Towering Over the Traditions of UC Berkeley

The Campanile is 9 feet shorter than London’s Big Ben--and not nearly as famous--but few clock towers in the world have such grandeur or history.

Rising 307 feet above a courtyard full of sycamores, the Campanile has been the defining landmark at UC Berkeley since 1914. Sixty-one bells, the largest weighing more than 5 tons, hang in the belfry just above the open-air observation deck.

At noon, on the last day of classes, they chime an old Irish lament, “They’re Hangin’ Danny Deever in the Mornin’,” for students about to take final exams:

“What’s that so black against the sun?

It’s Danny fightin’ ‘ard for life.

What’s that that whimpers over’ead?

It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now.”

Generations of knowledgeable undergraduates have mouthed Rudyard Kipling’s lyrics for 75 years. No one knows how the tradition started, but the despair, for some, is real. At least three students leaped from the tower before bars were installed years ago to enclose the observation platform.

The Campanile’s four clocks are said to be the largest in Northern California, each measuring 17 feet in diameter. Alumni remember when pranksters managed to decorate them with Mickey Mouse hands. More recently, for Halloween, someone crowned the tower with a massive faux pumpkin.

Legends and stories go back as far as World War I. One involves gridiron hero Harold “Brick” Muller, who helped lead an unbeaten Cal team to a 28-0 dismantling of Ohio State in the 1921 Rose Bowl. Muller had the audacity and showmanship to try to catch a football thrown from the deck of the Campanile.

Visible from San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, the square bell tower, designed by John Galen Howard, is the focal point of campus life, said Charles Palmer, student body president during the 1968-69 school year. “I think for anybody who’s gone there, no matter what they were getting out of Berkeley, it’s a symbol.”

Palmer, now a Los Angeles attorney, remembers the tower as a place where secret societies met before conducting their initiation rites. “You were told to meet there ... and led to a meeting place,” he said. “You’d be cloaked in almost graduation robes, and there’d be a presentation about the history of the organization.” Some of the private groups date to the founding of the campus in 1868.

Although he keeps the vows of 30 years ago and declines to identify the society he joined, Palmer talks effusively about other tales involving the Campanile. Some center on the Big Game, Cal’s annual football matchup with archrival Stanford. To the winner goes “The Axe,” a perpetual trophy consisting of the head of an old lumberjack ax.

While Palmer was a student, Stanford was dominant and kept The Axe secure inside a locked case. Well, apparently not so secure, because Palmer’s friend John Welborne broke in with a screwdriver and got it.

“Alarms went off. Everybody went nuts,” Palmer recalled. “There was this huge hullabaloo about, ‘Where was The Axe?’”

Welborne, also a Los Angeles attorney now, devised a scheme for answering that very question. He shot pictures of The Axe in front of the Campanile--”so it was obvious where it was”--and sent 8-by-10 glossies to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Berkeley Gazette and both campus newspapers.

“The caption we put on the back,” Welborne said, “was, ‘The Stanford Axe Back Home Where It Belongs.’ ”

The end of the story was perhaps fitting. Cal lost to Stanford that year for the fifth consecutive time.

“I had to go down and give The Axe back to the Stanford football team,” said Palmer, who, as student president, was in charge of the formal presentation. “Not fun.”

More history rests inside the Campanile: bones and fossils from the Ice Age. Five cramped floors inside the tower, just above the lobby, hold thousands of relics of saber-tooth cats, mammoths, dire wolves, birds, insects, snakes and other animals that lived 40,000 years ago.

Most were dragged out of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. John C. Merriam, a Berkeley paleontologist, was one of the first to explore the pits beginning in 1912. His artifacts--and many added since--fill scores of shelves, drawers and boxes in dim rooms that few visitors get to see. Across one floor lies a fossilized piece of backbone from a plesiosaur, a giant aquatic reptile of 60million years ago, said elevator operator Lilyanne Clark.

“I call him my Loch Ness monster,” she said.

Nearby stand tusks and a massive jawbone. Dinosaur footprints are preserved in plaster. One set is marred by felt-tip pen: “Go Bruins.”

Even though the Campanile elevators are now closed for several months to undergo $400,000 in repairs, scholars still hike the stairs to study creatures of the Pleistocene, said paleontologist Mark Goodwin. “Scientifically,” he said of the relics, “they are irreplaceable.”

The Campanile’s construction began about the time Merriam was poking in the tar. The framework was erected in 1914. The tower contains three times as much steel per cubic foot as most skyscrapers. By the time the original bells were installed and a facing of white granite applied in 1917, the structure cost $144,000 and weighed over 10million pounds.

Formally named the Jane K. Sather Tower, for an early campus benefactor, the Campanile was designed after the bell tower at St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy. The Campanile spire is topped by a 20-foot-tall lantern that burns at night with a 1,200-watt light bulb. To service it, crews climb spiral staircases up through spidery areas above the observation deck.

The deck, framed with granite arches, costs $2 to visit when the elevators are working. The bells are visible above it, some 6 feet in diameter. The carillon--as the array is called--is played by a man in a glass-walled booth who manipulates some 60 baton-like keys and 30 foot pedals, all rigged to cables.

That man is Jeff Davis. He has been on the job for 17 years, having learned the obscure trade from the carillonist who preceded him.

Couples who get married at the nearby Faculty Club often time their nuptials to end as Davis begins a Sunday concert. They exchange rings and someone makes a call to the tower. Davis launches into a joyous piece from Bach or some baroque tune he has arranged specifically for the carillon.

“I have a huge repertoire--about 500 pieces,” he said, conceding that the bells are difficult to play. The carillon is California’s biggest, even larger than Stanford’s. But when operated by a master, it is also extraordinarily expressive, Davis said.

“It has the widest dynamic range of any instrument,” he said. “I can play it so softly you can’t hear it at the bottom of the tower, and so loudly you can hear it miles away.”