One of the things that fascinated me most about BY High was the imposing old Education Building. From the first time I saw it, I had an image in my mind of flying a kite from the roof on a windy spring day.

We were always discovering a new passageway or trapdoor or ladder inside the building that went somewhere, but never to the roof.

"I wish I could get up in the attic of this building," I said one day to one of my friends, Jim Petty. We were both sophomores and it was 1964.

"You mean you haven't been up there yet?" he sounded surprised. I'd already been at the school for two years. "The way you get up there is by going up the ladder backstage in College Hall," he said.

John Boshard and I agreed to meet Jim after school in the College Hall auditorium. With Jim going first, we crept up the rough wooden ladder. I was excited to enter an ancient world of beams and rafters. It was surprisingly clean – we could hear the pigeons cooing, but not one had found its way inside.

Carpenters had long ago built wooden pathways across rafters, leading to neat piles of junk in distant, dark places. The large attic could be illuminated by light bulbs turned on with the simple tug of a string as you passed by on the wooden plank trail.

I was particularly fascinated by a theatrical contraption we found. It had been built to enable a person to fly through the air. It was designed to be lowered from a ceiling trapdoor near the middle of the auditorium, where it could glide down to the stage. Peter Pan was only one of the characters, I learned, who had descended to the stage using this device. I would have tried it myself, but it looked like the rope was pretty old. I made a mental note, however, to purchase a new rope and someday follow in the footsteps of the Wright brothers. Unfortunately, this is a mischief note that I never pursued.

Over the coming years, six or seven of us -- the "attic rats" in our class -- explored every nook and cranny in the attic, including the massive organ in its "locked" loft behind the "control booth" -- but that's another story.

We were all into "control" at one time or another during those years, and some BYH students considered the elected student body position of Speech Manager to be superior to that of Student Body President. After all, the Speech Manager got to oversee or "control" all stage productions, including assemblies and plays. It was a most prestigious office, and was looked up to by most of the boys who had little interest otherwise in school politics. The symbol of this office was the "control booth" -- but we had learned long ago there was no entrance to the attic from the control booth.

At one time, the BYU Art Department had been located in the top floor classrooms in the Education Building -- the fourth floor -- and when they moved out in the mid-1960s they left behind boxes of half-finished and rejected student and faculty art works, including metal newspaper and yearbook engravings, in various attic hideaways. I am amazed that even after several years of looking we continued to find more boxes.

But in all of our exploring of the attic, we had not yet found an entrance to the bell tower, the central architectural feature on the roof of the Education Building. From just the right angle in teacher Fred Webb's third-floor chorus room, you could see a small wooden bridge that led from the back of the bell tower to the roof. This nearly drove me crazy.

One day in journalism class, held on the fourth floor, I began to ask questions about why BYH did not have a bell in its bell tower. I learned it had been removed in 1949 and installed in a steel beam tower on the hill overlooking the George Albert Smith Fieldhouse. Its main purpose now was that it could be rung after college basketball and football victories. It was known as the "Victory Bell."

"Why don't you write a story about our vacant bell tower?" suggested our journalism teacher, Hal Williams. “Maybe someone has another bell that needs a good home.”

Lights began to glow inside my brain. "Maybe we could take some photos inside the bell tower to illustrate the story," I said casually. “How would we go about getting into the tower?”

Well, one of the keys on our journalism teacher’s key ring, it turned out, opened a door in the photography room. This door led directly to the narrow, steep stairs that went up into the bell tower. We wondered how anyone ever got a large, heavy