Alumni // Notre Dame Magazine // Notre Dame Magazine

Making It on Her Own . . . and You Can, Too

2012-05-17T09:00:00-04:00

Meg McElwee ’03 knows that the best things in life are often the most simple, like buzzing two pieces of fabric through a sewing machine, sketching out plans for a new dress or running her fingers over the fabric that will soon become a fort for her boys.

“Like any creative art, the pleasure and balm is found in the process and the product,” says McElwee, who learned to sew as a young girl.

While working as a teacher in Chihuahua, Mexico, McElwee was inspired by the rural landscape’s bold colors and the simple lifestyle of those around her. Instead of being able to run to a store when she wanted a new shirt, McElwee would sew it up herself.

She designed and created her own clothing, countless objects for her home and tools for her classroom, including aprons for her students’ cooking and painting activities. “The process,” says McElwee, “is, at once, meditative and challenging. The product is a thing of functional beauty.”

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With the encouragement of her husband, Patrick, McElwee began selling her patterns online. At first, this was a simple way to fund her “fabric habit.”

By the time the couple moved to Durham, North Carolina, her hobby was a growing business, Sew Liberated. She soon gave birth to Finn, now 2½, and Lachlan, 1, and running her own business fulfilled the dream of working from home while raising the children.

McElwee believes the benefits extend far beyond the income and personal satisfaction that Sew Liberated generates. “My design work,” she says, “helps fill me with a relaxed enthusiasm that I can then transfer to mothering my boys, and being an inspired parent has a far-reaching ripple effect on society.”

She enjoys creating spaces for her young boys to play, read and explore, as well as clothing that is well-suited for their active lifestyle. “I’m making Lachlan a pair of insulated, waterproof pants,” says McElwee, “so that he can comfortably sit and scoot while we explore the natural world during our frequent nature walks.”

The 30-year-old loves the fact that design and sewing give her the ability to customize clothing and home to suit her style — practical, simple, comfortable — while living within her means. She also enjoys “the freedom that comes with being able to sew clothing that fits your body, not the unrealistic measurements of the fashion industry.”

This freedom and adaptability is part of what make her sewing patterns, and the projects found in her books, Sew Liberated (2010) and Growing Up Sew Liberated (2011), appealing to so many — her company has sold more than 55,000 patterns. The clothing’s simple and elegant construction can be adjusted to any body type or fit. Sewists use the basic project as a blank slate, allowing their fabric choices, unique embellishments and personal touches to shine.

Through Sew Liberated, McElwee shares her love of this process and encourages others to showcase their unique style. “Sewing, design and crafting spaces are creative activities that replenish my energy reserve. Mothers must make it a priority to fill their own cups,” says McElwee, “and one way to do that is to delve into sewing and design.”

Grace Myers is a freelance writer who blogs at BetterWritinginBusiness.com. During her free time, she enjoys crafting and has made three versions of Sew Liberated’s Schoolhouse Tunic.

By Natural Design

2012-05-17T08:45:00-04:00

Andrew Sarnecki ’00 will tell you, “I don’t like the word ‘fashion.’” At least, that is, not in relation to his business.

This from a guy whose merchandise sells in more than 500 shops in 16 countries, including Australia, Japan and Costa Rica. That merchandise? Men’s surfing and climbing apparel.

But to him, he explains, the word “fashion” evokes images of runways and models. “I think of ‘high fashion,’” he adds. “Something that is not obtainable for most people.”

And Sarnecki, the 34-year-old creator and part-owner of HippyTree, a home-grown clothing company geared toward the “open-minded,” as its website states, is no elitist clothier. Images at the site of Sarnecki sporting flip-flops kind of give that away. “I didn’t go to design school or study fashion,” he says. “We’re into making wearable goods for your everyday person.”

Sarnecki grew up in La Habra, California. There, he and his family enjoyed the area’s many beaches, with Huntington and Newport as two of their favorites. During those early years, he says, he found himself swept up in something other than the tide. “The surf culture caught my eye,” Sarnecki says. “Whether it was the bright clothes or the baggy pants, I don’t know. That may have been a small part of it.”

But as a teen, he adds, the anti-establishment attitude of the surf culture really gripped his attention and his imagination. “It had its own fashion, music and art scene,” he explains, noting the brilliantly designed displays in local surf shops and print ads in surf magazines. Even “the graphics on the clothing and decals on the surfboards were inspiring.”

At that time, he says, “Many of the companies making surfboards and surf wear were not large corporations. They were start-up companies founded in people’s garages, and they were selling their products to independently owned surf shops run by surfers. This was all very appealing to me.”

So much so that after graduating from Notre Dame, where he majored in photography and graphic design, Sarnecki made the trek back home seeking work in the surfing industry.

Not long after his return, he took a job at Body Glove, a wetsuit company in Redondo Beach. During his six-plus years there, Sarnecki says, he touched all the creative functions of the business. Starting as an entry-level designer he moved from crafting hang tags and logos to product design of surfing wetsuits. Eventually he transitioned into advertising and marketing for the label and was hired as art director. All the while, he pursued his true career goal, surf and underwater photography.

He submitted his photos to the local surf magazines. “I was getting stuff published,” he says, “but things weren’t lining up the way I wanted.”

So Sarnecki, who had since moved to Hermosa Beach, in an area southwest of Los Angeles known as South Bay, started publishing his own surf photo booklets. He distributed them for free to surf shops. “I was building relationships with the shop owners,” who strongly encouraged him to create products they could sell in their stores, he says. In 2004, he released his first tide calendar, featuring his own art-driven photography, and a T-shirt under the HippyTree label. Within months, 12 stores sold out of his goods.

He continued to add to his product line, specializing in T-shirts that featured his playful graphics and photography. The company took off from there. “I’m an artist,” Sarnecki says. “I’m into designing practical garments that people need.” And what guy doesn’t need a dozen T-shirts a year and a sweet pair of nonbinding board shorts?

It may sound easy, Sarnecki says, but it isn’t. His sister Carolyn, who is a partner and the company’s COO, laughs, albeit sweetly, about her brother’s success. “We always knew Andrew had a special talent and that he would do something creative with it,” she says. “But, really, Andrew was an accidental businessman.”

However, she adds, over the years she has watched Sarnecki and the business evolve. The corporatization of the surf industry, marked notably by surf giant Billabong’s acquisition of other surfing retailers, she says, forced the company to adapt. In this regard, Carolyn credits her brother for his vision for the business. “He was able to look ahead and see how things would be changing,” she says, noting that the company is remapping its website and launching an online store. Still, she adds, “we appreciate the importance of the core surf shops. In order to be a relevant brand in our industry, you have to have a core.”

In return, Sarnecki lauds his sister, who holds an MBA from Columbia University, for keeping questionable business decisions in check. If he wants to shoot photos at Yosemite with some of their sponsored climbing athletes, for instance, his sister is there to weigh in on deadlines and dollars. Recently the label added climbing apparel to its line, Sarnecki says, tapping into the camping and outdoor industry with its “Surf and Stone” marketing platform. Reaching that niche, he adds, has been good for business.

Though HippyTree’s product-line is modest — mostly men’s T’s, sweatshirts and swim trunks — its marketing techniques take it beyond ordinary.

Sales manager and third business partner Josh Sweeney touts the company’s “Plant a Seed” campaign as proof of the effectiveness of building relationships in business. For the promotion, HippyTree packaged sunflower seeds in some of its product tags. They then asked buyers to grow a plant from those seeds and send in pictures of themselves with the plants when they bloomed.

“It took several months for people to grow that seed,” says Sweeney, a childhood friend of Sarnecki’s. “And every time they touch it they are subconsciously thinking of our company.” Plus, he adds, he and his associates like the personal reward that comes from “creating a cool conversation and dialogue” with people around the world. “It’s fun.”

The casual wear continues to sport Sarnecki’s unexpected and whimsical graphics — a tree shaped in the hang-loose surf symbol, a curl of a wave formed by wheat grass. Images, he says, that reflect both his childhood and adult experiences of nature that range from the Sequoia National Forest to Patagonia to the Galapagos Islands. “Of course all these beautiful landscapes I’ve witnessed have inspired the work.”

Nature imagery reaches every age and demographic because everyone can relate to it, says Sarnecki, who gets a surf in every couple of days before heading to the office. And if business wasn’t such a natural part of his life already, even Sarnecki’s mom helps out with billing and inventory a few days a week.

“It’s important that we are accessible and touchable,” adds Sweeney. “Our customers and fans see that we are normal people, just like them.”

Jessica Trobaugh Temple is a freelance writer living in South Bend.

O’Brien embodies commercial success

2012-04-30T08:45:00-04:00

Actor Dan O’Brien ’99 was tailgating before the Notre Dame at Stanford game last Thanksgiving weekend when a fellow tailgater began gesturing wildly in his direction and approached him.

As one of the co-stars of Whitney, NBC’s hit ensemble comedy (think Friends) O’Brien has had to adjust to being recognized — and sometimes accosted — by fans.

But this fan did not recognize O’Brien from the show. He was absolutely certain he had come upon the Fighting Irish leprechaun mascot — traveling incognito — and was determined to unmask him. “Yes you are! Don’t lie! I know you are!” the man insisted.

