The Walla Walla High School football team played the season’s first home game on Friday, Sept. 11. As usual, the varsity boys made their entrance to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells,” performed by WaHi band students.
But this time, the song carried notes of history.
The somber tolls that opened the song came from a classic iron school bell wheeled onto the track that circles the football field. The bell spent years tucked away, unused and overlooked. And, thanks to community partnerships, it now has a fresh start at a local school.
The story begins last year with the opening of Blue Devil Stadium on the WaHi campus.
“It was the first time in the history of Walla Walla High School, which is fairly lengthy, that WaHi had ever hosted a football game on campus,” Chris Ferenz, the school’s athletics and activities director, said.
The school wanted to start some new traditions to go with the new stadium.
Ferenz had an idea: When the players march out to “Hells Bells,” the spectators should hear a real bell rather than a recording.
It turns out that the kind of large, flared-lip school bell he had in mind is rare, and expensive — often tens of thousands of dollars, Ferenz said. The school couldn’t find one in time to kick off the stadium’s inaugural season.
Eventually, Ferenz reached out to John Golden, the Walla Walla County Fire District No. 4 chief. The two men had coached varsity basketball together for years.
Ferenz asked if the fire district had an old bell lying around. It dawned on the chief that his district did, in fact, have a bell — the bell of Blue Creek School. Back then, school bells helped direct students through their daily schedules.
The one-room schoolhouse in the county’s Mill Creek area is long gone, and, since 1979, the property has belonged to the fire district, which built a station near the former school site.
The school’s bell sat silent in a corner of the engine bay for about four decades. At one point, Mill Creek residents had discussed building a stand for it at the station, but the plan never materialized, Golden said.
Golden researched the bell to make sure he could donate it. He contacted people who were among the last students to attend Blue Creek School. Of course they remembered the bell, they told Golden.
He asked them: “‘What do you think if we donate it, and it gets repurposed and used by a school?’” Golden said. “And they all thought it was a great idea.”
Students at Southeast Area Technical Skills Center at Walla Walla Community College turned the bell into a restoration project. They fashioned a new clapper and a blue, four-wheel cart to house and transport the several-hundred-pound antique, which will be stored at the stadium.
Meanwhile, the Big Blue Boosters of Walla Walla, a nonprofit that raises funds for the high school’s sports, auctioned off the bell’s first four tolls — the iconic “Hells Bells” intro — to a booster supporter.
The honor on Friday went to Charysa Chavira, of Walla Walla, who pulled a cord attached to the clapper.
A band student then took over, sounding the remaining nine tolls as his bandmates performed the rest of the song and marched in four rows along the track before spectators. The Blue Devils got into position to charge the field (and went on to beat Lakeland High School’s Hawks 44-28).
And a new WaHi tradition was born.
