FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL: CHURCH BELLS REMIND FAITHFUL IT'S TIME TO CELEBRATE

The bells at St. Mary's Cathedral ring three times a day and are operated by electric motors and cables in the bell tower.

A workman wrestled with the bell at First Presbyterian Church in Cape girardeau during the demoliton of the second church at the site in 1964 in this file photo. The bell was installed in the current church in 1966.

If ever you have looked on better days,

If ever been where bells have tolled to church,

If ever sat at any good man's feast,

If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear,

And know what 'tis to pity, and be pitied,

Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.

-- William Shakespeare

Listen to the language of the bells: Joyous for weddings and christenings, the somber tolling for funerals, the mellow reminder across city blocks and country fields that it's time to come to church.

Or even that it's 6 o'clock and time to head home for supper.

In Cape Girardeau and Jackson, the bells still toll at several churches for weddings, funerals and Sunday services.

"I like to hear them at the start of the service," said the Rev. David Johnson, pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Jackson, where the bells ring every night at 6 o'clock and at the start of services, and for special events such as weddings. "They ring out the fact that we're starting to celebrate the Lord."

The bells at St. Paul are on a timer, Johnson said, but folks are hearing the actual bells, not a recording.

The church has four bells -- three new ones cast in the Netherlands for the current church and weighing in at 1,300, 640 and 385 pounds, and a fourth bell from the old church that weighs 210 pounds.

New McKendree United Methodist Church in Jackson also sounds its bells for services, said pastor Scott Lohse.

The bells at Cape Girardeau's Trinity Lutheran Church can be flipped on and off with a switch, said Gereld Schrader, a member of the church board.

"You turn it on when you want to ring it and turn it off," Schrader said. "It's not on a timer."

The bells can be heard at the start of services on Saturdays and Sundays.

Elroy Kinder, parish assistant at Hanover Lutheran Church in Cape Girardeau, has had lots of practice ringing the bell at the Old Hanover Lutheran Church.

"The ones we have here in the new church, they're electronic," Kinder said. "At the old Hanover Church, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, the bell was put there in 1887, a brass bell."

The bell is rung for weddings, he said. "And we do use it for the tolling of the bell for funerals whenever there's a funeral in the cemetery there."

The bell is also used for special services held in the old church, including the Reformation service and the special German-English service at Christmas.

The bell is in the balcony of the old church, and two ropes are used to ring it, Kinder said, "one to ring the bell, and one to toll the bell."

"You've got to get a good rhythm going to make it sound right," he said. "You don't want to pull the bell too hard or you'll turn it over and it won't sound right."

Old St. Vincent's Church and St. Mary's Cathedral also feature bells, ringing every morning, at noon and at 6 for the Angeles service.

The bells of St. Mary's were cast in 1891 by the H.Y. Stuckstede Bell Foundry in St. Louis.

The bells were silenced in 1988 when congregation members realized the wooden supports holding them in place had been badly deteriorated over the years. After the repair work was completed, the bells were back in business.

First Presbyterian Church lays claim to the oldest bell in Cape Girardeau, and possibly Southeast Missouri, said church historian Nancy Bray.

The bell was cast in 1855 by Jones & Hitchcock of Troy, N.Y., and was originally purchased by a church in St. Louis.

But the big bell -- 43 1/2 inches in diameter at the mouth and a whopping 1,400 pounds -- was too heavy for that church and wound up at First Presbyterian instead.

The bell was housed in a wooden tower outside the church for several years, until it was installed in the second church building in 1902. Then the current church was built in 1965, and when the bell was installed, "that was the last the world saw of it," Bray said.

The bell didn't just call people to church, she added. It was also used to announce fires and jail breaks, signal the start of school and call people to town meetings.

It's been a couple of years since the bell was rung for Sunday School or services, Bray said.

"Probably there's no good reason for it, other than we haven't seen to it," she said.

But the church board is considering plans to start ringing the bell regularly again in the fall, Bray said, and she hopes the congregation's youth will be involved.

"We have to do it by hand now," she said. "I'm guessing we're going to do something to make it easier."

Bray said she's always loved the sound of church bells.

"I heard somebody's bells the other day, and it was the most beautiful sound," she said. "I couldn't figure out where they were coming from."

The bells have been a familiar sound in Cape Girardeau for many years, she said.

"I grew up in the 500 block of Broadway and I lived within hearing distance of the Trinity bell and our own bell, so the sound of church bells was really a very strong one in the downtown area," she said.

Not everyone likes the sound of church bells. Residents around St. Mary's Cathedral and Old St. Vincent's have complained in the past about the noise.

Johnson said he doesn't think his Jackson church's neighbors have any complaints about the bells at St. Paul.

"People probably set their watches by us," he said.