“I suggested the man might be thinking of the Xerox commercial that plays during Notre Dame games,” O’Brien recalls, chuckling. In it, O’Brien’s character discusses photocopying with a cardboard cutout of the leprechaun. “See! I knew it!” the man announced triumphantly before asking O’Brien to pose for a photo with him.

When O’Brien traveled to his native Alexandria, Virginia, for Christmas — he is part of a large, close-knit Irish-Italian family — his cousins stopped by to have photos taken with him, “so they could prove to their friends we were related.”

Such attention, though flattering, seems to have little effect on O’Brien, who recently moved his family from New York City to Los Angeles, where Whitney is filmed. Despite being a seasoned pro — his resume boasts an impressive array of stage and screen credits — the 34-year-old actor displays none of the self-absorption one might expect from a guy on the fast track to Hollywood stardom.

He’s just jazzed to have the gig.

Working on a sitcom filmed before a studio audience, “is the best of both worlds,” O’Brien enthuses, “It’s like live theater — but with do-overs.” In addition, he says, “It’s the best schedule in Hollywood. You go to work every morning and come home every afternoon.” Whitney allows him to spend “more time than ever before” with his wife and three children.

His acting life wasn’t always so cushy. Before he landed the role on Whitney, O’Brien spent 10 years in New York — primarily on the stage. He worked “every odd job under the sun.” Some part-time jobs were what one might consider typical for an aspiring actor — waiter, bartender, theater manager, extra on Law and Order — others were more unusual, such as supernumerary (nonspeaking actor) in productions at the Metropolitan Opera.

“As an actor you are always having to quit jobs when you get a play,” O’Brien says, “so I was always on the make.” One of the “craziest” jobs was “working as an undercover spy for a private eye firm.” O’Brien’s job was to track down and tally the number of knock-offs (counterfeit products) in Chinatown. “They hired a lot of out-of-work actors,” he explains. To avoid being recognized, “we had to wear really silly costumes.”

Despite the odd jobs, “I was always sort of ‘making it’ as an actor in my mind because I was always working on a play,” O’Brien says. His break came when he was doing a play with friend Michael Hannon, who “took me under his wing and introduced me to his agent,” O’Brien says. “I owe my career to him.”

That agent helped O’Brien get commercial auditions and finally “break into the business” (defined as getting paying work) when he was hired to do a commercial for America Online in 2004. “I thought I’d be on easy street,” he recalls, “but in fact they hardly played it. I just barely covered my union entry fees.”

As his reputation grew, more work followed. “About five years ago I started making really good money doing commercials — conveniently around the time I started a family,” he says. But easy street wasn’t always easy for the stage actor who had labored long and hard for the purity of his craft. O’Brien struggled with nagging doubts: Had he “sold out” by doing advertisements?

“I had a moment when I walked into my commercial agency and told them I couldn’t do it. I told my wife we needed to give back the money I’d made. She was pregnant with our first child at the time. She was nearly in tears. I prayed about it and asked God to give me a simple answer. I talked to my parents’ priest. Finally, one guy, Father David, said, ‘Get a grip. Keep doing the commercials — you can use your money to do good things.’”

He met his wife, Julie Shavers, a playwright and fellow actor, in 2002 when he answered a casting call in Back Stage magazine for a play she had written. At the audition, he recalls, “Julie told the director she had to cast me, because she was going to marry me.” O’Brien says he “knew” too, by the play’s second rehearsal. The couple has produced four plays together, including Silver Bullet Trailer, written by Shavers. They were married in 2005 and have three boys, Ammon, 5; Ivie James, 3; and Austin, 1.

O’Brien says the couple’s decision to move to Los Angeles was “a leap of faith. I prayed a lot about it. My sister-in-law is fond of saying ‘the Lord takes care of babies and fools,’ so I figured I was covered on all fronts.” Former classmate Andrea Kavoosi ’99 covered one front, introducing him to Vikram Dhawer of Authentic Talent and Literary Management, who became his agent in L.A. Dhawer worked to get O’Brien many film and television auditions — including the one that earned him the role of Mark on Whitney.

“As soon as I watched his commercial reel,” Dhawer recalls, “I knew I wanted to work with him because he was ‘that guy’— the guy I had seen in multiple commercials who was always funny and interesting enough to actually make me pay attention to the commercial.”

O’Brien credits Dhawer with also steering him toward more creative ways to get work — such as video auditioning for roles. With the advent of YouTube, if an actor wants a part nowadays, O’Brien says, it’s not uncommon for him to videotape himself reading the part and send a video link to a director or casting agent. One online audition caught the attention of actor/director Clint Eastwood — and nearly landed O’Brien a part in the film Gran Torino.

Even live auditions that don’t pan out are not a waste of time, O’Brien says. “If you do a good job and maybe aren’t exactly right for a part, a director will remember you and you could get called for something else.” Such was the case when O’Brien auditioned for Ben Stiller, who was directing a television pilot. O’Brien didn’t get the role, but Stiller was so impressed with O’Brien’s reading that he hired him to participate in a reading of a film script by Aaron Sorkin.

O’Brien admits he was a little star-struck when he arrived at Sorkin’s Hollywood Hills home to find a room full of well known actors with whom he’d be reading. Despite being on a successful prime-time sitcom, O’Brien has trouble even now imagining himself a peer to legendary actors. Achieving celebrity later — rather than sooner in one’s career — “keeps you humble,” he says.

On Whitney, O’Brien plays Mark — an irreverent, girl-chasing, commitment-phobic police officer with a penchant for blurting purple prose. O’Brien, in contrast, is a devoted husband and father and devout Catholic who recently put his two older boys in “timeout” for calling each other “dummies.” His children are not allowed to watch the show — too adult.

The day after an episode airs, O’Brien says, he is often teased by friends about the “dirty” things he says on camera. But, O’Brien adds, “I like giving this guy a voice. He has a point of view, and I want to show it . . . to show how he got there.”

Whitney Cummings, O’Brien’s boss as well as co-star, says, “I saw hundreds of actors, and he had the job when he said the first line in his first audition. He was so fresh, so real, so inherently funny. I knew I had struck gold.”

As the character evolves, viewers get to see Mark’s vulnerability, and O’Brien’s influence. In one episode, Mark is a Notre Dame fan (O’Brien, whose father, grandfather and brother are also ND grads, lobbied for it in the script). In another, Mark lets slip that he’s not as sexually experienced as he’d claimed. When he’s called on it, he explains he was raised Catholic — and considers “the act” to be something “special.”

Cummings says she is “the most protective of the role of Mark because secretly Mark is me and all my propaganda. Mark is a very complex character who keeps unveiling new dimensions that I think are surprising everyone . . . watching him negotiate who he thinks he should be with what makes him happy.” On O’Brien’s influence, Cummings deadpans, “Dan’s real life isn’t much of an inspiration, because from what I know he just constantly churns out children.”

Bitten by the acting bug in 7th grade after landing a part in a school play, O’Brien began acting lessons, fell in love and never looked back. In high school, “I did all the plays and really found my group of friends there.”

He landed his first professional role — lead in an off-off-Broadway play — the summer after his sophomore year at Notre Dame. Today his resume reflects a solid balance of stage and screen work, plus a few special skills — “stage combat,” “accents” and “an unbelievably realistic cricket sound.” A lifelong musician and composer, O’Brien enjoys playing piano and guitar, and still plays in a garage band “when my wife is out.” He also plays the trumpet, an instrument he played in the Notre Dame Marching Band his freshman year.

O’Brien hopes to do more writing and directing, and is currently at work on a screenplay with fellow Notre Dame alum Pete Cilella ’99. He would also, someday, like to write a script “about the Catholic experience . . . being Catholic . . . from a liturgical point of view. So much is happening right now . . . changes to the Mass. I would really like to explore some of that.”

Liz (Woyton) Warren is a freelance writer and lifelong Irish fan. She lives with her husband in Southern California.

Domers by Design

2012-04-03T07:10:00-04:00

Sure, a Notre Dame sweatshirt or a leprechaun painted on the garage door displays your true colors. But not everyone wants to be such a show-off. To discreetly cheer the home team, you could grab some items your classmates helped create and quietly let your inner Domer shine.

Proudly dress in cutting-rooms scraps and plastic bottles with a shirt or hoodie from SustainU, a company founded by Chris Yura ’03. The former ND football player and model knows that clothing featuring “100 percent recycled apparel that’s made in the USA” is the essence of cool. Help clean up the world at sustainuclothing.com.

For the Skechers Blazed youth sneakers, Scott Kelley ’03 ran the extra mile. He designed a utility patent on the shoe closure system, which is “capable of rapid adjustment in multiple planes of movement.” Yeah, what he said. The new zig-zag closure is great, but the flames are more apt to get the kids fired up. Can be found wherever Skechers are sold.

You probably can’t golf as well as Luke Donald, shown here at the 2011 Masters tournament at Augusta National Golf Club, but you could dress like him. Maureen Whitaker ’02, a design director for golf and tennis at Ralph Lauren, and her team designed and styled this look inspired by the azaleas spread throughout the Augusta course. The RLX tech pique polo shirt and RLX Cypress pants are available at ralphlauren.com and select golf clubs’ pro shops.

