When Katheryn Kolesar went to Butler Elementary School 70-odd years ago, the boys wouldn't let her ring the bell.
"They said the girls were too dumb and we weren't strong enough," Kolesar recalled, laughing over the memory with former classmate Dorothy Moeller.That was then; this is now, and on Friday she pulled the rope and had her revenge.
"It felt good," Kolesar said as she and two sister alumnae from the days of girlhood oppression on the playground broke the boys-only bell barrier and let it rip.
Ninety-six-year-old Agnes Cronin got first honors, stepping up to tug on the cord at a ceremony dedicating the installation of the historic Butler School Bell at an LDS Church ward house at 7000 South and 2700 East.
It took the frail Cronin a minute or two to coax a tone from the 104-year-old bell, and when she did the crowd of 300 went wild.
The event marked the culmination of more than 60 years of private efforts to save the bell, which was thoughtlessly discarded when the schoolhouse of the now long-gone community of Butlerville was remodeled into a church meeting hall in the 1930s.
Local resident Ormand S. Coulam retrieved the bell from a junk heap and held on to it for 35 years before leaving the area and turning over the artifact to Grant and Norma Winn, whose daughter, Sally, said on Friday that her parents would've been pleased to see the bell restored to its original location.
"(They) felt it should be hung where it could be rung," she said.
The 340-pound bell dates from 1893, when it topped a schoolhouse in the corner of southeast Salt Lake County, which at the time was a sparsely settled part of the valley and a day's horseback ride from Salt Lake City. Today the site is in the midst of suburban sprawl in the still-unincorporated county just north of Sandy near I-215.
The dedicatory prayer by Butler Stake President Brian L. Sellers noted times have changed, as it included a plea to protect the bell and its new tower from vandals.
Much of Friday's ceremony was solemn, punctuated by frontier poetry read to a background of dreary harmonica music. The mood changed markedly, however, when emcee Carl O. Evans invited the excited audience to step forward and ring the bell.
"Come up in an orderly fashion," Evans urged a crush of onlookers, reminding them that police were on hand for crowd control.