When I was young, everyone heard the college steam whistle blow. It signaled football games, Pole Scrap, Maypole dance, and the beginning of the Walkout.
–Earl Carwile ‘41
Our day began with the cheery notes of the college’s heating plant whistle summoning reluctant, sleepy-eyed students to their 7:40 A.M. classes.
–Ralph Whiteman ‘52
When the football and basketball games were completed, the firemen would blow the whistle and count the score with whistle blows for victories. This was a nice service for those on campus and for neighbors.
David Allison ‘53
The college whistle was a campus institution. It blew every day at time for chapel and maybe for class periods.
–Bob Foster ‘48
It could be heard all over town, even late at night. We would count the blasts and know the MC scores.
–Robert Matson ‘50
For more than a quarter-century, Monmouth College students have marked the hours listening to the familiar Westminster chimes emanating from a loudspeaker in the Wallace Hall cupola. Although generated electronically, the carillon music has become a campus tradition.
Earlier generations relied on a much more shrill, but equally beloved, timekeeping device.
When Wallace Hall was built in 1909, its cupola was not designed to house a bell that traditionally would call students to class, so the administration instead had a steam whistle attached to one of the boilers in the new heating plant.
The heating plant whistle soon became a familiar sound in Monmouth, and residents set their watches by it. That is, until one morning in 1917 when some students decided that morning classes could not start without a whistle, and ran off with it. A hastily-procured substitute was found—an automobile exhaust whistle that emitted often-bizarre sounds.
Despite its unpredictable tone, students came to love the new whistle, which the Oracle student newspaper said “has shrieked and squawked in victory, shrilled to awaken students, and moaned at chapel time for 13 long years.” It was not surprising that disappointment was voiced in the summer of 1930 when he heating plant was renovated and a brand new whistle was installed—one with a deep, even tone.
Perhaps that was what prompted an unknown prowler to creep into the administrative offices in Carnegie (now Poling) Hall early in the morning of October 22, 1930, and deposit the original whistle, stolen in 1917. The administration duly restored the old whistle to its rightful post, causing the Oracle to rejoice: “Students will no longer feel the urge to steal the whistle, for the sacred relic is again in our midst and each true Scotchman will feel a thrill of pride as the noble old thing blows its daily sermon of toots and snorts.”
The newspaper, however, proved unoracular in its prediction, as the whistle disappeared once again just a few years later. For the next 15 years, the campus was without a whistle.
Then one day an alumnus stumbled upon the relic while cleaning out his attic and returned it to the school. To the embarrassment of the administration, it was stolen again a month later, and there was a desperate effort to replace it.
Stored away for many years on the campus was a whistle from an old threshing machine that had never been used because the college’s steam pressure was too great. As a last resort, they decided to give it a try, and it worked!
Some years later, a key part of the whistle’s mechanism disappeared and the college was again without a whistle to celebrate victory for several years. Then, in 1977, President DeBow Freed requested that the whistle be rebuilt to be used at homecoming. Green Army handyman Cletus St. Ledger dug through old machinery and found the necessary parts.
With the advent of new heating technology, the college’s old steam boilers eventually became a thing of the past, and the heating plant itself was for the most part dismantled, along with the steam whistle. Recently, however, the whistle surfaced in a corner of the plant and it was sent to the archives, where it will remain silent but safe, unless someone comes across a new source for steam on campus.
This blog was inspired by a publication titled “Hometown Memories: Recollections of Homegrown MC Alumni.” A collection of memoirs from “townies”—alumni who grew up in the city of Monmouth, the project was the idea of one such former townie, Marjorie Munson Wunder ’53. The quotations that head this story were excerpted from the booklet. It is clear from these recollections that the Monmouth College whistle is a beloved memory to many MC alumni.
