half-hour ahead, and then one at the beginning of the 11 o'clock service. That bell had a history and a slight flaw that had to be considered in the ringing of it. It had originally hung in the Congregational Church that was on Oak Street, near the site of the present school. The church was built in 1876 and the bell was added two years later. In 1919 the Congregational Church merged with the Disciples of Christ, or Christian, Church, which had a bell-less building on the site of the present Echo Shop on Big Basin Way. The newly formed Federated Church met at the Congregational Church until the present building, designed by Julia Morgan, was built in 1923. The bell was hung in the new edifice.

The aforementioned flaw was in the clapper, the long piece with a bulbous end that strikes the inside of the bell. After more than 60 years of ringing, that bulbous end had worn flat on one side, resulting in a lesser sound when it hit the bell. I was advised by Dr. Palmer that if the bell rope was held for a fraction of a second before that side of the clapper hit, it would strike harder, making a louder sound. Otherwise, he said, it would sound like a fire bell.

Having grown up in Saratoga, where his father was also a church pastor, Dr. Palmer would have known about the fire bell sound. The local one, now mounted in front of the fire department's Headquarters Station, was hung in a tower at the stub end of Fourth Street, near the old town jail.

Getting back to Luddite territory, I happen to have some classic examples of the kind of thing the fuss was all about. Once, every document in print required that the type be set by hand. Then came the Linotype, which cast molten metal into lines, or slugs, of type. Goodbye, typesetters. I never heard of any mass destruction of Linotypes by Luddites, but I'm sure there were jobless people thinking along those lines.

One of my hobbies is printing with hand-set type on an 1887 treadle-powered job press. I also have a Linotype, in need of restoration, but I'm sure these artifacts can coexist. Eat your heart out, Ned Ludd.