Author, TV personality and jewelry designer Katharine Sise ’01 likes to do custom designs and is known for her multi-chain necklaces with charming little attachments, but her fine jewelry is truly a treasure. So go for the gold — or, if you prefer, the brass or the silver chains — at katharinesise.com.

Brian Murphy ’93 and his wife, Jessie Randall, put their best foot forward in 2004 when they formed Loeffler Randall. Murphy is the company’s CFO, while his wife, as president and creative director, continues to oversee the design of the brand’s high-fashion shoes, like this black/cream woven jacquard Dita platform pump.

Anne Slowey ’82 is a Fashion Know It All. No, that’s not being snarky — it’s the name of her column for Elle magazine, where she is the fashion news director. While the men can get their tips from GQ, headed by not one but two ND grads, the ladies can ogle Elle to find Slowey’s advice or do a search for her blogs and columns at elle.com.

Snipped

2012-04-03T06:10:00-04:00

“Who are you wearing?”

I blinked at my female friend. She’s hammered, I thought. She didn’t mean “who,” she meant “what.” Panicked that I’d committed a fashion faux pas, I glanced down at the clothes I’d worn to the party in early October 2010. But nothing was amiss, which is to say I looked like I always did: as though a tornado had struck the men’s sections of only two stores in the mall and then deposited their contents into my closet.

I sported Gap 1969 jeans, Gap T-shirt, Gap belt, Banana Republic socks and a Banana Republic V-neck sweater.

She read my confusion, which had furrowed my brow like a shar-pei’s. “To the movie premiere! Who are you wearing?” Her face lit up like mine does when talking about Rocket’s kickoff return against Miami in 1990.

Ahhhh. Love and Other Drugs, the movie based on my first book, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, was scheduled to open the American Film Institute’s annual festival on November 4. In addition to co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal — playing “Jamie,” words that are really, really fun to type — and Anne Hathaway, numerous celebrities would be in attendance. Ditto, the paparazzi. As the author, I’d get to walk down the red carpet, where I’d be photographed and interviewed. You know, ho-hum everyday stuff.

Later, when I related the details of my party conversation to Jenn, my then-girlfriend, her face expressed some disappointment at having somehow fallen in love with a rube.

Growing up, I dreamt about a lot of things: hitting game-winning home runs in the World Series, catching game-winning touchdown passes in the Super Bowl and hitting game-winning shots in March Madness. I never considered walking down a red carpet, let alone what I’d wear. Apparently a lot of women have spent a lot of time considering both those things.

The premiere’s dress code was cocktail attire: dark suit without a tie. Convenient, since I already owned a black suit. “Snazzy,” my father would describe it; three-buttons with an athletic cut. I happily shared that fact with Jenn, who did not share my enthusiasm.

“You’re not buying a new one?!”

I scoffed. She did not. “Jamie, it’s your movie premiere!” Her tone softened to that of a kindergarten teacher. “You need a new suit for this.”

My face flushed with embarrassment. I felt an awful lot like Dad, which is never a good thing when discussing fashion. He would still be sporting plaid pants if Mom hadn’t swiped them from his closet and donated them to Goodwill in 1985.

Why would I ever have thought my old suit would cut it?

“Besides,” Jenn added helpfully, “Three-button suits are out; two-buttons are in.” Of course they are. Having once owned a clothing label, she wielded a wealth of fashion-trend wisdom, knowledge that would have proved invaluable to a novice like me in a situation like this. Naturally, I did not invite her on my shopping excursion.

In December 2009, she had wanted to buy me clothes for Christmas. At Neiman Marcus she expertly yanked many “hip and stylish” shirts off the rack, each of which I passed back with a grimace, like a 5-year-old given broccoli. The tres chic salesman rubbed her back empathetically. When we finally settled on some less daring tops, I couldn’t help coughing at their price tags. Not a lot of fa-la-la in the car on the way home.

Setting out solo to buy the most important suit of my life was the sartorial equivalent of a couch potato attempting Mount Everest sans Sherpa. I went to Macy’s. You don’t read about many celebrities doing their clothes shopping there.

Instantly, I spotted a black, two-button suit with faint pin stripes. On sale for $250! No need for an overly detailed girlfriend or fawning salesman; a 40-year-old Notre Dame grad and former Army officer can dress himself, thank you very much! (Note: Without authorization, Jenn stopped into a Beverly Hills men’s boutique at which she identified a London-designed, Italian-made, midnight blue shirt for me. As instructed, I drove 45 minutes to the store where I forked over the — cough — $200.)

The movie premiered at the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I had booked a hotel room across the street at The Roosevelt — no parietals in Hollywood! — the swank spot hosting the after-party. Jenn got her hair and makeup professionally done, and looked stunning in a silky black dress. In my new suit and — gotta grudgingly admit — spectacular new shirt, I strode toward the red carpet like I actually belonged there.

Then I felt the tightness in the lower back of my suit jacket. I tried to poof it, like a concert pianist prior to sitting down on his bench. But my jacket did not budge. This would have been fine if it had no vents. But it did. Standing on Hollywood Boulevard, merely two first downs from the media lights and red carpet, Jenn confirmed that two strings crisscrossed the bottom of the jacket flaps: an X marking the spot of my fashion fiasco.

She didn’t need to say the words: That wouldn’t have happened at Neiman Marcus

Sweat spewed from every pore in my body, just like when I got my first speeding ticket at age 17 in my father’s Buick. Limousines pulled up, dispensing Tinsel Town stars. Camera flashes created temporary daylight.

I desperately pointed to Jenn’s fashionable, tiny clutch. “Do you have scissors?”

“Who brings scissors to a movie premiere?!”

Questioning how she could ever be a decent mother if she wasn’t prepared at all times, I searched frantically for a couture crisis cure. A guy squeezed past me so he could enter The Coffee Bean behind us.

Jenn remained on the sidewalk, undoubtedly questioning my ability to be a father if I couldn’t even successfully complete a suit purchase.

The bustling coffee shop froze after I exploded through the door. I cut to the front of the line without objection, an amazing occurrence. The streets of Hollywood teem with the mentally ill. Apparently these customers simply thought me truly deranged.

The teenaged barista stared at me, fearful. I beseeched him. “Dude . . . do you have scissors I can borrow?” I half turned, half bent over to awkwardly show him my tethered vents.

Without a word he whipped out the requested tool, spinning it like a gunfighter before handing it to me. Snip. An aircraft carrier of weight sank from my shoulders.

Two minutes later, Jenn and I stood on — no — floated above the red carpet, beaming for a phalanx of photographers screaming my name. “Jamie! Jamie!” It was the high point of my life.

Later we would learn that Jamie Lee Curtis’ limo had pulled up immediately after we stepped on the carpet; the paparazzi were yelling for her.

For my next movie premiere — fingers crossed, wood knocked — I don’t know who I’ll be wearing. But I’ll be bringing a female shopper to help me decide. And I’ll be going to Neiman Marcus. That’s a tax write-off, right?

Jamie Reidy is an author and screenwriter in Manhattan Beach, California, where he neither hangs ten nor gets tan.

London Unveiled

2012-04-03T05:00:00-04:00

London Vale ’08 asks if I’d like to hear a joke.

Fifteen seconds later she’s delivered a squeaky-clean quip about a priest and a million bucks, and I’m giggling politely. Vale laughs at her G-rated attempt, too, and admits, “I’m working on being funny.” It wasn’t Chelsea Handler’s job she was after but, rather, the title of Miss California USA, just a side dish to her full-time gig as an aspiring actress and model in Los Angeles.

Vale prepped for the pageant for six months, boning up on current events, lifting weights at Gold’s gym and, yes, perfecting her witty banter. Despite all her work, the title was not to be. Still, she appreciated the chance to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Sheila Mitchell, who won the title of Mrs. Minnesota America in 1990 and Mrs. Minnesota USA in 1993

Life hasn’t always been so glamorous for London (yep, it’s her real name), who grew up on a 500-acre apple farm, 35 minutes south of Minneapolis. She got her first shot at performing at age 5, giving tours of the orchard to visitors while standing on top of a wagon. It wasn’t long before the precocious kid was begging her mom to let her audition for a paper plate commercial that was shooting nearby.

“I hate chocolate, but I had to wear a white dress and grin while I ate scoop after scoop of chocolate ice cream off the plate,” she recalls. Vale faked the chocolate fixation long enough to nab the role, which led to a string of other jobs, including a small part as a schoolgirl in the 1995 Warner Brothers film A Little Princess, the cover of Catholic Digest and commercials for Target and McDonald’s while in high school. When it came time to consider colleges, Vale visited South Bend at the suggestion of a friend, took one look at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, and knew she’d be calling Notre Dame home in the fall.

The self-described “theater nerd” fell right in with the other artsy students on campus, creating short films with friends from the St. Edward’s Hall Players and taking on roles in four performances put on by the University. “There were times where I felt like the quirky girl. I think some of the students probably didn’t know what to do with me,” she remembers. Not that it ever deterred her — when it came time to graduate, she watched her peers accept their various job offers and purchased a one-way ticket to LA.

There, Vale threw herself into show-biz runaround. “I auditioned four, sometimes five times a day,” often changing clothes out of the back seat of her car, she says. Like most up-and-comers, Vale got more rejections than callbacks. “Sometimes you just have no idea what they’re looking for. There’s no feedback. It’s just, ‘You didn’t get it, sorry,’” she says. But instead of giving up, she started working on small independent films, sometimes for free, on set nine days straight with little sleep between takes.

