If you find yourself on Main Street in Bangor roughly 15 minutes past the hour, you may hear a frog croak.
The sound comes from the clock mounted to the Maine Discovery Museum’s facade. Designed by Brooksville-based sculptor Joe Rizzo, it depicts a frog reading a book sitting on a pocket watch surrounded by a paintbrush, pencil, cello, stars and a globe.
Similar to a cuckoo clock, the number of croaks it emits corresponds to the hour, but the clock hands and noise are about 15 minutes late.
This means that around 11:15, downtown Bangor is treated to 11 frog croaks — twice a day, every day.
The hourly croaking is a unique phenomenon that brings color and quirk to downtown Bangor. But the most fascinating part may be that, despite the fact that the clock has hung outside the museum for more than two decades, many residents seem to have no idea the clock even makes a noise at all.
The sculpture, which is 13 feet tall and weighs between 600 and 800 pounds, was mounted to the Main Street museum in January 2002.
Kate Dickerson, the museum’s director, doesn’t remember when it fell 15 minutes behind, but the museum has no plans to fix it.
“Out of all our building concerns, getting the clock to chime on the hour is our lowest priority,” Dickerson said. “There are so many moving parts in the museum that we deal with, and I prefer to leave the quirkiness of it.”
Additionally, all of the clock’s mechanisms sit on the outside of the building, meaning the museum would have to rent specialized equipment to lift a mechanic to the sculpture.
When it was installed, Rizzo said the volume of the frog’s croak was adjustable, though Dickerson doesn’t know how to alter the sound now. But even if the croaks could be turned down, all of the people the Bangor Daily News spoke to last week who know about the ribbiting agreed the sound is a “charming” part of the fabric of downtown rather than bothersome.
Laura Ramsay has watched the popularity of downtown Bangor wax and wane over the 25 years she has worked at Bangor Window Shade and Drapery on Main Street. Today, Bangor’s downtown is “so much more vibrant” than it was years ago, and the clock contributes to that.
Joan Osler, who moved to Bangor in the 1970s, first heard the croaking shortly after the clock was installed. She still hears it regularly through the windows of her Main Street yoga and meditation studio. The colorful clock and unusual chime is part of what gives downtown Bangor character, she said.
Ben Layman, who has worked at the Penobscot Theater for 17 years, hears it often.
“I love it, I think it’s charming,” Layman said.
But his colleague, Mark Muir, who has worked at the theater for three years, had no clue the clock croaks.
Amy Douglass first heard the clock in 2009 while visiting Bangor for a friend’s wedding. She was downtown to find lunch and a few souvenirs when she heard it. At first, she couldn’t identify the sound, but a friend who lived in Bangor told her where it came from.
“I think it’s cute,” said Douglass, who has worked at Rebecca’s Gift Shop for eight years. “It’s something different.”
Loretta Kearns of Orrington, however, heard the croaking for the first time on Tuesday despite working at Rebecca’s since 2017.
“That’s amazing,” Kearns said after hearing the first ribbit. “I can’t believe I didn’t know about that.”
Joey Newell has never heard the clock in the six years he has lived in Bangor, but said the idea of a croaking clock is “a pretty cool and quirky thing for our area to have.”
“I’ll have to walk by and listen for it some day,” Newell said.
Neither Brandie Cardenas of Bucksport nor Lezlie Vogel of Old Town, both of whom work at Out on a Whimsey Toys, knew the museum’s clock croaks hourly. Vogel has only been working at the store for two days, but Cardenas has been the Maine Street store manager for two years.
While she has never noticed the croaking, Cardenas said she has heard “something strange, but we always thought it was the crosswalk outside.”
No one has ever asked Dickerson to turn off the ribbits, but occasionally someone asks where the sound is coming from “because it’s not an intuitive clock sound.”
Dickerson likes the fact that it makes people pause and listen.
“As a team, we find it delightful when it goes off,” Dickerson said. “It’s not a terrible thing in this day and age to have your curiosity piqued.”
