Page 6 - 1969 VESTIGE

Old bell gets new housing; summer, 1968.
HE old bell was housed this year. Permanently enshrined. It will not again be passed from place, taken from earthy and
materialistic moorings here, shuntled to ascetic and lonely towers there. It is home now - elevated somewhat, but not too high - exactly where it belongs.
The bell has measured-out the days for almost one hundred years. Cast in Baltimore in 1879, it had unpretentious beginnings in Lynchburg, sounding over laborers in a tobacco warehouse. Years later it functioned at irregular hours to summons the city's volunteer firemen and finally, and more often, it rang for the members of Epiphany Episcopal Church. But early in the twenties it was brought to VES to become a part of the heart and memory of everyone who ever heard it toll.
For hundreds of men - young and older - the old bell resounds. For those of the twenties who danced the rhythms as definite as those of a poet's - it sounds.
Tolling throughout the Depression, over the "Lost Generation," through all the ..Jazz Age," high in its barren and unpainted framework the bell's gray shadow lay across struggling times . . . It was a time when people still believed in the world.
In those years Henry W. Mattfield was permanently master-in-charge. He requested the responsibility, insisted upon it, keeping night- and day watch over
hundreds of boys for more than twenty years .. .
Came the forties and World War II, the war that would eradicate forever all evil from the face of the
earth.
The war ended. Enrollment grew. Young boys from
those days were the last to grow up without television. Returning veterans were housed in the old gymnasium. Dormitory cubicles were replaced by rooms with doors. The William King Fieldhouse was built; the century passed the half-way mark; and the Golden Age of John Gannaway emerged. His kindly presence in his rocking chair at the check-out station was enough to persuade any boy who had not prepared his math homework to seek his help before asking for an evening on the town. In that age, "Wild Bill" Wyatt was running a history course that had every other master postponing any homework assignment on the evening before the Big Test. The dorms were especially quiet.
Jon Arnett and "Monk" DeVere were not. Running barefoot and wild through the woods, they brought back rattlesnakes for the skinning and squirrels, caught bare- handed, just for the fun of it. And regularly at three p.m. each Monday, Mr. G. B. Lamar came by bus to sit on the athletic field and visit with the boys . . .
The sixties now - and the end of another decade. This book is the story of another generation growing-up beneath the old bell.
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