James Clare Lamph, Bountiful, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, March 4 & 9, 2004: Saving the Legacy tape no. 646

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JAME LARE LAMPH R H 4 9, 2004 they used to in their shrines, clap their hands so they could wak th pirit up th Y could talk to them. But there was a big bell, and what used to be one our favorit pastimes was to ring the bell. The bell was as big as the house. The wall of the bell itself was so big inside you could go inside. The thickness of the bell wall was maybe thirty inches at the base. It was shaped like a regular bell, a big old heavy thing. How you rang it was with a telephone pole, like a swing, outside. There was two ropes hanging down which balanced it, and you'd get the telephone pole swinging. What we used to do was get that telephone pole swinging until it just almost touched the bell, and then we would yank it as hard as we could backwards, and then hang on the rope as the pole swung forward and really get it to going. It was a lot of fun to get that bell to ring. You could hear it for twenty miles. BEC: How was it that you got to ring the bell? JIM: You pay six yen. That was how you got to ring the bell. [He spins a toy top.] That's what it sounded like. It sounds exactly like that. So I got the little top which you just heard, which is the exact sound; it's as if you had just rung that bell. And it would ring for the longest time, it was so big. The fun thing was that you'd get inside the bell and when somebody rang the bell, you couldn't hear the bell ring inside. You could talk like we're talking now, but you could shout to somebody three feet away from you outside, and they couldn't hear you, and they could shout back. The vibration killed all the sound going between the two. It was real fun. While we were in Iwakuni we got permission to bring our families over, but we needed Quarters. Of all things, we couldn't find anything, so thirty of us got together and we built houses. We literally built our houses on a comer of the base, and we called it our 114