The closest I came was the activities bell at summer camp. It was pretty big, about what you’d have in your average church, and could be easily heard miles away at some of the remote sites like riflery. We also had revelry in the morning and taps every evening, but that via a camper with a trumpet that probably was in band back home.
Ours are community sirens, one at the fire station and one about two blocks away on the water tower. I don’t know why such a dinky town needs two of the damn things. No factories here that sound sirens that loud (there is a factory, but I don’t know if it sounds a siren). They were/are used as air raid sirens, tornado/severe storm warnings and to occasionally call the volunteer firefighters when apparently their pagers don’t work or something.
That was probably the case in my little town. We had a six o’clock whistle. I always assumed it was a reminder that the stores were closed, and that may have been one function, but it was also probably a daily test of the siren. I left town in 1988; I’m not sure how long they kept blowing that whistle, or if they still blow it today.
When writing about “sundown towns,” Jim Loewen has said that he’s always suspicious of towns with a six o’clock whistle; apparently, it was some signal that all blacks had to leave. That may have been the case in my little Blazing Saddles-like village at one point, but by the 1970s there were no blacks living within 25 miles of that town, and I could count on my fingers the number of black people I saw there in 14 years, so I don’t know whom they could have been warning.
Yep, absolutely. I grew up in a small town in western Wisconsin with the noon whistle. Was run by the fire department, with repeater speakers scattered around town. Couldn’t miss it in the junior high/high school. It was both a convenient way to test the whistle and let everyone know what time it was. If the wind’s really good, you can hear it out at my parent’s, 4 miles from town.
My current Minneapolis suburb has a whistle too, but it sounds at 9 PM every night. We call it the curfew bell (which it is - tells kids when they need to be in, as well as being a test of the tornado/storm siren).
Oh! I’m 36. So the noon siren was a fixture in our small town all during the '80s and '90s, and it still sounds (I think).
Boy, did I misunderstand this thread - but it brought back memories!
As one of three boys in the family, we were allowed to go out and play in the neighborhood, but my mother had a real whistle…and when she blew that whistle, all three of us boys knew it was time to come home - to eat, or get ready to go somewhere, or whatever.
Mom was the only one in the neighborhood who came up with this idea (long before cell phones) to get her three boys back to the house, pronto.
And woe be it if you were too far from home to hear that whistle!
I was shocked to find, while reading through the title to my house, that the town I live in now was a “sundown town” once upon a time. No six o’clock whistle here, but the town my parents live in has one, that is also blown for tornadoes and to call the volunteer fire department.
I think it’s a statewide mandate in Minnesota to test tornado sirens on the first Wednesday of the month at 1:00 pm. Every town I’ve lived in in MN has done that.
We had a 8 AM whistle where I grew up.
I live about a half mile from Greenfield Village– a small-town-sized outdoor Americana museum-- and every day in the summer I can hear their shift-start whistle at 9am, the lunch whistle at noon, and the quitting whistle at 5. They’ve been doing this my whole life, but I didn’t always live so close as to hear it.
No. The first time I ever encountered anything like it was in Japan. I lived in several different places in California growing up. Until now, I’d never heard of signal like that being independent of a clock tower or old-style factory. I had no idea that it was even a thing in the US.
The ubiquity of chimes (almost always the Big Ben tune) at 06:00, 12:00, and 18:00 every day was one of the things that weirded me out about Japan. It’s like they don’t know how to live without the regimentation. It still annoys me and I don’t like them.
I can’t believe the secret Service was caught unaware by something like this.
It seems that the chief reason for a noon whistle in some towns is nostalgia.
I must confess I sympathize to some extent with that sentiment.
In my backwater hometown in Louisiana, the volunteer fire department sounded a siren every day at noon–part test and part signal. It was right across the street from the high school, and at its peak, it pretty much drowned out everything else, so the whole school just sort of paused until it wound down. They had a set of codes for real emergencies. The tornado warning was a continuous siren, and there were about a dozen fire patterns that indicated which meeting point the volunteers should converge on. Most people could make a guess about where a fire was from the siren.
I don’t know if they still do it or not. I don’t recall hearing it during visits in recent years, but I spent very little time in town on those visits. They’ve probably scaled it back, at least.
I’ve lived just outside New Orleans my whole life and never heard of noon whistle. Plenty of church bell ringing the quarter hour but no whistle.
ETA: I’m in my late 20’s for those that might be wondering
In Edinburgh they use an artillery piece instead.
(It’s also at one o’clock, not noon.)
Now, that’s funny! (for some strange reason)
Y’know, I bet they (S.S. men) just hate when someone reminds them of that. 
No noon whistle, but I grew up with the sound of the Broadmoor escape siren* which was (and still is) tested at 10am every Monday. (Of course, any lunatics who wanted to escape knew exactly the best time to do so 
)
*As name-checked in Sound of the Suburbs by The Members, punk fans!
I’m within hearing distance of that siren right now, but never hear it because that’s the time our office chooses to test the fire alarm. I’ve been here 12 years and I still jump when it goes off.
When I was a kid in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa we also had a loonie alarm for the mental hospital, plus occasional tornado warning tests.
When I was working at Boeing in Wichita I seem to remember a noon whistle. I was in the computer center away from the factory so it wasn’t obvious.
This thread is a trip. I grew up in a small town in Northern IN, and until just now was convinced that the Noon Whistle was a unique custom. Sadly, nowhere else I’ve ever lived has had one.
I also miss the 3am train that used to blow its horn as it passed. In retrospect the engineers might just have been jerks, but occasionally waking up to hear the train in the distance is a fond memory. It’s probably less so for those poor folks who lived closer to the tracks.
When I was visiting there about four years age it still blew.
I grew up in a lumber mill town. The whistle blew at 07:00, 12:00, 17:00, &22:00. It did not blow at 03:00. These were for the shift changes and for lunch 1st & 2nd shifts. 3rd shift was on its own. It did not blow on Sunday. I visited there about a year ago, and it still blows.
When I worked in other lumber mill towns in the Pacific Northwest, they always had, at least, a noon whistle. I have worked in other towns that had a factory or some other kind of mill, and most, if not all, had at least the noon whistle.
Church bells are another story, but most of these towns had, at least one, noon bell. Often one could hear three or four churches ringing their bells at noon.
Train whistles, again, another story. Here, we have a train come through at 02:15 every morning. It blows its whistle for the crossing on the highway.
The college I go to has a noon chime. It is electronic. They could do away with it, as it is, IMHO, just noise.
In the North German town where I grew up (ages 10 to 20) the sirens that served as both air raid and fire sirens were tested every Saturday at noon - with the ‘all clear’ signal so there was no danger of confusion. Saturday siren and Sunday lunch were part of the rhythm of my childhood. We knew the signals for ‘fire’, ‘switch on radio’, and ‘bombers or missiles incoming’ by heart.
Some time in the 1980s the fire brigade came to rely on pagers and a few years later the civil defence function was also discontinued. I recall a time sirens were as visually ubiquitous in German town as mobile phone antennas are now…