Artifacts

story by John Heaney '02

The Sigma Chi Bell has been displayed in the Adams Center since 2000.

I remember the first time I saw the Sigma Chi Bell. It was sitting in the bed of a white pickup truck in front of Brantly Hall on a banner fall day in 1998. It was impressive. And it was huge. Looking back, I’m not sure how the truck’s rear axle didn’t snap under the weight.

But there it was, the legendary Sigma Chi Bell, back in Missoula for the first time in two decades.

Being a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity myself, I knew a lot about the bell. It originally hung on the USS Montana, a battleship built in the early 1900s that saw action in World War I. The ship was decommissioned in 1920 and renamed the USS Missoula. It was scrapped in 1930, and Professor Frederick C. Scheuch, a past acting UM president and founder of UM’s Beta Delta chapter of Sigma Chi, requested the small dinner bell from the ship as a souvenir. Instead, the ship’s one-ton bronze bell arrived, a gift from General Patrick Hurley, the secretary of war under President Herbert Hoover.

The bell’s new home was at the Sigma Chi house, where it was displayed in the rose garden until a summer day in 1955, when all of a sudden, it vanished.

Over the next twenty-three years, Sigma Chi brothers, hell-bent on finding the treasured bell, followed all sorts of leads in search of it, but to no avail. Then in early 1978, rumor had it that the bell was in the backyard of a rival fraternity at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Don Bennett remembers the first time he saw the bell in person, too.

“We heard it was in Bozeman behind the Lambda Chi house, so a group of us went to check it out,” recalls Bennett, a Beta Delta Sig. “It was winter, and there was about two feet of snow on the ground. We drove by the house, and, sure enough, there it was. It was encased in ice, but I could see the ‘USS Montana 1908’ engraving on it, so I knew it was the correct bell.”

Aided by a bit of liquid courage, the crew snatched the bell in the dead of night, hoisted it into the back of Bennett’s 1972 International pickup, and returned to Missoula.

Bennett says the bell was painted an ugly shade of purple, and it was dinged up. Apparently the Lambda Chis rang the bell at football games to celebrate Bobcat touchdowns. Bennett cleaned the bell and built a tower for it, which he assumed would be impervious to another theft attempt.

He was wrong.

At Christmastime that same year, a group of Lambda Chis known as the “Secret Six” swiped the bell back. It remained hidden for the next twenty years.

Rex Boller, also a Beta Delta Sig, remembers when he first saw the bell.

Boller, who spearheaded the efforts for the bell’s most recent return, knew the Lambda Chis still had it, despite rumors that it was sunk to the bottom of Flathead Lake or melted down. After years of negotiations, it took the threat of a lawsuit to finally get it back. The bell was returned to the Sigma Chis, as long as it was put on display in a public place.

“We got it back just in time for Homecoming in 1998,” says Boller. “And let me tell you, it was gratifying to finally see it. It was on a trailer, and a bunch of the brothers rode with it in the parade. There was a lot of excitement that day.”

Alumni Director Bill Johnston undoubtedly remembers the first time he saw the bell.

He was a neutral party who helped broker the deal, and he also was charged with driving the white pickup to Bozeman to retrieve the ringer.

“It was great to be the person driving it back,” Johnston says. “I’d just heard about the bell, but I’d never seen it before. I knew what it meant to the guys at the house, and it sure was fun to deliver it.”

Which is where this story began.

The bell has been safely displayed in the lobby of the Adams Center since 2000. It’s on an oak pedestal topped with a marble slab etched with the fraternity’s motto, “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (In this sign, you shall conquer).

“Even talking about it now gives me goose bumps,” says Bennett, president of Freedom Bank in Columbia Falls. “The bell’s been hidden longer than it’s been on display. It’s much better now that people can see it. There’s a great history behind that bell.”