The Evening Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 45

THE EVENING SUN ACCENT ON PEOPLE ARTS LEISURE PAGE Dl BALTIMORE, WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 1975 PAGE 1 'Good Ole Roy' Clark's Fire Warms Many Irons By Elise T. Chisolm Singer Roy Clark is rich and on the go and maybe the two go together In fact, it took four days to track him down for a telephone interview Where you been, Roy? "I've been on the run, you know. I travel between Los Angeles, Tulsa, Maryland and south to Mexico. But I'm sorry it took so long to talk to you," he apologizes And then he makes up for the delay with a 35-minute interview. Some stars wouldn't give you more than 10 minutes and that through a public-relations interpreter.

Roy has a big house in Davidsonville, that he is selling. He has race cars, yachts, airplanes and race horses. He has property in Tulsa and has bought a 37-room house there. "It's good to know that, finally. I'm making more than I'm spending," he comments candidly.

"Yeah, it's great." Despite his grand lifestyle, the real Roy Clark doesn't put on superstar airs. He and his wife of 17 years, Barbara, actually have a homelife. He says the one way his money has changed Barb is, "She stays shopping just a little longer." The star of the country-and-western "Hee-Haw" show on television turns serious: "If being rich is owning things and traveling and liking your work, then I'm rich. But it brings complications, being rich," he adds Roy Clark will be at Painters Mill Music Fair here from May 29 through June 1. with an 8.30 P.M.

starting time. "I can't wait till I get there and see some of my friends. I'm glad television has opened the barn door and let country music in, especially in Maryland." It took Roy Clark a long time to be discovered. "It was on the Tonight show, one time when Jimmy Dean was hosting, and from them on I got calls. Then came He can play the guitar, banjo, fiddle, trumpet and "sing a little." Roy jokes.

To those who work with him, he is very musically talented and a good business man, but his friends insist he's just "Good ole no swelled head. Overweight for a long time, he's down to 205. "I've written a diet book, called 'Roy Clark's Stuff Yourself Silly In it we talk a lot about all the diets that are out, but we think ours is a practical one," Roy says. He had help in writing the book and readily acknowledges this. At 42, Roy Clark is still not sure he's reached his peak.

Or branched out far enough. "I'd like to do some serious acting now. It's fun to try it all, you know." And loving every minute of it Roy Clark: he's rich, Old Bell Foundry Here Still Turns Them Out shipped a 350-pound bell to the Pres-sbyterian church at the Pine Ridgj Agency in the Dakota Territories on July 2, 1888. And visualize cowboys on a trail drive passing the Comanche County Courthouse, in Comanche, Texas, where a McShane bell went in January, 1892. And evoke horse-drawn pumpers when you come to the brown ink that says the Newark (N.J.) Fire Department bought a 10.000-pound bell a month later.

And the bookkeepers' entries tell you that across the years the Seth Thomas Clock Company bought a 500-pound bell to toll the hours for the stockbrokers on Wall Street and the Ursuline Convent in Laredo, Texas, put up a McShane bell to ring at matins and vespers and Chase School No. 8 in Baltimore county ordered a 60-pound schoolbell and the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Varne, Bulgaria, had a 400-pound bell shipped via the Johnston Line and the Rev. William Reed bought a 200-pound bell for the St. Luke Baptist Church at the Water Proof Plantation in Louisiana and J.C. Brewser Co.

installed a 150-pound factory bell in their Fayettesville Cotton Seed Mill in North Carolina and McShane shipped them a $7.50 steam whistle to go with it. And in 1883 the Rev. Edmund Didier had McShane put the 14-bell chime in the immaculate Georgian tower of the church of St. Vincent de Paul on Front street in downtown Baltimore. One bell was dedicated to Father Didier and the rest were inscribed and dedicated in an ascending tonal scale: Most Rev.

James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. St. Vincent de Paul, Pray for Us. Sacred Heart of Jesus, Have Mercy on Us. Immaculate Virgin, Pray for Us.

St. Joseph, Pray for Us. William Pinkney White, Mayor of Baltimore. Guardian Angels, Protect Us. Mother of Jesus, Pray for Us.

St. Vincent de Paul Church. Rev. John B. Gildea, Founder of This Church.

In Memory of Rev. H. Myers. The Orphans of our Asylum. An F-tone bell was left without an inscription, perhaps in hopes a donor might pick up the $3,217.60 tab, which included hauling the 15,000 pounds of bells downtown by wagon and raising them into the tower by pulleys.