“Every once in a while I’d get lucky and meet someone on set who was willing to introduce me to their agent or tell a casting director about me,” she says. “Like any other industry, it was all about building contacts.”

The networking paid off. Vale landed some modeling gigs, slipping into everything from bikinis to wedding dresses for local magazine spreads, designer websites and even the runway. Nice work, for sure, but it is, well, work. “It’s never as glamorous as it looks,” admits Vale. “But I’m usually so happy to be there — pulling ideas and inspiration from the stylists and makeup artists — that I don’t have time to think, ‘My feet hurt!’ or ‘I’m cold!’”

All of the success was sweet retribution for the young woman who was told she had to make some changes if she wanted to be a model. “I remember when I was 21 a photographer told me I needed Botox. Someone else once told me I’d never make it if I didn’t have the tiny mole above my lip removed. I’ve learned to take it all with a grain of salt.” For that healthy attitude, she thanks Notre Dame. “I’m so grateful I have that foundation to lean on. I learned to keep my head screwed on straight.”

Vale’s refreshing attitude will come in handy now that she’s inching closer to her real passion: to become a dramatic film actress. She has a recurring role in The F List, a webseries about making it in Hollywood, and just finished filming the independently produced TV pilot The Gunrunner Billy Kane. Her work in the sci-fi thriller required more than just acting chops. Vale spent part of the movie being chased by a CIA agent across the rooftop of a building and scurrying down a three-story fire escape — all while wearing high-heeled boots.

Scary? Sure. But the up-for-anything actress hopes her next role will be equally as edgy and fun. “You put in tons and tons of work, and once in a while something really cool happens,” she says. One such moment: Vale recently got a call from her sister, who spotted her modeling a designer gown in an issue of Us Weekly. It’s a long way from orchard tours and paper plate commercials, but in a way, she’s just getting started.

Kristen Dold lives in New York City and is an associate editor at Women’s Health magazine.

