Four of us had been trying to pick the locked door to the belfry, until finally we quit using an old pocket knife and tried a small piece of celluloid. Amazingly, the door swung open!
This was the Salt Lake City and County building, a block off the downtown area. It’s a massive building, constructed in 1894, with the appearance of a 14th century German castle. We were all 11 years old in 1950, and into trading and collecting pigeons.
The doorway revealed a rickety old stairway, heavily laced with pigeon droppings. This was a good sign. We eventually climbed to a platform with huge open-air windows. Mounted in the center were four enormous bells. We tried ringing them with our knuckles, but the sound was too faint. Then I found an old whiskey bottle in the corner, and in seconds the bells began pealing throughout the city for the first time in many years.
The bottle eventually shattered, but by then we had found a half-sized door that emptied onto the roof. We found ourselves on a narrow catwalk leading to a flag pole at the far end, just before the roof sloped downward. Gazing down at all the nearby houses and cars that looked like dollhouse toys, we became aware just how high up we were. We stalled for a while until someone said, “Well, let’s get it done,” so we continued to the flagpole, squatted down on our butts, feet first, and began carefully inching down toward one of the turrets.
We noticed a group of people 120 feet or so below us, not knowing they were fearfully waiting to see us fall, so we just waved. We found our birds in the turret, grabbed them and stuffed them into our shirts as they flapped and twisted and tried to escape. When we began inching back up toward the flagpole, my best friend Dale yelled that his shoes didn’t have traction and he was slipping toward the edge. I raced back up to the flagpole, cut the rope, tied it off and took it back down to him. We pulled him back up to the catwalk.
Bobby saw a cluster of birds in a different turret, so he took a slingshot and marbles from his back pocket and tried several long shots. Unbeknownst to any of us, one of the marbles arced downward and struck one of the growing crowd down below, knocking a lady unconscious.
We headed up a staircase, trying to calm the excited birds under our shirts, and came to the clockworks, walking directly behind the huge Roman numerals beautifully etched into the glass. Strolling out onto the balcony, we admired the magnificent front range of the Wasatch Mountains.
Then we saw a red light flashing on an ambulance, far below, mysteriously driving up the sidewalk. This was not our problem, so we kept climbing to the next balcony. The ambulance drove back onto the street, its siren wailing. We were getting tired of climbing, but soon reached a trap door that opened up into the tower. It was like reaching the summit of Mt. Everest, and we basked in the glow of the moment. The fact that we had made it without parental guidance made it even sweeter.
Then we saw three cops standing on the catwalk, looking up at us. It sunk in quickly they were headed our way and we, in that small tower, had no place to hide. Our first move was to release all those pigeons we had risked our lives for, thinking there would be no evidence against us — but we were covered with bites, cuts, scratches, feathers, droppings and blood. We decided to climb down to meet our soon-to-be-jailers, hoping they would be more merciful if they didn’t have to climb all the way to the top after us.
They took us to the juvenile delinquent unit in that same building — one floor below our belfry entry door — and called our parents. They spent the rest of the day telling us how decidedly dumb we were. They took great pains attaching labels to all our escapades: assault; breaking and entering; trespass; disturbing the peace; willful destruction of property. They said we now had criminal records. We felt like genuine gangsters and were very ashamed.
As our parents marched us out, I looked back over my shoulder in time to see our stern interrogators break into wide grins while tearing up all that paperwork. Nevertheless, that was the day we quit hunting pigeons.
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