New bells give Santa Barbara courthouse a ring of authenticity

For years, you could set your watch by the courthouse clock in Santa Barbara.

But the bells — well, you could barely count on them at all. From a tower atop one of the city’s most visited sites, peals rang out every 15 minutes — or 14 minutes, or 17, or not at all. Sometimes they struck on the hour, sometimes not. It was as if Victor Hugo’s famous hunchback had quit flinging himself from rope to rope, propped his feet on a gargoyle and started hitting the Bordeaux.

On top of all that, the sound was more tinkle than toll.

“It was ridiculous,” said courthouse docent Rodney Baker. “It was like, ‘Avon calling.’ It was totally synthetic.”

A richer sound in sync with a big clock didn’t seem too much to expect, especially in a landmark building renowned for its grandeur. However, the task was as complicated as any case ever heard along the dim, cool corridors of the 83-year-old courthouse.

In the world of old bell towers, it turns out, all is not what meets the ear. And in a town that cherishes its history, restoring it is a goal that can be elusive — even if only by inches.

The tale of the tower starts four years ago with electrical engineer Mostyn Gale, an avid amateur horologist, or clock expert. Gale had become so fascinated by the courthouse clock that “as kind of a lark” he got permission from county architect Robert Ooley to maintain it.

On Saturday mornings, he would wedge himself into the dimly lighted storage closet that held the inner workings of the 1929 Seth Thomas: an assembly of golden gears clicking away in an upright, forest-green iron frame, connected by metal rods to the four huge dials outside.

“It was a fascinating, wonderful thing,” he said.

Gale oiled what needed oiling and fixed what needed fixing. But certain gears were oddly pristine: “It was like the day they rolled out of the factory,” he said. “They still had their finish. There was no wear on their teeth.”

One day he made another astonishing find. Amid the room’s clutter sat five dusty crates with shipping labels from 1929. Gale opened them, tearing through wads of vintage newspapers. Inside were five iron bell hammers, as pristine as the gears that were supposed to connect them to the bells that were supposed to toll for Santa Barbara.

Trouble is, there were no bells.

It wasn’t any great secret, but neither was it something advertised by a city that embraces its past.

Nobody seems to knows exactly why no bells were installed. The Depression may have sidetracked plans for them. Someone may have realized they’d be too heavy for the tower, or, as was the case for Quasimodo, they would deafen tourists on the observation deck.

Santa Barbara is hardly unique. As it turns out, bells are a bit of smoke-and-mirrors in many churches and municipal buildings. While some have bells that are rung electronically, most have synchronized sound systems that broadcast recorded chimes, hymns or patriotic music.

“Nobody’s really up there ringing bells” in most buildings, said Jim Verdin, whose family in Cincinnati has been making bells, tower clocks, electronic carillons and aluminum “shells” that resemble bells since 1842. With cutting-edge sound technology, he said, “the average person can’t tell the difference.”

In Santa Barbara, faux bells started pealing in 1977 — a touch of gravitas in a town that likes to add a dash of silver to its hair.

The city’s trademark “Spanish” look — the white walls and red tile roofs that speak of a bygone day — came long after the Spanish left. After a devastating 1925 earthquake, city leaders stepped up a campaign to refashion an aging downtown with Spanish Revival architecture. They passed one of the nation’s first architectural review codes in 1929.

“By the 1920s, very little remained of the ‘real’ past of Santa Barbara and its Spanish heritage” aside from the Santa Barbara Mission and perhaps 20 smaller structures, wrote Patricia Gebhard and Kathryn Masson in a 2001 history. “Yet these remnants ... provided the rationale upon which the city was remodeled in an authentic Spanish style.”

In keeping with Santa Barbara’s new look, the courthouse was built to appear old and European. With ornate mosaics, Latin inscriptions, arches, turrets and sunken gardens, it was modeled after a medieval Spanish castle. Tile plaques in the Hall of Records even commemorate royal visits, including one by Belgium’s King Albert and Queen Elisabeth in 1919 — 10 years before the courthouse opened.

Still home to working courtrooms and legal offices, the courthouse has many local boosters, including David Bisno, an amateur historian and founder of a national program for senior education. Two years ago, Bisno led his class on the history of timekeeping into the junk-filled storeroom that housed the Seth Thomas.

“My pupils dilated,” said Bisno, a retired ophthalmologist. “I was blown away by ease with which I could teach everyone in the room how a clock works,” he said. “It was big, it was impressive, and it was so obvious you were inside a clock.”

Dick Schall, a philanthropist and clock collector who was one of Bisno’s students, also was wowed. Together, they launched a grand plan: a full-scale renovation of Seth Thomas Tower Clock Model 18 No. 2744 and transformation of its dark nook into a mini-museum available for guided tours.

Over wine, the two men and their wives agreed to split the cost of the Bisno Schall Gallery — a sum described by Schall, the retired chief executive of Dayton Hudson, the former parent company of Target, only as “a meaningful amount.”

Gale, the clock’s unofficial keeper, recruited volunteers from Ventura-based Chapter 190 of the National Assn. of Watch and Clock Collectors. They dived into the clock, disassembling it to clean, polish and, in some cases, repair or replace its thousands of parts. Gale had gears, screws and pinions spread out on tables in his garage. For nine months in 2010, the clock’s hands were still. On Dec. 31, 2010, they were back in action, awaiting the addition of the never-used bell hammers.

Meanwhile, the problem of the laggard tolling enticed Bryan Mumford, a self-described “crackpot inventor” whose precision timing devices include a clock designed to keep time on Mars. He got to work on a system ensuring that when the hammers swung, Santa Barbara would hear bells.

At the gallery’s grand opening last April, everything was ready. Five bells, the biggest the size of a small compact car, hung from the 20-foot ceiling. Hundreds of twinkling lights represented the constellations that Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino might have viewed on Dec. 4, 1602, when he named the coastline for St. Barbara.

Big names in time — Galileo, Albert Einstein and Sanford Fleming, the father of standard time zones — peered from a mural by local artist Ed Lister.

Revelers ate shrimp, sipped wine and gazed upon the shiny innards of the Seth Thomas. As 5 p.m. approached, Bisno called for silence. A few people pulled out cellphones to check an atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Cogs whirred and blades flew.

The hammers swung and came to a screeching halt within inches of the bells. Still, deep, resonant peals rang out, and if they sounded familiar, there was good reason: They were digital recordings of the carillon at UC Santa Barbara’s Storke Tower. The crowd cheered.

At last, Santa Barbara had its bells — clapper-less, fiberglass-coated foam masterpieces painted with the patina of age.

Real bells would have cost $250,000 each and required costly structural changes.

Regardless, the whole works was precisely on time — or at least pretty close.

Amid the revelers, Mumford checked his instruments and found that the swing of the clock’s 175-pound pendulum was slow by 85 millionths of a second. Ordinarily, he said, it’s off by perhaps 10 millionths of a second. He blamed it on air disturbances generated by the milling crowd.

“Fix it, Bryan!” someone joked.

There was laughter and more cheering. It was a nice moment in time.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com