Deaths of Notre Dame alumni

2012-04-03T03:00:00-04:00

James W. Pick, MD ‘35, 12/23/2011, Shorewood, WI
Burnett C. Bauer ’38,’46 MA, 10/28/2011, South Bend, IN
Thomas E. Roche ‘39, 01/13/2012, Chandler, AZ
Otto C. Stegmaier, M.D. ’40, 12/13/2011, Davenport, IA
Victor J. Blong ’41,’57 MS, 12/19/2011, South Bend, IN
Richard L. Fogarty ‘41,’43 JD, 12/18/2011, Tempe, AZ
William W. Hartman ‘41, 12/27/2011, Parkville, MD
Jerome A. Ryan ’41, 11/13/2011, Hamilton, OH
Victor F. Corcoran ’42, 01/14/2012, Rochester, NY
Thomas C. Foley ’42, 12/30/2011, Wichita Falls, TX
Martin J. Rock ’42,’48 JD, 10/28/2011, Clarendon Hills, IL
K. Joseph Sheedy, M.D. ‘42, 11/02/2011, Williamsville, NY
Dr. John C. Bennett ’43, 11/20/2011, San Rafael, CA
Donald F. Haller ’43, 10/28/2011, Evansville, IN
James E. Madigan ’43, 11/13/2011, Little Rock, AR
William B. Middendorf ’43, 01/26/2012, Bethany Beach, DE
William A. Clarke, M.D. ’44, 11/24/2011, Lee, MA
Paul H. Heimann ’44, 01/01/2012, Palm City, FL
Robert S. Johnson, M.D. ’44, 10/23/2011, Spokane, WA
John R. Clary ’45, 12/02/2011, Falls Church, VA
Charles R. Lugton ’45, 01/07/2012, Littleton, CO
Eugene J. O’Toole ‘45, 12/02/2011, St. Joseph, MI
Francis X. Pendarvis ’45, 12/24/2011, San Diego, CA
Cecil R. Burket, M.D. ’46, 10/25/2011, Rochester, MN
Charles L. Madden, Jr. ’46, 12/25/2011, Edina, MN
Bro. Thomas M. Beere, CSC ’47, 12/22/2011, Notre Dame , IN
Theodore V. Oppenheim ’47, 11/22/2011, Fairfield, CA
Frank J. Debitetto ’48, 11/13/2011, Blacklick, OH
Patrick B. Henry ’48, 11/12/2011, Orland Park, IL
John F. Mabey ’48, 12/13/2011, Richmond, CA
Thomas S. O’Donoghue ‘48, 10/10/2011, Arlington Heights, IL
Lawrence J. Schubert ’48, 01/15/2012, South Bend, IN
Rev. William B. Simmons, CSC ’48, 12/19/2011, Notre Dame, IN
Edwin L. Voll, Jr. ’48, 12/04/2011, Toms River, NJ
Rev. Maurice G. Chase ’49, 11/20/2011, Los Angeles, CA
John T. Dougherty, Sr. ’49, 12/18/2011, Louisville, KY
William E. Fuller ’49, 12/17/2011, Fishers, IN
William F. Harrison ’49, 01/01/2012, Rocky River, OH
Frank R. Hiner ’49, 12/06/2011, Ellicott City, MD
Charles A. Kepp ’49, 12/17/2011, Philadelphia, PA
Donald J. Klein ’49, 11/22/2011, Mount Arlington, NJ
Estate of Thomas J. McCarthy ’49,’50 JD, 11/23/2011, Erie, PA
Donald C. Welch ‘49, 01/16/2012, La Crosse, WI
Richard F. Klee, Sr. ’50,’51 MS, 01/13/2012, Notre Dame, IN
Thomas J. Klug, M.D. ‘50, 09/30/2011, Harlingen, TX
Lawrence E. LeRoy ’50, 12/17/2011, Mission, KS
John C. Lyons ’50, 11/18/2011, West Bend, WI
Harry E. Monahan, Jr. ’50, 11/09/2011, San JuanCapistrano, CA
Bernard J. Mulholland ’50, 09/23/2011, Burlington, NJ
Mark J. Sheehan, Jr. ’50, 11/30/2011, Lauderdale-by-Sea, FL
Robert C. Butler ’51 MMUS, 11/25/2011, Fountain Hills, AZ
Robert W. Elliott, Jr. ’51, 12/12/2011, East Tawas, MI
Dr. Robert J. Lokken ’51, 10/25/2011, Miramar Beach, FL
Honorable John F. Mendoza ’51 JD, 11/08/2011, Las Vegas, NV
Robert E. Moriarty ’51, 10/13/2011, Lakewood, WA
Newton F. Straup ’51,’67 MS, 11/06/2011, South Bend, IN
Anthony H. Wirtz ‘51, 01/23/2012, Boulder City, NV
Robert J. Bruns ’52, 12/18/2011, Cincinnati, OH
James A. Delagrange ’52, 12/02/2011, Cuyahoga Falls, OH
Michael P. Dentino, Jr. ’52, 12/14/2011, Peoria, IL
Honorable John E. Doran ’52,’52 JD, 12/14/2011, South Bend, IN
Dr. John R. Gleason ‘52, 01/08/2012, Louisville, KY
Robert A. Kirchgessner ’52, 11/10/2011, Grand Rapids, MI
Joseph S. Shepherd ’52, 11/10/2011, Bay Village, OH
Dr. James W. Barany ’53, 11/07/2011, West Lafayette, IN
Tony R. Carnevale ’53, 11/02/2011, Oradell, NJ
Bro. Joseph A. Dudek, CSC ’53,’62 MS, 12/15/2011, Notre Dame, IN
Richard D. Salamida ‘53, 07/16/2011, Huntington Beach, CA
Richard T. Braun, Jr. ’54, 12/16/2011, Chesterfield, MO
William H. Burke, Sr. ’54, 01/24/2012, Plymouth, MA
Lawrence J. Fitch ’54, 11/02/2011, Belton, TX
William R. McClure ’54, 10/27/2011, Jackson, MI
John Paul McShane ’54, 01/22/2012, Westminster, CA
Gerald E. Mernin ’54, 12/13/2011, Bozeman, MT
Sr. M. Rosaria Schaefer ’54 MA, 01/25/2012, Atchison, KS
Richard Donahue ’55, 12/26/2011, West Lafayette, IN
Joseph C. Farrell ’55 MA, 06/16/2011, Baltimore, MD
Paul Z. Hauhnar ’55, 01/11/2012, Shillong, India
Dr. Walter C. Hourt ’55 PHD, 04/19/2011, Bloomington, IL
Eugene P. Lund ’55, 01/16/2012, Biloxi, MS
Dan J. O’Neill ‘55, 12/06/2011, Butte, MT
Ameel G. Rashid, M.D. ’55, 12/19/2011, Peoria, IL
Edward G. Vogt ’55, 11/14/2011, Kankakee, IL
Albino C. Bustamante ’56, 10/29/2011, Albuquerque, NM
David C. Goodfellow ’56, 02/18/2011, Fuquay Varina, NC
James A. Herbaugh ’56, 10/21/2011, Sparks, NV
John C. Patz ’56, 11/05/2011, St. Paul, MN
William D. Seiber ’56, 12/15/2011, Louisville, KY
Thomas S. West ’56, 11/12/2011, Simsbury, CT
Jules P. Augsdorfer ’57, 11/18/2011, Erlanger, KY
James F. Driscoll, III ’57, 12/16/2011, Poland, OH
Reverend Bernard A. Horzen ’57 MS, 12/08/2011, Peru, IL
Sr. Eleanor Lang, OP ’57 MA, 11/16/2011, New Haven, CT
William T. Lennon, Jr. ’57, 12/29/2011, Indianapolis, IN
Rev. Bernard C. Mischke ’57 MA, 01/02/2012, Onamia, MN
Sr. M. Theophane Reinecke ’57 MA, 01/04/2012, Atchison, KS
John C. Kirchner ’58, 01/12/2012, Weston, CT
David G. Kramp, M.D. ’58, 12/08/2011, Spokane, WA
Thomas E. Mark ’58, 03/24/2011, Golden, CO
D. Lee McMaster ’58, 01/02/2012, Wichita, KS
Harry H. Odem ’58, 11/16/2011, Houston, TX
C. Maxwell Brown, Jr., M.D. ’59, 12/17/2011, Bardstown, KY
John A. Fochtman, M.D. ’59, 12/13/2011, Petoskey, MI
Richard D. Kirsgalvis ’59, 12/12/2011, Michigan City, IN
William E. McAdam, Jr. ’59, 03/27/2011, Newbury Park, CA
Richard J. Phelan ’59, 11/26/2011, Glenview, IL
Duane H. Straight ’59, 11/01/2011, Minneapolis, MN
Robert J. Blum, Jr. ’60, 01/08/2012, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL
Dr. Gerald L. Goudreau ’60, 12/30/2011, Livermore, CA
Wilma C. Simoneaux ’60 MA, 11/22/2011, Morgan City, LA
G. Robert Feeley, Jr. ’61, 11/26/2011, Middletown, CT
Patrick J. Fish ’61, 01/15/2012, Ballston Lake, NY
William Flannery ’62, 10/30/2011, Orchard Park, NY
Herbert Hajicek ’62,’63 MA, 01/11/2012, Bourbon, IN
Philip E. Hockwalt ‘62, 12/25/2011, Akron, OH
Edward G. Joyce, Jr. ’62, 01/08/2012, Reynoldsburg, OH
Sr. Patricia Kelly, CSJ ’62 MA, 11/23/2011, Dodge City, KS
Cosmo L. Laurello ’62, 01/02/2012, Ashtabula, OH
John B. O’Connor ‘62 MA, 11/14/2011, Andover, MA
Patrick M. Sheridan ’62, 11/05/2011, Monkton, MD
Sr. M. Antonia Anthony, OSF ’63 MA, 11/04/2011, Denver, CO
Roger L. Brandt, Sr. ’63, 11/05/2011, Chandler, AZ
Paul J. Carroll ’63, 11/12/2011, Chicago, IL
Jay H. Wilkinson, USN ’63, 12/30/2011, Biltmore Lake, NC
Larry M. Costilow ’64, 11/24/2011, Chester, IL
Rev. William F. Dawson ’64 MA,’68 PHD, 12/13/2011, Davenport, IA
Keith E. Gisleson ‘64, 01/13/2012, New Orleans, LA
Rev. Walter J. Cullen ’65 MA, 10/02/2011, Minneapolis, MN
James F. Flint ’65, 12/29/2011, Alexandria, VA
Richard L. Hendricks ’65 MA, 12/23/2011, South Bend, IN
Robert B. Hensley, II ’65, 11/15/2011, Louisville, KY
Philip J. Trippel ’65, 11/18/2011, Parkersburg, WV
James R. Harbison ’66,’67, 01/09/2012, Maryland Heights, MO
Daniel S. Hoover ‘66 MS, 01/24/2012, Painted Post, NY
George J. Keefe ’66, 12/05/2011, Park Ridge, IL
Arne F. Larson ’66, 07/28/2011, FPO San Francisco, CA
Paul D. Marceau ’66,’70 MA, 11/06/2011, South Bend, IN
Sr. M. Jean Lenz,OSF ‘67 MA, 01/21/2012, Notre Dame, IN
Dr. Steven D. Maluga, Jr. ’67, 01/05/2012, Elgin, IL
Sr. Basil A. O’Flynn, CSC ‘67 MA, 12/16/2011, Notre Dame, IN
Ronald A. Biehler ’68, 11/21/2011, Palo Alto, CA
Sr. Rose A. McIntyre ’68 MA, 10/27/2011, El Paso, TX
Betty J. Polley ’68 MA, 01/03/2012, Lynden, WA
Marion E. Pongrace, PhD ’68 PHD, 06/16/2011, Milwaukee, WI
Mark D. Blackwell ’69, 11/24/2011, Valparaiso, IN
William T. Daly, Jr. ’69, 12/16/2011, Louisville, KY
Rev. Edward R. Goldian ’70 MA, 03/24/2011, St. Louis, MO
Robert F. Lovely ’70 MA,’75 PHD, 01/21/2012, Chicago, IL
Dr. William A. Ludwico ‘70, 11/15/2011, Newport Beach, CA
Sr. M. Jane Pavlovic ’70 MA, 10/20/2011, Danville, PA
John E. Vermeire ’70, 12/18/2011, Charlotte, NC
Carl E. Wingate ’70 MS, 12/03/2011, Longview, WA
Dennis P. Barnes ’71, 11/18/2011, Warsaw, IN
James M. Ersfeld ’71, 11/01/2011, Placitas, NM
Sr. M. Suzanne Smith ’71 MA, 12/18/2011, St. Louis, MO
Regis F. Huschak ’72 MS, 11/12/2011, Portage, PA
Robert W. Roche ’72, 01/12/2012, Columbia, MD
Sr. Joan Albaugh, CDP ’73 MA, 12/24/2011, Allison Park, PA
Jock M. Smith, Esq. ’73 JD, 01/08/2012, Montgomery, AL
Anthony R. Catino ’74, 06/26/2011, Maple Grove, MN
Larry F. Gries ’74 MA, 12/09/2011, Evansville, IN
Dr. Barrance V. Johnston ’74 PHD, 11/05/2011, Gary, IN
Barbara Rhoadarmer ’74 MA, 12/20/2011, Martinsville, IN
Timothy J. Walsh ’74 JD, 11/17/2011, Granger, IN
Sr. Margaret M. Quinlan ’75 MA, 06/23/2011, Carmichael, CA
Sharon A. Reen ’75,’77 MS, 12/23/2011, Charlotte, NC
Patrick T. Swain ‘75, 12/01/2011, Granger, IN
Dr. Owen L. Slaughter, Jr. ’76, 11/13/2011, Bloomington, IN
Lois B. Warren ’76 MBA, 12/17/2011, Granger, IN
Daniel P. Griffin ’78,’80 MBA, 11/10/2011, White Plains, NY
Fr. Albert M. Illig ‘78,’84 MA, 12/21/2011, Depew, NY
Paul A. Gargula ’79, 01/21/2012, Downers Grove, IL
Robert M. Kemp ’79 MBA, 11/16/2011, Fremont, CA
David E. Knee ’80, 12/05/2011, Wilmington, DE
Craig D. Erickson, PhD ’82 PHD, 12/29/2011, Dallas, TX
Dr. Judith K. Greenlee ’83 PHD, 11/11/2011, Pasadena, CA
David J. Dziedzic ’84, 01/14/2012, Vienna, VA
Mark J. Mooney ’87, 01/16/2012, Cave Creek, AZ
Susan Pawlecki Jarrell ’89, 01/10/2012, Bloomfield Hills, MI
Douglas A. Johnston ’90, 12/15/2011, Goshen, IN
Dr. Volker U. Blankenstein ’93, 11/21/2011, Granger, IN
Lisa K. Kelly, M.D. ’93, 11/03/2011, Los Angeles, CA
Clifford N. Steger ’94, 01/11/2012, Stamford, CT
Anthony A. Steffes ’97 MBA, 11/12/2011, Grand Rapids, MI

The House Rock Built

2012-03-02T06:00:00-05:00

When Dayne Crist woke up from what he thought was a nightmare in November 2010, he was horrified to learn that not only had Notre Dame actually lost to Tulsa, but Brian Kelly and Michael Floyd were, indeed, zombies.

After a heartbreaking loss to USC in 2009, Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen and wide receiver Golden Tate made sense of it the only way they could — by painting a picture of a sad clown and getting drunk at an underground cockfight, respectively, all to the strains of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.”

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Sites to behold

Welcome to “Stuffing the Passer,” the puppet show put on by the blog The House Rock Built that provides Notre Dame fans a funhouse mirror through which to view their team.

There’s puppet Brian Kelly, who speaks in a Kennedy-esque accent; puppet Dayne Crist, who has a recurring problem with fine motor skills; puppet Tommy Rees, who at one point mentions he is ND’s starting quarterback “pro tempore”; and puppet Michael Floyd, who is blue with green hair, does not lack confidence so much as he lacks clothes, and believes the Main Building was built in 2008 so he would “have something to base jump off of.”

Michael Fotopoulos ’03 and Brian Stouffer ’04 are the comedic brain trust behind the series. These Chicago alums trade their day jobs — described as “cubes in undisclosed locations” — to become amateur Muppeteers in their free time.

