Talk Back! 
Most Read stories this week
Most Emailed stories this week
RSS1,000-pound rosary sends heavy message: Pray
NOKOMIS - Hail Mary, full of grace ? and if you sinners out there try to pray this particular rosary, you are going to need a back brace.
Not that fingering the 59 beads is the point here, of course. The rosary that retired quarry worker Bernard "Chub" Clark has created in his rural three acre yard near Nokomis is made of old bowling balls and probably weighs close to 1,000 pounds, give or take.
Behind the rosary is a cautionary sign, stark black letters against a white backdrop: "You know not the hour Jesus will come - please pray." Clark hopes the message rather than the rosary will weigh heavily on the conscience of rubber-necking motorists passing by on Hillside Avenue. Clark believes mankind has strayed further and further into the gutter and our Father, who art displeased in heaven, is getting ready to bowl us over for our wickedness.
"People have got no respect for themselves or anybody else," laments Clark, 73, a faithful Catholic. "And I do think, if we don't change the ways of the world, then the good Lord one of these days is going to say 'The hell with you' and stick a match to it."
He's convinced his 65-year-old Lutheran wife, Wilma, who has a 500-plus collection of angel figurines and thinks her husband is on to something: "The signs aren't good," she says. "Things just seem to be getting worse and worse all the time."
So, what to do? Her husband took the view, supported by his wife, that if people aren't taking much notice of God, you can at least remind them that he's out there in the great alley of sin, keeping score. Clark, who has bowled a fair bit in his time and fingered a personal rosary so fervently over the years he had to replace the worn-out beads with lead shot fishing weights, decided he could combine bowling and the rosary to make a striking statement about salvation.
He got it all done four years ago, linking each ball by ¼-inch log chain and attaching a 2-foot by 16-inch cross hewn from 4-by-4 treated lumber at the center. Word of his creation has gradually spread among the multitude, and various priests have dropped by for a visitation, too. In July, it made the front page of the Catholic Times, the official newspaper for the Catholic Diocese of Springfield, no less.
"After it came out in the Catholic Times, I don't know how many phone calls we got about it," says Wilma. "We've had a lot of people coming out here to take pictures of it."
Her husband even encountered a passer-by who confessed up front he was an atheist but, despite himself, couldn't hide his admiration for the bold handiwork wrought by a true believer. "He said he thought the rosary was really neat," recalls Clark, smiling. "So maybe it might be turning him around a little bit towards God, I don't know. It can't hurt, though, can it?"
Tony Reid can be reached at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.
Previous Page 
Subscribe 
Email Alerts 
Print this story 
Email this story
del.icio.us
digg
newsvine
facebook
Search By Issue
Search By Keyword