Mr. Parker says it was a bargain: the bells of St. Vincent's would cost more than $90,000 today. You can still hear them played on most Sundays and Holy Days by Larry Fenaroli, a carilloneer. "You need 10 bells to play any music to speak of," Mr.

Parker says. "You need 15 bells to play most church music without rewriting it. Christ Church on Hill street has 16 bells, put in in 1958. 1 made those. The big bell on top is 3,000 pounds.

A swinging bell. Used for a call bell. Let 'em know when services are starting. And they're also used for a carillon or chime to play hymns, almost any arrangement." Most churches, however, make do with a "peal," which is two to five bells toned to a chord. But chime or peal, McShane still makes bells today with the same slow, careful, personal craftsmanship employed in 1883.

The bell for St. Joseph's is being handcrafted just as St. Vincent's chimes were. Mr. Parker, his son and Howard Messerly even use many of the same tools.

Bell making requires great skill, infinite patience, long experience and a little bit of horse manure. By Carl Schoettler In the jumbled clutter and tropic heat of the McShane bell foundry, a conical mold waits like a dormant volcano for the hot metal that will bring it to ringing life. Virgin copper has been melting for half a day in a roaring furnace that spouts angry green flame like a jealous dragon. The molten Straits tin that transforms the copper into bell metal simmers restlessly beneath a bed of glowing charcoal in a great pot nearby. In his curiously medieval shop with 100-year-old tools and skills, the bell maker, William R.

Parker, seems a kind of alchemist as he supervises transmutation of the metal into a 400-pound bell for St. Joseph's Mission Church, in Sequim, Wash. A master craftsman with heavy arms and watchful eyes and a kind of thick-fingered delicacy, Mr. Parker conducts the pouring of this bell like a choirmaster rehearsing an old and well-remembered song. Mr.

Parker is the president of the McShane Bell Foundry Company, which occupies this cramped and dusty workshop on East Federal street between Calvert and Guilford. The 119-year-old McShane company is the last bell foundry left in the United States. "Anybody can make a 10 or 20-pound ship's bell," Mr. Parker says. And McShane has cast plenty of ship's bells over the years.

(In fact, on this day, along with the bell for St. Joseph, Mr. Parker, his son, Bill, and foundryman Howard Messerly will cast a 15-pound wedding bell for a friend's daughter.) But when it comes to big bells like the 400-pound bell for St. Joseph, McShane is the only place in America that can do the job. The McShane foundry has cast more than 100,000 bells since Henry McShane started the business in 1856.

Edith Myers, the firm's secretary-treasurer, thinks most of them are still ringing, and ringing as clear and true as when they left the foundry. McShane bells have gone all over the country. The casting and shipping orders were recorded in neat businesslike script by the succession of bookkeepers who preceded Ms. Myers. The record books encourage the kind of romantic fantasies invoked by a rogues gallery of frontier desperadoes or a portrait gallery of Victorian belles.

You can daydream of High Plains Indians when you read that McShane Sunpapers photo-Ralph L. Robinson BEAUTIFUL BRONZE Mr. Parker and Howard Messerly put finishing touches on the bell for a far-off church. City Hall Bell Dates Back The McShane Bell Foundry cast Baltimore's City Hall Bell August 25, 1889, and it is named Lord Baltimorenot Big Sam as is often erroneously reported. Big Sam was, indeed, the bell put in the dome when City Hall was built in 1875.

Big Sam was made by Joshua Regester Sons in 1874 and was probably named for one of the sons, Sam, who was a city fire commissioner. But Big Sam cracked and McShane raised his successor August 29, 1889. Lord Baltimore weighed 7,503 pounds with positioning blocks, and sounded a note a semi-tone deeper than Big Sam: "Nearly B-flat," according to Nineteenth Century listeners. Lord Baltimore, which currently rests on Holliday street during City Hall renovations, is signed "John Adam Schmidt, Maker Schmidt, a McShane master craftsman, is remembered by many as Baltimore's finest bell maker. Joseph's bell mold.

"This is a 400-pound bell. It'll come out C-sharp. One-quarter inch can make 40 or 50 pounds difference. We do it by feel, to get the tone we want." The two-week process of making the two-part form is completed when graphite blackening is put on the surface of the molds "That's the finishing coat. It works out smooth as glass almost.

