A Vision of Joy - My personal reflection about our city’s most popular landmark

 

A Carillon History Lesson.

A Vision of Joy

I had a meeting with Thomas Joy the other day. If you don’t recognize the name, he is the son of William and Judith Joy. His family along with the Perrine’s who are cousins owned the Sentinel for a whole lot of years. 
Mrs. Joy, Jody to many, was a world traveler and her treks were written about in nearly every Sunday paper from the 1970s until about 2015. Then her stories were reprinted in our Express Magazine, a tabloid we used to replace the Parade magazine our subscribers used to love. I say “we” because it still feels like family to me. I worked there for twenty years: four years in late 80’s/early 90’s and from, 2005-2022 after my 13 year stint at the Riverfront Times in St. Louis.

I worked a lot with Mrs. Joy. Although, I never got into the habit of calling her Jody since I was taught to call adults mister or mrs. At the Sentinel if you emailed Mrs Joy, you were emailing me. Mrs Joy never did move into the computer age. She typed on an old manual typewriter for as long as I knew her.

I had met William, aka Mr. Joy, the builder and visionary of the Carillon bell tower when i was at my first go-round at the Sentinel. I started there in 1987 and Mr. Joy passed in 1988. i saw him a few times. And my dad, Ed Walker, got to work with him. My dad helped install the HVAC in the bell tower.

After my long thirty-five year career in newspaper graphic design, I have been in a season where I have lost my parents and have been having health challenges that I have almost conquered. So these days I work as a front desk worker at the Centralia Recreation Complex. It is owned by the Centralia Foundation which also owns Foundation Park and the Carillon. For the last month or so I have been filling in answering phones at the Carillon. Having a bit of a history with its creators gives me a slight edge when answering calls from curious folks.

Last week Thomas Joy sat with me and told me bit about his dad and the Carillon creation and vision. Did you know William has been envisioning the bell tower since the 1950s? Thomas confided that the original idea was to put that structure atop the Sentinel building. He laughed and I joined in. Having worked there for so long, I knew that definitely wouldn’t have been a good idea. As a worker you see a lot of the building structure cracks that a building built before the Sentinel’s inception in 1863 would possess.

Thomas shared that the smallest bell is 20 pounds and the biggest one named after him and his grandfather, The Great Tom, weighs in at 11,000+ pounds. Yikes. Just putting that one bell atop the structure of the Sentinel building would definitely cause a lot of foundation issues. I’m talking tomb level issues. So it is great that they decided to build the Carillon across the street (Poplar) hoping to one day have a park surrounding the structure in the center of Centralia.

The vision of a Carillon park was an ongoing goal and it has taken many years to revamp the grounds as businesses fell away and the Foundation was able to buy up the property on that block. What a vision it is today. Did you see all those beautiful spring tulips at Easter time? It was a wonderful sight.

Coming on May 16th we will start our Summer Carillon Concert series as Karl Keldermann dusts off those bronze giants to play some beautiful music to our community. I hope you come and give it a listen. We will definitely be showering the town of Centralia in song very soon. Keep looking up and listening for the sounds of bells ringing.

Toni Walker, Carillion Assistant 

The photo montage of building the tower is located in our Carillon office on Elm Street. Did you know they called the area at the top where the bells live The Birdcage?