In an Internet full of fans who take the trials and travails of their teams seriously, the House Rock Built is often a whimsical breath of fresh air.

“We have really tried to just show our affection for our school,” Stouffer says. “We saw a need out there.”

The two Domers were neighbors in Keenan Hall and first started writing things together for the Keenan Revue, the annual popular send-up of campus life. Post-graduation, they were involved in separate blogs and “it just kind of snowballed from there,” Fotopoulos says.

According to the duo, the puppet show was born during a going-away party for a friend who was moving to New York. Conversation drifted into the existence of the Muppet Whatnot Workshop at FAO Schwarz, where people can purchase customized Muppets, and the potential of doing a show centered on Notre Dame.

“It started out as a joke, and we just got too many beers into it,” Stouffer says. “We were like, ‘Oh my goodness, we have to start doing something.’”

The ensuing productions have definitely been on the guerilla filmmaking side, making up in enthusiasm what is lacking in budget. One recent innovation was an $8 tripod from Walmart.

“We basically doubled our efficiency,” Stouffer says. “It’s fun having the giant challenge.”

II.

College sports, with their fervent rivalries and fan bases, have proven fertile ground for the Internet. The website SB Nation, for example, hosts hundreds of sports blogs. Many are specifically tailored to college football, from Purdue-centric Hammer and Rails to Penn State-focused Black Shoe Diaries and Michigan-dedicated Maize n Brew.

A standard-bearer of this subculture is Every Day Should Be Saturday, a blog that covers college football through its uniquely jaundiced eyes. Past features have included an award for the program that has the most run-ins with the law and NCAA violations, and recurring satirical Top-25 rankings from long-time coach Howard Schnellenberger, who routinely finds “suspenders” to be a worthy No. 1.

Things can take an even more entertaining turn in the blog’s comments section. That’s where dozens of college football fans enter a virtual sports bar and rag on each other’s teams, illustrate their emotions with television and movie clips, and spin inside jokes like how the Clemson Tiger’s eyes make him look like a drug addict.

Perhaps the biggest Notre Dame footprint on the Internet belongs to NDNation, which basically functions as a discussion board for Fighting Irish fans. Other sites, such as Her Loyal Sons and One Foot Down, have tried to mix humor with more straightforward analysis. The lines between traditional media and blogs continue to blur, with Keith Arnold ’02, a writer from NBC, even taking part in a virtual, weekly Q&A discussion called the Irish Blogger Gathering.

For years, one of Notre Dame’s most popular and informative blogs was Blue-Gray Sky, a collection of people who knew each other from Notre Dame or from posting on the Internet. Their work was noticed by mainstream publications such as Sports Illustrated. Despite officially shutting down in March 2010, the site still gets comments on its website.

Jay Barry ’92, one of the blog’s founders, says Blue-Gray Sky entered the Internet landscape at a “fortuitous time.” Few pure Notre Dame blogs existed, and other college football sites were just getting started as well.

“There was sort of this nascent base of college football blogging,” Barry says. “I was kind of shocked and surprised ND didn’t have more established blogs.”

And the proliferation of new media tools such as YouTube and TiVo allowed more comprehensive access to game film.

“The DVR made all the difference in the world,” Barry says, referring to the digital devices that can record and store hours of live television.

Those forces let Blue-Gray Sky feed a niche for original humor, long-form analysis and play-by-play breakdowns concentrated on a single team. In one corner there was a rundown of the greatest villains in Notre Dame football history (Desmond Howard, Jimmy Johnson, the referee who threw the clipping penalty flag in the 1991 Orange Bowl). In the other corner were analyses of offense formations.

“We had the luxury journalists don’t,” says Pat Mitsch ’99, a former Blue-Gray Sky contributor who edited Maple Street Press Irish Kickoff 2011. “We could write as long as we wanted and whatever we wanted.”

Even the most successful labors of love can get submarined, and Blue-Gray Sky met a fate similar to many other blogs when obligations such as children entered the picture. Barry estimates that at one point he was working 10 to 20 hours a week on the blog, and about 300 posts still remain in draft form.

Mitsch says the late nights — and an era of football games that could be equally as dark — left some marks.

“It took its toll, especially when the team was terrible,” he says. “We’ll encapsulate the Charlie Weis-era, for better or worse. There were a lot of late nights, but it was fun.”

III.

For the average college football fan, there has likely never been a time when there are simultaneously as few and as many places to get information.

Games — the central product of college football — are placed in limited hands, with the monolith of ESPN controlling a good deal of the landscape and other networks concentrating on specific conferences or teams where available. But it is now possible to follow a team without ever laying eyes on major media because of the Internet explosion.

Sure, actually seeing the gold helmets on game day will require Fighting Irish fans to buy tickets or tune into NBC or ESPN. The monopoly on trenchant analysis is over, however, especially when it can come in the form of puppets.

“There is always going to be a spot for a team-oriented site,” Mitsch says. “They will probably be the amateur guys doing it in their off-hours.”

That is certainly the case for the puppeteering team of Stouffer and Fotopoulos. During the football season, they comb the Internet for the hot topic of the week, which could be anything from the stadium evacuation during the Notre Dame-South Florida game to conference realignment.

Those topics then get filtered through layers of the language that reflect the duo’s background as members of a generation raised on Sesame Street, The Simpsons and South Park. “We tend to speak in constant pop culture references,” Stouffer says.

Yet the world they have created is most definitely their own. All the characters, Fotopoulos says, “have their own quirks” in “Stuffing the Passer.” Coach Brian Kelly may call his quarterback “Tommy” in real life, but online the sophomore is stiffly addressed in patrician-Northeastern style as “Thomas.”

“We’re not exactly parodying the actual people,” Stouffer says. “They are the Muppet imitations of them.”

Sometimes, however, reality and parody come pretty close together. Over the years, a rather manic puppet incarnation of former Irish wide receiver Golden Tate has made a habit of referencing his infamous 2009 leap into the Michigan State band, occasionally in holiday song (Oh touchdown tree/Oh touchdown tree/We love you more than field goals/And in the air or on the ground/Jump in the band and dance around).

Shortly before Notre Dame played the Spartans in the fall, Tate’s Twitter account hinted he and his puppet may not be so far apart, posting, “All I kno is someone better keep the tradition going and jump into MSU band.”

It’s all part of the strange and sui generis Notre Dame love letter known as the House Rock Built.

“I hope [the players] enjoy it,” Fotopoulos says. Notre Dame “is very, very much a part of who we are.”

Liam Farrell is this magazine’s alumni editor.

Hey, look, it’s that guy you’ve seen in lots of movies and TV shows

2012-02-24T10:00:00-05:00

Richard Riehle ’70 has been known as many things in his career: character actor, theater standout and, more than anything, as the “jump to conclusions” guy from the movie Office Space (1999). In fact, in an interview easily accessible by the Internet, he refers to himself in exactly this way.

Maybe that’s the greatest hint about who Richard Riehle is — someone who knows who he is. Who’s always looking for a juicy part he’s never played but is comfortable with his career and where it’s taken him.

Comfort wasn’t something that always came so easy for Riehle, the oldest of six whose father died when Riehle was 13, forcing his mother back into the workforce as a nurse. For Riehle, this meant learning independence and a fierce work ethic in his town of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. As a teen, he clocked in 40 hours a week at the local grocery store owned by his late father’s friend, allowing him to contribute to the family finances.

Even though he acted in high school, he thought another calling awaited. “My godfather was a priest, and my mother’s brother had been one,” he says. “In every generation, essentially, on the Irish side. . . . It just seemed to be the direction I wanted to go.”

The seminary and Riehle quickly decided together that it wasn’t best, however. “I went off to the [Saint Francis de Sales] seminary, but it became clear pretty fast that it wasn’t for me,” he says.

A good clue of the shift in his interests came when he was caught sneaking back from seeing Lawrence of Arabia without permission. “They sat me down at that point and just asked me if I really thought this was the right place for me. We both knew the answer.”

Riehle’s professional career began with roles in local theater while filling a teaching assistantship at the University of Minnesota. Fellow Notre Dame graduate Warren Bowles ’70, who was also in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes at the time, ended up being a one-time roommate and could tell at that point Riehle was going places.

“He is one of the most well-read theater people I’ve met in my life,” says Bowles, who’s been a director for Mixed Blood Theatre. “He is and has been the classic character actor. He was playing middle-aged men when he was in his 20s. He also looked to avoid the really broad stuff. He went for the kind of subtle wink-and-a-nod comedy that took strong skills.”

Riehle regularly was cast in roles at the Meadow Brook Theatre in Rochester Hills, Michigan, or you might’ve caught him at Shakespeare festivals in Colorado or Oregon. “I was content during that time,” Riehle says. “I always seemed to find work.” He even learned not to mind if he didn’t get the lead role.

“I always wanted the role that would bring something out of me, force me to find something extra,” he says. “The lead isn’t always the best part in a play or a movie.” Riehle found acting to be a balancing act, interpreting when it was time to be over the top and when subtlety was the order of the day. Holding back, he says, is one of the toughest things he learned.

From those learning experiences came a job in Seattle in the early 1980s with a director writing a play that would ultimately reach Broadway in 1986. It would be pivotal for Riehle.