It's foundry facing. Keeps hot metal from cutting into the sand." And now in the McShane foundry the fiery liquid copper is poured into the waiting tin through an aurora of blue sparks and green flames. Bill, plunges a green sapling into the pot in an age-old process that amalgamates the metals into bell bronze. Then, with a sudden, cautious pur-posefulness, the metal is tilted into the bell mold: "Not too fast, Bill. Just steady Hold on, we got plenty of time.

Okay we gotta go kinda fast now." The red metal rises to the top of the mold and they are finished. The bell is poured pure and true. is the outside, is made upside down. The crucial implement is the "sweep," which is a kind of template that revolves around the cope or core and scrapes the gravel mixture into the bell shape. "The whole secret of bell making is in the shape of the sweep," Mr.

Parker says. "Bells have a lot of tones in them. There's the strike tone and overtones and partials. A good bell has three major tones: the strike and the hum and the octave higher. If they're in perfect alignment you have a perfect bell.

"And most of it is in the shape of the sweep. There's more engineering in one of these things than anyone dreams of." Mr. Parker says his collection of sweeps is priceless. He has made some himself, notably two patterns for replicas of The Liberty Bell which McShane cast. Some are as old as the company.

Many were made by John Adam Schmidt, a genius of bell-making who worked in Baltimore for a half-century till around 1900. "Weight controls tone," Mr. Parker says, resting his heavy hand on the St. "Horse manure? Yes," says Mr. Parker.

"Well, it's a binder. Ties the sand together and also makes the mold more porous. Lets the gas escape when we pour the metal. Nobody's ever found anything cheaper or better. Been using it a thousand years or more." The bell mold is made from Millville gravel, horse manure and water.

Millville sometimes called Jersey gravel got its name because it comes from Millville, N.J. Bell makers use Millville gravel. Mr. Parker says, "because it's the right texture and you don't have to add to it." The muddy mixture is handpacked on bell-shaped steel "cages," which Mr. Parker explains are forms you make bells on.

"There has to be a core and cope. There is a cage for the core and a cage for the cope. The core is the inside and the cope represents the outside. They form the mold. The space in between represents the thickness of the bell." Core and cope are made separately.

And the core, which is the inside, is made right side up and the cope, which Membership In Churches Religious membership in the United States dropped slightly in 1974 for the first time in recent history. An authoritive study shows that 61.9 per cent of the population held formal memberships in American churches, compared with 62.4 per cent in 1973. The count fell from 131,424,564 members in 1973 to 131,245,139 in 1974. The figures come from the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 1975, the most comprehensive source of statistical information on church memberships. The Roman Catholic Church, the nation's largest denomination, made a minor gain of 01 per cent, or 5.011 persons, in 1974.

The nation's second largest church, the Southern Baptist Convention, had an exceptional gain of 230,067 members. All other large denominations lost and numerous smaller bodies recorded gains or losses too minor to make a difference. KilfMNm Service Older Czechs Chilled By Actors In SS Garb Prague (AP) Nazi swastika flags decked the medieval buildings of Prague's Old Town Square. Drums and pipes of the Hitler Youth brought a chilling reminder to a small group of Czechs watching the making of a film about events leading to the Lidice massacre. Warner Brothers was filming "Seven Men at Daybreak," the story of the 1942 assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich by exile-Czech members of the British Royal Air Force.

Heydrich, sent by Hitler to rule the remnants of partitioned Czechoslovakia, was shot while traveling by auto to Prague Castle. The seven Czech assassins were hunted down by the Nazis, and rather than surrender they killed themselves in the crypt of a Prague church. The Nazis retaliated with a reign of terror, killing an estimated 2.000 Czechs. The village of Lidice outside Prague was razed, its men executed and their wives and children deported, most to their deaths in concentra-ton camps. "Yes, I remember it all," said an old woman watching the filming.

"Martial law was declared and there was shooting everywhere. I peeked around a gatepost and a bullet swished by "My sister and all her family were killed." a white-haired pensioner reported. A Czech woman cast a disapproving glance at an actor in full Nazi SS (elite guard) regalia walking through the Prague railway station to the set. "We shall never forget those awful, awful days," she remarked. For the middle-aged and elderly Czech spectators, the tragedy of the Nazi occupation was alive as if it had happened yesterday.

But young Czech extras in the film showed no emotion. "Aren't you uncomfortable to be seen in that SS uniform?" a young man was asked. "Why should I be?" he replied. "It keeps me warm on this cold day Sunpapera photo-George Cook McSHANE FOUNDRY-It's the only place of its kind left in the U.S. William R.

Parker fills mold with fiery metal.