Weeks into the Fall 2021 Semester, Westminster bell chimes began singing across campus and Laie every hour.
I hadn’t noticed those chimes until one day when they started ringing a few weeks after I arrived in Hawaii. My friends and I wondered, where are these bells? Why were they just starting now? Who’s in charge of playing them? Thus began my quest to uncover the mystery of BYU–Hawaii’s bells.
In my endeavors to solve the mystery of the BYUH bells, I spoke with and emailed dozens of school faculty, students and community members, scouring for any information I could find. Every person I talked to, it seemed, told me, “I have no idea who does that. Let me know when you find out!”
Along the way, I spoke with Laie old-timers Millie Enos, Percy Tehira, Nadine Kekauoha and Riley Moffat. Each of these wonderful saints gave of their time and told me all they knew about the clock chimes. Thank you.
Let me describe how I found all these people. Laie is a small, tight-knit community with locals who all know each other. I love the history and love that emanates from the community of this town. I enjoyed getting to know aunties and uncles who were more than willing to share their stories and point me in the right direction.
For me, the bells have changed from a random, hourly surprise, to a symbol of Laie and the love that resides here. Biking through town, finding unsuspecting interviewees, sleuthing for answers in the BYUH library and fulfilling a self-endowed mission to solve the mystery of the bells has been such a privilege.
During my sleuthing, I learned the history of this school from the people who were here to experience it themselves and I developed a deep love for this place we call home. When I hear the bells, I feel blessed to be welcomed to study at BYUH. I am reminded of all the noble women and men, the genuine gold, who have made and continue to make this place what it is today.
Origins of the chimes
According to the University Archives, BYUH finished building a clock tower on top of the McKay complex on Sept. 8, 1957. A BYUH Archives’ photo caption of the renovated front of the McKay complex explains in 1977, the clock tower got a makeover and the clock was removed.
While the mystery of the missing clock tower was now resolved, I still needed to find out where the bell ringing was coming from on campus.
Figuring out the mystery of the BYUH bells became a daunting task because as I talked to more people around Laie, I discovered I needed to talk to someone else. I thought I would never discover where our school’s quasimodo was hiding.
Finally, after diligent effort and weeks of tracking people down, I was able to uncover the mystery of the chimes.
Today’s chimes
Jared Nikora, an electronic systems coordinator at BYUH, said he manages the school bell system. He said the bells are connected to a computer in the library that plays the chimes on a schedule.
“There’s nothing special. It’s just a computer,” he shrugged, showing off the console that is solely devoted to managing the bell chimes. He said the computer chimes on a timer automatically. The only time he tinkers with the system, he said, is when the computer isn’t working right or the time needs to be adjusted after the power goes out.
Nikora explained people can hear the bells chime from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the weekdays and the system plays hymns on Tuesday mornings right before the devotional.
Nikora said the speakers that broadcast the chimes are on top of the Aloha Center, and every few years they can go bad because of the weather. The speakers got replaced in Fall 2021, which explains why the bells were quiet over the summer.
Bygone bells
Before I got ahold of Nikora, I was sent to speak with Carol Hammond, a Laie community member and retired piano instructor at BYUH. One sunny afternoon, I parked my bike at Hammond’s house and I begged her through the screen of her front door to give me just 10 minutes of her time and answer some questions.
Carol Hammond explained she has lived in Laie since the '70s when her late husband, Dale Hammond, started teaching chemistry at BYUH.
She gave me an excerpt of her husband’s life story he wrote in 2017. In it, he documents his role as the quasimodo of BYUH and how he managed the ringing of the chimes. In 1972, when he started teaching in the chemistry department, he writes the administration asked him to help out with the bells.
In the '70s, there was a set of bells donated to BYUH from BYU in Provo, he writes. They installed the bells in the Aloha Center, but they did not work. Because Hammond was a tech-savvy guy, he says he took on the task of fixing and manning the bells.
His story reads, “It turns out that there were no actual bells. They consisted of several racks of metal bars that were struck by a solenoid (magnetic cylinder) hammer.” Hammond explains how hitting the metal bars emitted tones through vacuum tube electronics that made the bell sound. In other words, the system created the bell chime without using actual bells.
Carol Hammond said her husband played the console like a piano keyboard but added “there were certain things that were automatic, so they could ring every hour.”
For times he couldn’t play, Hammond said he programmed the bells to play the Westminster chime every hour from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. The Westminster chime is the familiar, five-note tune which, according to the BilliB Clocks website, is from Handel’s Messiah and made famous by many prominent clock towers like Elizabeth Tower, which houses the famed Big Ben bell.
As Dale Hammond worked on the bells, he writes he gained full access to the Aloha Center to do what needed to be done. Carol Hammond said he worked in a little tech room in the Aloha Center that housed the bell console. That’s when she said her husband became known as the quasimodo of BYUH.
However, Dale Hammond writes these particular bells were finicky and they had to be replaced.
He writes he was instrumental in getting a new set of bells, called Flemish bells, with a minor third harmonic, which made them sound off key. Carillon bells traditionally chime this harmonic chord, he writes. Due to their unpleasant sound, these bells needed to be replaced too, he says. He writes about people, especially the music faculty, who repeatedly asked him, “Why don’t you get those bells in tune?”
That was when BYUH got digital bells. Hammond writes, “This system used digital recordings of a master Carillon bell system and used DVDs to replay the tunes so recorded. They did indeed sound like real bells.” He says Maas-Rowe Carillons Inc., a Carillon bell company, recorded a DVD with 90 hymns, BYUH’s school song, Pomp and Ceremony for graduations and three unspecified “popular songs.” They also had a DVD with 30 popular Hawaiian songs, Hammond writes.
In a nearly two-decade-old Ke Alaka’i article from 2003, Lynzi Mate writes the Maas-Rowe bell system digitally tunes the bell sound, avoiding any of the tuning problems of the previous bell system.
Impact of the chimes on people’s lives
Dale Hammond writes, “If the bells ever went off for more than a couple of days, I got a phone call from Sister Lillian Coburn, wife of one of the math teachers, who lived right across the street from the campus. Those bells told her when to get up, when to eat lunch and supper and when to go to bed.”
Listening for the bells is a habit other long-time Laie locals practice too. Millie Enos, who has lived in Laie for more than 50 years after studying here in the 50s, said she loves listening to the bells every hour.
She said, “When I hear it, I enjoy it. Some didn’t. It bothered them. But I enjoyed listening to the chimes. It reminded me of BYU in Provo because they had the same thing at their bell tower.”
Percy Tehira, another longtime Laie resident, shared the same sentiment. He said he first came to Oahu to help build the Polynesian Cultural Center as a service missionary. He said he likes hearing the clock chime because it reminds him of the one he heard at home in New Zealand, where he grew up. “I used to deliver papers as a kid, and I’d hear the chimes of the clock.” He explained he used the chime to keep track of time as he worked.
Dale Hammond’s history says he worked as the bell specialist on campus for more than 30 years, and most of the time, his service was entirely voluntary. He writes, “I loved being in charge of the bells because I felt it was a real contribution to the campus that nobody else was trained to do or was interested in doing.”