“It was called Execution of Justice, and before it went to New York it was in Washington, D.C. [The director] called me and said there was a part she thought I’d be great for. She couldn’t offer it to me but could get me an audition for the producers in New York. I went to New York, got cast [at the age of 37] and ended up staying in town for 10 years.”

As so many talents did to start — from Meg Ryan to Demi Moore — he would play the soap opera circuit, the bulk of it from 1984-89. The plots were as outlandish as you might expect. On One Life to Live a guy ends up in a coma dreaming he’s in the Old West. Riehle was the bartender there.

Basking in Glory

Riehle’s big screen break would come in the classic Civil War film Glory (1989). Playing a quartermaster who doesn’t mind denying African-American soldiers shoes, he draws the ire of the character played by Matthew Broderick, just one of many well-known actors in the cast. According to Riehle, the director, Ed Zwick, was won over because he said everyone else played the quartermaster as a villain while the Wisconsin native played him more as a bureaucrat.

“It was the most touching screenplay I’d ever read,” he says. “I didn’t have many scenes with Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman . . . but to be a part of that cast was a highlight of my career.”

Riehle says he found it particularly interesting that some of the extras weren’t exactly strangers to the time period being shot. “We used about 400 people who had already been Civil War re-enactors — they were there almost every day,” he says. “They would be annoyed and say that’s the wrong patch or this button isn’t right. . . . They had a lot of passion.”

Riehle would then have another break, though it would be a short one. Cast as Principal Ed Rooney in the television version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1990, it gave him a chance to work with a then little-known Jennifer Aniston, someone he would see again in — you guessed it — Office Space. “Her timing was just so brilliant, and there was real humility in what she did,” he says.

Unfortunately Aniston and that cast’s talents weren’t enough to save the Ferris Bueller TV series, and Riehle found out by hearing about it instead of a phone call. “We didn’t even have a wrap party because everyone thought we’d be back after we shot our last scenes,” he says. “But things change.”

What didn’t change was Riehle’s devotion to his work. Whether playing a security guard being evasive with Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive (1993) or a banker getting threatened by Joe Pesci in Casino (1995), he kept busy and kept auditioning. That led to his most celebrated role as Tom Smykowski in Office Space. A character always worried about his job, Riehle had to find the balance of humor and a touch of sadness in a man who ends up in a wheelchair.

“What I remember most of all about that shoot was [director] Mike Judge said, ‘at least, we’re going to go have a blast,’” he says. “We went out everywhere while we were shooting in Austin. We had a great time.”

The low budget meant creative decision-making. “We didn’t have a regular effects person to put me into a body cast for my scene after the character’s accident, so we hired an EMT guy to put me in a real cast. I couldn’t get out of it for 8 hours — and when the EMT had to go to work he left a cast-cutter for the PA [production assistant]. That was fun.”

Although the box office numbers were anything but great, the film has become a legend thanks to the world of DVDs and Comedy Central.

It’s led to people asking him about his character’s unforgettable invention — the Jump to Conclusions mat. You see, there are squares with different conclusions and you, uh, jump to them. The character Samir sums it up beautifully when he assesses, “This is a horrible idea.”

Says Riehle: “People come up to me all the time asking about the movie, but maybe the best was one time when I was at this bar. I was going to leave but they told me to stay since Sammy Hagar was going to show up. He comes in with these beautiful women. One of them asks me for an autograph with a line about a stapler. The only problem is . . . that’s another character’s line. When I tell her this, she later asks me for the autograph again — and, again, asks me to write the stapler line.” He did.

Maybe that’s the life of a character actor: Recognized but sometimes unappreciated. Again, Riehle doesn’t seem to mind so much. “I was older when I really got started, and it did limit things,” he says. “But a character actor, you come in to make a little diversion, be the comic relief or add a little bit of intensity to what’s going on. You’re also liable to have a longer career.”

Riehle’s keeps going. His career so far has included well over 100 parts. He’d been a regular on the sitcom Grounded For Life from 2001-03 (“when that job ended, at least I received a call from someone about it,” he says with a laugh) and played summer stock. Riehle relished a moment in the latter that had him come in contact with one of the greatest playwrights of all time.

“I was doing Arthur Miller’s first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck. He came and I found it interesting when he talked about not wanting to change it. He said, ‘I wrote it in 1940, I was a totally different person, I can’t pretend to know what was in my head.’ It was something to see this man in his 80s.”

Another reason Miller wanted the words to stay the same was because he thought he’d given in too much as a younger man. “He saw it as a parable, and the others in [that 1940s] production saw it more literally,” Riehle says. “Miller was afraid to say something then since he was a . . . kid. He didn’t have that problem this time around!”

Riehle, who lives in Los Feliz, California, is also pursuing his love of traveling, one of the reasons he got into acting to begin with. “I spent a month in Sofia, Bulgaria, doing a horror film and realized from walking around that it’s really three cities in one: the first from the 1200s and 1300s, not touched with cobblestone and winding streets, the second from the USSR . . . the third is the one with creeping capitalism.”

You can also count on Riehle to be found with a book in his pocket. “I like that I can stand in line somewhere with something to read and be instantly entertained.”

Riehle views taking on roles in independent movies as yet another hobby — not so focused on paying the bills as stretching out his abilities. A few years ago he did Ken Park with Larry Clark of Kids fame. It probably will never go into wide release, but Riehle relished the experience, nonetheless.

“I love the freedom these types of projects allow,” he says. “You can sometimes just start shooting right away and have the chance to experiment. . . . As I get older, the roles may not be there as much on high-profile projects, but I’m always going to look for ways I can work and maybe even be a part of ways to change the business. When I work, I feel great. That doesn’t ever have to stop.”

Eric Butterman has previously profiled Regis Philbin and Anne Heaton for this publication. Contact him at ericbutterman@yahoo.com.

This is the man who will fix South Bend

2012-02-14T10:00:00-05:00

Predicting the future is a deadly business. One year ago a dying magazine, Newsweek, proclaimed South Bend a dying city — No. 8 on its lethal list of the “top” 10 — based on U.S. census figures showing the city’s precipitous and unexpected drop in total population (down 3.9 percent since 2000 to 104,215) and in residents under age 18 (down 2.5 percent). To the dismay of the city’s outbound mayor and residents young and old, the statistical pairing put South Bend in the familiar company of troubled neighbors like Cleveland, Detroit and Flint, Michigan.

Back then, Newsweek expressed doubts that South Bend would ever recover.

But predictions are the lifeblood of magazines, so here comes another dangerous prophetic dalliance in the darkest days of the dead season: Should reports of South Bend’s death prove greatly exaggerated, the first signs of its revival will be found half a block from the Saint Joseph River at the corner of Niles Avenue and Washington Street.

Today that weedy, empty parking lot is in the hands of a 29-year-old Notre Dame graduate architecture student, a proud product of South Bend’s struggling public school system who also happens to be one of the leading land developers in north central Indiana.

David Matthews doesn’t look like your typical builder — least of all in the era of Donald Trump. His slight frame shows no evidence of a lunchtime steak habit; the blue oxford shirt, dark denim and black dress shoes mostly suggest an afternoon of teaching John Updike to undergrads. Yes, those are Ray-Ban frames, but they have clear lenses that convey the alert, unorthodox mind behind Matthews’ green eyes.

The fact is, Matthews isn’t your typical builder. He broke ground on his first confirmed real estate success, the innovative Ivy Quad development that rises across Twyckenham Drive from the varsity lacrosse and soccer fields, the year the housing bubble popped, when he was 26. He pays more up front for durable, high-end materials (3-cm granite countertops for instance are standard at Ivy Quad because “it’s more affordable to pick a higher standard and buy a whole bunch of it than to go a lower standard where you can pick anything”) and superior construction methods. He hires Amish framers (“They don’t build the fastest, they’re never in a hurry. And they’re very consistent and really easy to work with . . . and, yeah, they’re good”). He handles all sales himself so he can catch the body language that communicates prospective buyers’ inarticulate likes and dislikes.

He’s never known a housing boom, and yet he just moved in to one of his own units at his second venture, the profitable, downtown East Bank development, with its attractive brick and limestone facades and its exhilarating views of the falls and the Morris Performing Arts Center. And he doesn’t harbor anxieties about that uncertain future.

“A lot of developers think that if you can squeeze a dollar out of a project and into your pocket, it’s better,” he says. “But I’m from South Bend, you know? My business partners at Ivy Quad are from South Bend. This is our community, and what we build is going to stand for decades to centuries, so we better do it right.”

Youth movement

Matthews, of course, isn’t the only homegrown twentysomething to put his talent where his heart is. In November, South Bend voters overwhelmingly chose Pete Buttigieg, the 29-year-old Rhodes Scholar and son of Joseph Buttigieg, Notre Dame’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, in the first race for an open mayoral seat in 15 years. Though “brain drain” threatens South Bend much the way it does communities across the Midwest, younger faces are increasingly prevalent in its energetic business and economic development communities.

Truthfully, the news isn’t all bad. Last summer, hopeless old South Bend won a prestigious All-American City award from the National Civic League, which cited revitalization of the northeast neighborhood and a campaign to reduce high school dropout rates among reasons for the designation.

