In the fall of 1977—40 years ago now, when we were freshmen at Georgetown—four of us climbed up to steal the hands off the clock on the tower of Healy Hall, 150 feet or so above the quad.
I’m not sure why the adventure came back to mind recently. Or maybe I am. Over the past few months I’ve seen notices of the deaths of classmates, both high school and college. We’re of an age, all of us from those days, that mortality is sad, yes, but not exactly tragic anymore. On the actuarial tables, it’s only a little unexpected. A little unforeseen. Heart attacks do kill people in their late fifties. Cancer stalks us. Degenerative diseases begin to manifest.
There’s an old tradition of Georgetown students trying to steal the hands from the two faces, east and west, of the clock on Healy. Finished in 1879, the building includes Gaston Hall on the north, the old Riggs Library on the south, and the clock tower in the middle—the three-part silhouette against the skyline that every Washingtonian knows. The theft of the clock hands peaked in the mid-1960s and then gradually petered out (although campus reports suggest a new spike in the 2000s).
But one day, our freshman year, a kid from South Carolina named Pat Conway stopped by my room in New North to say he had found something interesting in the quad. We were all urban climbers, in those days. The National Cathedral, up Wisconsin Avenue, was the Everest of Washington buildings, with near-permanent scaffolding that gave amateur building climbers, the club of stegophilists, a start up its Gothic sides. Georgetown’s quad had its own attractions, though. The fire escape on Maguire, for example, led to slate roofs, which could be traversed to the battlements above Riggs, for a nice view of the city.
Pat had been interested, however, in the other side of Healy’s roofs. A small square of wrought-iron fencing, a widow’s walk, sat on top of the northern rise above Gaston Hall. So Pat climbed up to it—and found a trapdoor that revealed narrow wooden stairs leading down. The next night, we gathered up flashlights and two more of our friends: Stan DeTurris from Poughkeepsie and Dave Barry from Matawan. Out to the roof from a gabled window on the top floor of Old North, through the valleys of the jumbled roofs above Gaston, up to the widow’s walk, and down the rickety stairs into the attics of Healy.
One door blocked our passage, but Dave jiggered it open. And then we had a straight walk to the central tower and up the stairs through years of pigeon guano. A small door on the clock face let us reach out to pry the hands off the eastern dial, looking out on Washington. The tradition was to send the hands to the Vatican, asking the pope to bless them, but Paul VI was elderly and failing. So we hid the hands under the floorboards of the balcony in Gaston Hall until the end of the academic year, when we presented them to the school’s president during his visit to our dorm floor.
A year and a half later, in the spring of 1979, Stan found another way to the tower, crawling through the air-conditioning ducts above the iron balconies in Riggs Library. That time, Stan and I took the minute hands from each of the clock faces. As I remember, we left them leaning against the front door of campus security. In 2014, I was invited to give a talk in the old library, but I spent most of my lecture eyeing the ducts for a route to the attic.
Pat Conway dropped out soon after we took the clock hands, leaving school to work with Fr. Richard McSorley in peace campaigns. Dave Barry went on to Georgetown Law, practicing in New Jersey. Stan DeTurris is a noted surgeon in Florida. And I . . . mostly, I just plod along these days, and in the mornings I read the obituary pages.
Still, once every year or two, I have a dream about mountaineering on the quad, from the slate gables of New North around to the roof of Ryan Hall. The dreams often involve a vertigo now that I never felt when I was young: a feeling that I might miss my footing on the old gray slate and fall to the bricks below.
I suppose we might have been trying to create a symbol, as we pried those hands off the Healy clock: metaphorically demanding that time stop. But I suspect it isn’t true, for we would have had to know then that time really was passing. And we only learned about time later, as we slipped down through the years.