Photography by Lauren Allen
Dennis Stuekerjuergen was an active member at St. John’s Episcopal Church. He organized their yard crew, served as an usher, on the vestry and in the men’s camping group, where he had made several “dear friends,” his wife Leah Stuekerjuergen says.
Throughout his involvement, he was consistently mentioning the church’s bell. It was silent and had been that way for over 30 years. Father David Houk, who serves as the rector, says that he also heard about the bell from other members of the congregation since starting at the church in 2006.
“Over the years, I’ve heard all of this sort of sentimental longing about the bell and how the bell doesn’t work,” Houk says.
The chatter about the bell became so repetitive that he brought it up to church board members from time to time, asking what it would take to make it ring again. The reply would be that it was too complicated and too big of a project to tackle. The bronze alloy bell weighed 300 pounds and rested in a tower that was well above the church. There had been efforts in the past to revive the silent bell.
“We found records of an attempt to revive it in 1971,” Houk says, adding that the building was completed around 1961, and since then the bell had a track record of working inconsistently until it stopped ringing all together.
But for members of the church like Dennis, the desire to hear it ring persisted.
“That was something that he always hoped at some point would happen again, that they would get it working,” Leah said.
In the summer of 2023, Dennis passed away. Houk recalls that it was maybe six months after his funeral that Leah came to church asking to figure out a way for the bell to ring in his memory.
Admittedly, Leah thought the process would be simple: figure out the problem and then figure out the solution.
“I really thought it was going to be just actually getting people up there and really looking at it,” Leah says.
In hindsight, “simple” may not have been the first word they would have used to describe the process.
First, Leah approached one of Dennis’ friends from the camping group who’s an architect, David Farrell.
“A couple of weeks later, he called, and he said, ‘You’re never going to believe who I met,’” Leah says.
He met Gary Loper, of Loper Pipe Organ Service Co. A man who knows the niche world of bells and how to repair them, AKA The Bell Expert.
Slowly but surely, a small team had assembled to tackle the operation: Leah, Farrell and two electricians, Bill Knowles and Jimmy Little. Farrell became a coordinator of sorts, providing sketches and materials to Loper, who would then translate those items into a game plan.
“The first thing we did was we replaced the supports on either side and put ball bearings on the bell, because part of the problem was the bearings that they had created many years ago, when they replaced the wood, were not satisfactory,” Loper said. “We wanted to use high quality stuff, — we knew that we’re gonna only do this once, so let’s do it right.”
And they did. The bell is now automated and able to be controlled via an application, accessible to Houk and other prominent staff members.
“The main benefit is the low maintenance, because you don’t have a chain that you have to lubricate, you don’t have a sprocket which can break teeth and come loose. You actually have no physical contact between the motor and the bell,” Loper says. “The bell is just hanging there, and it’s got a plate, [that’s] driven magnetically, so that the bell just swings. It’s almost like magic, but not quite.”
On June 23, 2024, the bell finally rang again.
“It wouldn’t have happened without Leah,” Houk says. “[The team] really deserves the credit for getting it ringing after 35 years.”
