Watching a crane hoist a set of giant bronze bells toward the Hoover Tower observation deck, electrical engineering professor emeritus James Angell said to a reporter nearby, “I feel like an angel in heaven.”
The bells of the tower’s carillon were reinstalled this spring, two years after being shipped to the Netherlands to be recast and retuned. Their new sound was divine, according to Angell—carillonneur from 1960 to 1991—and it includes another octave thanks to 13 new bells added as part of the restoration. Housed in a new cabin on the 14th floor, the 48 bells range in weight from about 7 pounds to 2.5 tons. The carillon’s automatic player, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, was also repaired.
The $500,000 project, funded primarily by donations, was long overdue. Hoover archivist Elena Danielson, MA ’70, PhD ’75, uncovered documents in which University officials discussed the need to restore the bells as early as 1943, just two years after their original installation. The carillon, built for the 1939 World’s Fair in Belgium, was a gift of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, in appreciation of Herbert Hoover’s famine relief efforts during World War I.
Carillonneur Timothy Zerlang, DMA ’89, plays the bells from a keyboard near the carillon.
