Chimes Sour Note to Some

Never mind for whom the bells toll, for some residents of Sunny Acres Mobile Home Park in Oxnard they toll too much and too loud.

Even after Oxnard College officials agreed to turn down the volume a couple of decibels on the campus’ new bell tower this week, some neighbors prefer that it not toll at all.

A couple of weeks ago, the carillon in the bell tower began ringing on the hour, sometimes chiming a tune on an automated CD weekdays between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.

“They’re irritating, they wake me up,” complained Cher Rivett, a Sunny Acres resident. “It isn’t a chime, it’s a gong, and it’s on tape. My neighbor said it sounds like a funeral dirge.”

Rivett said she plans to gather signatures for a petition to take to the Oxnard College board of trustees asking to stop the ringing.

The college is already making efforts to appease complaints from neighbors, not all of whom feel like Rivett.

“We’ve turned the volume down a little from when we first started out,” said Ray Di Guilio, vice president of administrative services at the college. “We’re experimenting with it. Right now they’re just tolling the hour. And now I just got a call from someone who was upset and said, ‘I can’t hear them now--what happened?’ ”

Added Di Guilio: “We’ve had more favorable calls than unfavorable--probably 2 to 1.”

Other bell towers around Ventura County have rung regularly for years, apparently with few or no complaints.

“In fact, we get more complaints when they fail to ring,” said Billie Powers, who as an Ojai Civic Assn. volunteer has maintained the chimes in the Ojai post office tower for 30 years.

A local newspaper conducted a poll in the 1970s to gauge residents’ reactions to the bells, Powers said, “and everyone was for it.”

His wife, Lois, was a member of the Altrusa Club that raised the money for the first post office bell tower tape, which has been replaced with a preset CD that rings the hour with recordings of the Westminster Cathedral chimes.

“The drive for the chimes came out of the community, and I think that makes a difference,” Billie Powers said. “I’ve never heard anything but people say, ‘Gee, those chimes sound good.’ ”

The chimes at Cal Lutheran College in Thousand Oaks sparked “a few complaints at first, in 1974, but after a while the complaints died out,” college spokeswoman Lynda Fulford said. “Now people tell us how they grew up near the campus telling the time by our chimes.”

A tower clock in Thousand Oaks’ Oakbrook Village has been silent for more than a decade. Its only activity today: a swarm of bees flying in and out of a hive nestled under the clock’s hands, permanently rested at 3:32.

But some longtime residents of the area said they would like to hear the tower’s hourly chimes return.

“It wasn’t disturbing us at all,” said Charles Weisman, who has lived near the clock for 18 years and remembers when it chimed and told time. “If you have a clock, you may as well have it working.”

In Camarillo, the Padre Serra Parish Church with its bell tower opened in July 1995 and began ringing its bells on the hour.

“We couldn’t have had more than a couple of complaints,” said a parish employee. “Most calls were to tell us they like them.”

At the slightly older parish church, the San Buenaventura Mission in Ventura, the first bells in the mission tower did not ring at all during the 1800s because they were made of wood and were nonfunctional, according to a book on the mission.

These days, the San Buenaventura Mission automated chime tolls at 6 a.m, noon and 6 p.m. before Masses. Complaints about noise from the chimes are apparently minimal at the church, which was founded by Junipero Serra in 1782.

Times correspondent David Greenberg contributed to this article.