We didn’t have a noon whistle, but we had a local volunteer fire department that tested their fire signal every day at (I think) 8am and 5pm. They didn’t have a siren; instead it was a loud honking that you could hear across the entire village. We called it the Fire Burp.
When there was an actual fire, they had some kind of code that they would burp out to say what part of town to go to. It was always three numbers of burps separated by pauses. I never found out how the code worked. I think they eventually went to pagers, but they still retain the burp as a backup and continue to test it twice a day.
The next town over had a siren, which I would only hear when going to soccer practice over there. I thought that was cool because all the dogs in the neighborhood would howl back at it.
No whistles in Garden Grove/Westminster, Cali. We did have a chilipowder factory near by that when the wind blew the right way made our school smell like heaven.
WTF?! Seriously?
Mind if I ask how old you are? (Approx. will do.) As some posters have pointed out, they (air raid sirens) stopped being used completely, or in some cases, stopped being used/tested on a regular basis. Some that did have them, discontinued using them quite a long time ago. (Which is why I asked your age.)
For that matter, not every city and town had/has one.
I don’t have any cites, but I seem to recall that cities that were considered strategically important (or ‘high value’ targets) installed the sirens about the time of (and as a result of) the ‘Cold War’ and the fear of ICBM attacks and ‘MAD’ (Mutually Assured Destruction).
They also serve other valid and important roles in a lot of communities at present, severe storm/tornado warnings in the Midwestern states and for tsunami warnings on the West coast.
Then again, perhaps your community (city? town? wide spot in the road?:p) doesn’t need one.
No important ‘strategic value’ and not threatened by tornados, on a regular basis.
Of course, I could be wrong on all counts and it’s just that you’ve lived a very ‘sheltered’ life.
I’m not Leaffan, but I’m 38 and never heard of the practice outside The Flintstones and Roseanne and 50’s television (and those were factory sirens, not just some siren the city set off for the hell of it). Grew up in a suburb about 15 miles from the southern border of Chicago, incorporated in 1892. No large factories there that I know of there. Used to be farms and “starter homes,” now it’s strip malls and McMansions and more strip malls…
We had a tornado siren (they still do) that tested first Tuesday of the month. Thing scared the hell out of me when I was a kid.
‘noon’ whistle, tornado siren, air raid siren, tsunami warning siren…
IMHO, just different names for what is basically a device designed to alert and or inform as many people as possible, as efficiently as possible, about something important (in some way) to their lives.
I’ve never lived anywhere that had a ‘noon whistle’, either. I have heard of, and read about, their usage, though.
And I can readily see the usefullness of a ‘noon whistle’, say, in a small town wherein the majority of the population worked at a large mill or factory.
You state that, “We had a tornado siren (they still do) that tested first Tuesday of the month.”
So, actually, you have “heard of the practice”, it’s just that it wasn’t a ‘noon whistle’.
I realize that my response to Leaffanwas a little ‘snarky’. (That was induced by his ‘Flintstones…time to go get some vittles’ comment.)
If you and/or he took umbrage with my comments, please accept my apologies.
Just because a locality had an air raid siren didn’t mean it was used as a noon whistle, or that they had a noon whistle of some sort.
Air raid sirens, yes; noon whistles, might’ve read a book where a noon whistle was in the story, but that would have been it.
ETA:
No, one thing is not the other. A noon whistle is a whistle that goes off at noon, not at 3pm on the first Tuesday of the month. Just because you’ve heard an air raid siren doesn’t mean you have ever heard of the practice of a noon whistle.
I don’t think I’d ever heard of a “noon whistle.” The local tornado sirens are tested at noon as it happens, but it’s not some vaunted local tradition, it’s just testing something that can break down to see if it will work when it’s actually intended to be used. If the county got rid of tornado sirens because they’re expensive and not especially effective, I don’t think anybody would demand that The Wednesday Siren continue.
(Leaving aside towns with functioning factories with a shift change whistle) I somehow doubt that any of the towns that had a “noon whistle” had a noon whistle just because noon was somehow important. They simply test at noon (or 5, or the second tuesday of the month, or some other regularly occurring time) the whistle that is used for a different purpose. In my town the whistle (actually a siren but we called it a whistle) was used to summon the volunteer firefighters. It might also be used for other purposes I wasn’t aware of. They used it well past the advent of cell phones and pagers, and might still use it today. I’m not sure because I don’t live there anymore.
I’ve never heard of a noon whistle, but I live across the road from a church that rings its bell every half-hour. (It’s a really crappy bell too; it sounds like 2 scaffolding poles banging together.)
Growing up in Manhattan we did indeed have a noon blast of the air-raid siren. Just now I can’t remember what we called it (maybe the 12 o’clock siren?) but it was very disruptive as I recall. We were half a block away from the siren itself and it was still incredibly loud.
In the small NJ town I now live in, there’s also a noon alarm. I’ve never investigated but it sounds like the same siren used for fires.
I’m 51. Sure the city in Ontario that I grew up in had an air raid siren in the school playground that got tested maybe once or twice a year up to the mid-1970s perhaps.
I don’t think Canada was as concerned about being bombed in the cold war.
On Saturday afternoons when I was a kid, they’d test the air-raid siren in Whitby, Ontario. It was mounted on the firehall near the Four Corners (the intersection of Highway 2 and Highway 12 at the centre of town). I’m not sure when they discontinued the practice. It would make sense to retain it as a tornado/disaster siren; we do get tornadoes in Southern Ontario.
Later, I worked a summer job at GM. I don’t remember any whistles or sirens at shift change there… we’d be in our places, and the line would just start moving.
So–called my 90 year-old mom. She grew up in Danville VA. The noon whistle was almost certainly from the Dan River Cotton Mills downtown. About 3/4 mile from her house. She remembers it from the 1930s. I still heard it in the 1960s.
Me neither. The only time-whistle I’ve ever heard of notified Fred Flintstone that it was quitting time.
My town would test the air-raid/tornado siren the first Tuesday of every month; I don’t recall what time, 10am sounds about right. Blasting that thing every day, or even every week, sounds foolish to me; nobody would realize when a real emergency were happening.
