After years of waiting, the clocktower’s chimes returned to campus earlier this month, ringing out every 15 minutes from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. 

Since most current students have never known the chimes to ring, it took a concentrated effort from Leon Stutzman, ’59, to put the wheels in motion enough to bring them back. 

“I have one of those recumbent trikes,” Stutzman said. “I’ve always enjoyed riding through the campus, but there were no chimes and it just didn’t seem right. It just felt kind of flat or empty.”

Stutzman moved back to Goshen eight years ago, and in recent times has started to miss hearing the bells.

“I started what I called a campaign of friendly pestering with Brian Mast, [director of facilities],” Stutzman said. 

Stutzman began writing emails to Mast, about once a month, making up stories recounting things like a family bringing their child to move onto campus. When the fictional parents, who are alums, realize their child won’t hear the bells, they break down crying. 

Stutzman said that as the Westlawn project got off the ground, he layed low on his pestering, recognizing that Mast was busy. But when Ervin Beck, a former professor of English and classmate of Stutzman, sent a letter to their class warning them that there would be no chimes at their 65th reunion, he felt the need to do something. 

“That kind of got me energized again,” Stutzman said, “… after 65 years, he was still associating the chimes with his Goshen College experience.”

Stutzman cut a check to the college, specifically for fixing the chimes, and contacted Glenn Gilbert, retired director of facilities, for help. Glenn got in contact with Grant Bachman, AV/IT systems specialist, who started working on the computer that ran the chimes. 

“I had to get a new computer that could live in there,” Bachman said. “I made a plan for securing it a little bit better. The space that it’s stored in has a bad habit of getting wet as it’s dusty. The base of the clock tower is just a rough space for a computer.”

Bachman was able to pull the original audio files of the chimes off the old computer, and set them up to run again. Although there have been some hiccups with the computer, causing a few temporary outages, Bachman is working towards getting them going for good. 

“I joked with someone once,” Bachman said, “that if I ever fix the clock tower, my price was going to be that I could play a song at noon randomly.”

As for Stutzman, he’s been enjoying the return of chimes.

“I ride my trike nearly every day for exercise,” Stutzman said. “[I ride] through the campus and wait for the chimes to sound, and then I go on and finish my ride.”