Season of giving to open with concert by generous bell tower steward

By STEPHANIE GUNTER and JENA WITTKAMP
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- The volunteer caretaker of a campus landmark at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is giving the gift of music this holiday season.

UNC senior Travis Kephart, the Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower’s master bell ringer, will perform a holiday concert at 7 p.m. Dec. 6 – a finale to the day of the annual Christmas parade down Franklin Street, which will start at 10 a.m.

Kephart, a German major from Murphy, will perform Christmas and Hanukkah songs and secular holiday music. The public is invited to gather round as Kephart plays for 30 to 45 minutes inside the 172-foot landmark on South Road.

This holiday season closes the 72^nd year of the tower, which was dedicated on Thanksgiving Day in 1931. Dignitaries ate a Thanksgiving meal on the tower’s porch-like base after the ceremony.

By initiating the upcoming concert, Kephart resurrects a lost tradition. Bell ringer performances were common in times gone by. His faculty supervisor calls the concert just one example of many ways that Kephart has given his all to the tower, sprucing up its repertoire, its image and its performance.

Jeffrey Fuchs, UNC’s director of band activities, chose Kephart, a tuba player in the marching band, as the master bell ringer in May 2002. "He takes his responsibilities very seriously, and he’s thrown himself into the job," said Fuchs. "When Travis started, the list of responsibilities was very short. The list of what he’s done is incredibly long."

The short list involves keeping songs current, playing for special events and keeping the time correct on huge clocks facing out from all four walls near the top of the tower.

Since 1998, the Morehead-Patterson has chimed mainly by computer, which connects an electronic keyboard on the second floor to 14 bells on the seventh. To program a song, Kephart plays it on the keyboard, and the computer records the notes. Then Kephart can set the computer to play the song at any time without the keyboard’s help.

But Kephart also can play the bells directly from the keyboard whenever he wants. "If I have song in my head, I can plug in the keyboard and play," he said. "I’m glad that I can make people smile."

When Kephart became bell ringer, he kept the tower’s existing repertoire for a time. But in fall 2002, he started adding new songs; by February, he had changed most of them.

Now the tower has approximately 50 programmed songs, and Kephart tries to change them every three to four months. The selection includes folk tunes, hymns, songs from musicals and school songs. But Kephart doesn’t stop with such traditional bell tower fare. Occasionally he adds a whimsical touch with such selections as "The Smurfs" theme and the Beatles’ "Hey Jude."

The tower chimes every 15 minutes from 7:30 a.m. to midnight. It plays songs at 8 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. The songs vary daily, because Kephart has programmed the computer to avoid repeats. Once a song has played, two and half days pass before it is heard again.

Kephart programs the tower to play Carolina songs including "Hark the Sound" and "Here Comes Carolina" before every home football game -- and afterward if the team wins.

His other major responsibility is to keep the time. The computer clock gains about one minute per month. But Kephart is a stickler for government time, so he adjusts the clock every Thursday to accommodate for the difference.

"That’s been my number one priority, keeping the time," he said. "If you listen to the bell tower, you should be able to tell when your favorite TV show is coming on."

The computer sets the time for when the bells ring, and Kephart wants to make sure that the hands display the time the bells are chiming. He must climb a spiral staircases and a wrought-iron ladder to the sixth floor, where components that run the clock are located.

The cavernous room has 9-foot acrylic clock faces on four sides instead of walls. Kephart keeps his watch and the tower clock in sync and checks his watch before adjusting the tiny hands on a miniature clock. It is attached to a tiny one-quarter horsepower motor that moves the clock hands outside the tower.

But the clock faces do not have to be just for keeping time. For the past two Halloweens, Kephart taped large paper cutouts of eyes, noses and mouths to the inside of the clock faces. He lit the faces from inside with orange floodlights to make the clocks look like jack-o’-lanterns.

Kephart’s initiative also was in evidence on the first anniversary of Sept. 11, when the bell tower was scheduled to chime for five minutes to honor Carolina alumni who died in the attacks. Because the computer was being repaired from a lightning strike, he could not use the keyboard. But skills Kephart had learned on his job at Radio Shack came in handy. He connected a transformer to the electrical circuit for the bells and used a jumper wire to operate largest bell manually.

