He entered the house and took the key to the toolshed from the hook where it had hung since he was little.
But the first time he rang the monastery's original bells was in 2003, at Harvard's Lowell House, where they had hung since the early years of Stalin's Terror, when bell ringing was banned throughout Soviet Russia.
Although loans have come from the major collection of his work in Bergen, most of the pictures have been prised from private collections, many from walls where they have hung since they were bought from the artist.
Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is currently held in the Louvre in Paris, where it has hung since 1797.
Only a few more days are left before the enormous blue whale that has hung since 1969 from the ceiling of the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History is lost to view -- but only temporarily.
According to the New York Times, conservators at the Guggenheim Museum — where the painting has hung since 1978 — have known about the man for years but only recently did the museum receive a grant that would help them clean up the mess that had been made of the painting over half a century ago.
Mr. Rose remains the sole original member, though the keyboardist Dizzy Reed has hung on since the early 1990s.
It has hung there since 1963, when a seventh grader wrote it as a sort of moral guide and that year's graduating class presented it as a gift.
But he said exclusive deals alienated local stores like Basement Mix, where he has hung out since he was a teenager and found a community centered on the music he loves.
West Indies has hung on since, through the fiasco of an abandoned match at North Sound, Antigua, where the bowlers' run-ups were unsafe, the cliffhanger in the hastily arranged replacement match at St John's, Antigua, a high-scoring draw in Barbados and now Ramdin's series-clinching vigil.