"Every time I connected the wire, the bell would toll."

Kephart has become a bell tower expert. Fuchs has a folder of tower information and history, and the campus Web site shares information on pages http://www.unc.edu/tour/LEVEL_2/belltower.htm, http://www.unc.edu/about/landmarks.html and others.

But that wasn’t enough to satisfy Kephart. He visited the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library to find books with bell tower history. He knows that the clock faces were originally glass and how much each bell weighs – from about 160 pounds to the Gov. Morehead bell at 3,500 pounds.

Kephart updated and corrected information about the tower that the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America keeps online. He supplied them with photos and links to relevant UNC Web pages. His handiwork and photos can be seen at http://www.gcna.org/data/NCCHAPHL.HTM on the guild’s site.

Carillonneurs play carillons, or sets of finely tuned bells like those in Morehead-Patterson and other university and church towers. With its 14 bells, UNC’s tower officially is not a carillon, but a chime.

"The beginning of a full carillon is 23 bells," said Kephart "We are missing a lot of bass notes. The more notes you have, the more melodiously you can play."

He has befriended the bell ringer at nearby Duke University, whose carillon has 50 bells.

At Carolina, bell ringers have always been students. Some of their names adorn two wooden plaques on the tower’s second floor, listing the "Guild of Bell Ringers" from 1931 to 1953. Unfortunately, no list of the bell ringers after 1953 exists.

Alumni and benefactors John Motley Morehead III, class of 1891, and Rufus Lenoir Patterson II, class of 1893, donated funds to build the tower. The original 12 bells had to be rung manually. Students pulled levers that rested on a wooden stand on the second floor. The levers attached to cables that ran up five stories to the bells on the seventh floor.

More bell ringers were needed then, as a 15-minute concert was required every weeknight at 6 p.m. Bell ringers were offered lodging in Memorial Hall in exchange for their work.

Today, the original wooden chime stand and levers are long gone, but a second stand with levers that were used just for practice still inhabits the second floor. Beside it is an instrument resembling a player piano that was installed in 1967. A paper roll attached to the keyboard allowed songs to be played without a bell ringer – the last modernization until the computerized system in 1998.

The job of master bell ringer is unpaid but has some great perks. Kephart has access to parts of the tower that no one else gets to see. He has the key to a tiny hatch at the top of a wrought-iron ladder leading to the belfry, on the seventh floor.

When the bells ring, they can be heard in some parts of Durham. Kephart makes sure to warn visitors to the belfry when the bells are about to chime. "Plug your ears," he says. When the massive bells, hanging inches away, begin to ring, it becomes clear why.

But the best part of a visit to the windswept seventh floor is the breathtaking view. On a clear day, one can see up to 20 miles away. The 10-story tower sits on the axis created by the Old Well, South Building, Wilson Library, Kenan Stadium and the Dean E. Smith Center. Kephart eagerly points out such distant landmarks as the spires of Duke Chapel, the skyline of downtown Durham and the control tower at Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Last December, Kephart shared the view with Chancellor James Moeser. Knowing that the chancellor is a musician, Kephart called in an invitation. What he didn’t know was that Moeser was a bell ringer in his student days at the University of Texas at Austin.

Despite a sleet storm on the appointed day, the bell ringer and the former bell ringer kept their appointment, climbing spiral stairs and metal ladders in the cold. Their reward was a silvery view of Chapel Hill from the tower’s seventh floor.

"We shared stories about bell ringing," Kephart said.

Like Moeser, Kephart will remember his days as bell ringer for years to come.

"I always wanted to be in the bell tower since the time I first came here," Kephart said. "I think people probably don’t appreciate it as much as they should. I just feel a sense of responsibility to it."

Fuchs said Kephart is unique in his unusual dedication to the bell tower.

"Travis has been a fine steward of that great campus icon," he said. "In his eyes, this is his mark on the university."

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(Gunter, of Raleigh, is a senior majoring in journalism and mass communication. Wittkamp, of Raleigh, is a senior majoring in women’s studies and journalism and mass communication.)

Contact: Travis Kephart, (919) 914-7286, bellringer@unc.edu.
News Services Contact: L. J. Toler, (919) 962-8589, laura_toler@unc.edu.