Before the contrarian Matthews came along, however, no one had quite figured out what to do with what locals commonly view as an embarrassment and Matthews calls the city’s strongest asset — all that vacant land in the city’s deurbanizing landscape, especially along the river near the central business district. “Vacant land is awesome,” he says, “if you build on vacant land.”

That a townie kid would launch his vision for “fixing” downtown South Bend with luxury condominiums near Notre Dame is ironic, particularly when competing developments close to campus were laboring to find buyers. But Matthews saw untapped opportunity in the market, sold the idea to local investors Jim and Julie Schwartz ’89, hired adjunct Professor Frank Huderwitz ’80, ’92M.Arch. to design Ivy Quad’s first phase, and soon found his business model paying off despite lower per-unit profit margins. He has been especially successful at finding year-round occupants, another elusive target for new housing developments near campus.

“We had to start somewhere,” Matthews says, explaining his long-term goal to build for every price point. Even in this economy, he adds, surveying the University’s skyline from the back deck of an Ivy Quad townhome, the sounds of hammers and hydraulic cranes emerging from the rooftops of Phase II, “the Notre Dame market is good.” Meanwhile, he says, the project has supported 120 local jobs.

It’s not the first time the Purdue-trained industrial engineer has found a way to tap Notre Dame money for the benefit of the community. As a teenager, not all that long ago, he sat beneath the stadium press box on football Saturdays and sold programs to raise money for the Adams High School swim team. But Matthews’ story probably starts a few years earlier when, fresh off his award-winning performance selling Boy Scout raffle tickets, he found a copy of How to Buy a House with No (or Little) Money Down on his parents’ bookshelf. “And I wanted to do it when I was 9, and my mom wouldn’t let me,” Matthews says, laughing out loud.

By the time he bought his first house, with the intention to fix and re-sell it, Matthews had left Purdue’s doctoral program to figure out what he really wanted to do. He’d interned for Disney, worked for the Department of Defense at Maryland’s Fort Meade and even did a stint at a copper pipe factory in Elkhart, Indiana, listening to the Harry Potter series and modern Greek language tapes on headphones while feeding parts into a machine. “I wanted to go to Greece,” he says.

He wound up keeping that home he’d intended to flip, intrigued with the change he was able to make when he reconfigured the windows and walls to bring more light inside. Taking his entrepreneur father’s advice, he shadowed local business people and found his way into development, quickly gaining executive experience with a smaller-scale project.

Soon he was building Ivy Quad, making more money than he knew what to do with and acting like a retiree, traveling and even joining the competitive ballroom dancing club at Notre Dame. There he’d become friends with architecture students like Crystal Olin ’10M.Arch. and Aimee Sunny ’10. Olin in particular recommended books from her urban design curriculum, and Matthews began tapping Notre Dame students for input and hiring recent graduates.

“And then I was getting kind of bored,” he recalls. “I was tired of flying, so I was trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t want to join a country club. So I was like, hmm, grad school again.”

Looking into programs, Matthews shopped around the region. “The head of one program in the Chicago area actually asked me, ‘If you could get into Notre Dame, why would you bother coming here?’” While he felt technically prepared for his work, Notre Dame’s classical curriculum offered him history, theory and skills like watercoloring that he felt he lacked. “The classical program is based on more of a structured understanding of architecture, where they teach you proportions and the orders of things and that whole process of how to make beautiful buildings.” He met professors at the school’s weekly public lectures and in August 2010 went back to school.

Light and magic

Being a full-time developer as well as a full-time student takes some of the grade pressure off and helps Matthews keep his focus on learning. He says he’s building “much better now because of my education next door,” adding that he leaves the heavy architectural lifting to designers like Velvet Canada ’09M.Arch., Selena Anders, a visiting assistant professor, and others on his in-house staff. He also calls upon friends like Lauren Eaton ’12, Luke Olson ’08, and fellow graduate students Sylvester Bartos and Christopher Whelan, whom he credits with sparing him some embarrassing mistakes.

Professor Alan DeFrees ’74 says what Matthews gives back to the School of Architecture is just as valuable. “He’s full of good ideas. He’s a sponge for learning.” In DeFrees’ Acoustics and Illumination class, the students were comparing the use of steel angle versus limestone for a lintel. Matthews came in with prices demonstrating that the more durable but less conventional limestone cost less and labor costs would be lower, too. DeFrees says that kind of contribution helps both graduates and undergraduates, for whom such real-world matters are still relatively abstract.

Matthews’ work also demystifies development as a possible career path — one generally with more control over outcomes than architects typically enjoy in their often uneasy professional co-existence. In DeFrees’ veteran opinion, Matthews steers clear of two ruinous paths — developers who override their architects because of cost considerations, and architect-developers whose extravagant tastes overshoot potential buyers’ sense of good value.

Like his pupil, DeFrees also spent his childhood in South Bend. He returned later to study at Notre Dame and takes pleasure in Matthews’ “remarkable” success. Touring Matthews’ East Bank townhomes with their exceptional views of the downtown, DeFrees noticed subtle applications of lighting principles and techniques he’d taught Matthews in class. And while standard practice in the building trade almost invariably produces suburban results, DeFrees finds Matthews’ higher-density, mixed income developments communal, pedestrian friendly and civic-minded. “He knows how to design for his market,” DeFrees says.

Salvation in a simple idea

Finding that market without the benefit of Ivy Quad’s proximity to Notre Dame was Matthews’ East Bank challenge. As it turned out, what he discovered was probably the last thing any reasonable person would have expected from an unreconstructed former manufacturing hub in the flatlands of northern Indiana: A view.

From street level, the East Bank site was not so impressive, surrounded by modest structures and abutting the river at Colfax Avenue. But Matthews sensed what he couldn’t see: By raising the site with earth excavated for drainage at Ivy Quad, and by orienting the layout obliquely to the street, East Bank could offer its residents an unprecedented perspective of the city from spacious top-floor patios that captured its best features while maintaining a comfortable level of privacy.

Matthews then made another crucial decision. Rather than accepting the city’s usual offer of land sold at assessed value with property tax abatements he could pass on to buyers, he convinced officials to essentially sell him the land for free. Homebuyers would begin paying taxes immediately but, Matthews insisted, he could build an affordable, high-end townhome community that otherwise well-behaved local professionals would throw elbows to buy.

Voila, new taxpayers. And the first real hope that downtown South Bend might once again become a place more people would happily call home.

People actually attended the May 2010 groundbreaking ceremony. “Nobody shows up because some guy’s building condos,” Matthews observes. “Nobody cares.”

This time, 70 people cared. “And these weren’t contractors. These were city employees, attorneys, bankers and accountants — people who work and live in downtown knew about it and they showed up. Because people care about South Bend, and they want to see South Bend succeed.”

Eighteen months later, East Bank was finished and occupied. Matthews, who also obtained a grant from Downtown South Bend to make improvements on adjacent streets and neighboring properties — like a new outdoor mural depicting the work of the artists who work inside the Fire Arts Gallery across Sycamore Street — calls it his “catalyst.”

River Race, that weedy, empty parking lot a few blocks south along Niles Avenue, is his “litmus test.” Showing potential buyers the view from East Bank is helping with sales. Matthews already has three refundable deposits in hand with the groundbreaking penciled in for sometime this spring. What he has in mind for the site, which will rise directly above the falls where the East Race waterway begins its separate course, is a row of 10 townhomes priced as close to $200,000 as he can get. It’s tough to build good quality homes at that price, he admits, but mortgage rates are favorable, and he knows if he can sell to teachers, police officers and recent college graduates, he can sell to anyone.

The site plan includes top-tier commercial office space with underground parking and a rooftop café, two other rarities in the city.

“The way that you fix downtown, in my mind, is you need to get pedestrians on the sidewalks,” he says. Lunchtime isn’t enough. Most merchants and restaurateurs require solid, round-the-clock support if they’re going to take a chance on the city again. During the Christmas season, Michigan Street storefronts are filled with temporary pop-up shops brimming with holiday cheer, but without a reliable, year-round customer base within a five-minute walk, entrepreneurs fear losing out to suburban malls and Mishawaka’s Grape Road.

Farther east along the river are 30 abandoned acres near the old Transpo bus depot, another spot Matthews considers prime for this kind of durable, attractive urban infill. At 20 homes per acre and an average of three people per household, he knows he can meet the threshold Chicago analysts use for building a new grocery store — just the kind of anchor that gives small businesses confidence.

So, can David Matthews turn South Bend’s Tales from the Crypt into Sleeping Beauty?

Once upon a time, Professor DeFrees knows, South Bend was a bustling American city, larger than Sacramento, Austin, Mobile and Phoenix. He sees no reason it can’t grow again. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. “The energy that David brings makes a big difference. He’s showing people that South Bend is worth the investment.”

“I want developers to make a lot of money doing things in South Bend because that means more people will come and try the same thing. And then South Bend will be a successful city,” DeFrees says. “It used to be a beautiful city. Maybe people like David will turn it into a beautiful city again.”

John Nagy is an associate editor of this magazine.

'Near perfection' — The 1936 Notre Dame championship basketball team

2012-01-23T09:00:00-05:00

The hardcourt wizardry of forward Tim Abromaitis and guard Ben Hansbrough on the men’s squad and superstar guard Skylar Diggins on the women’s team stoked national championship chatter among Irish basketball fans a year ago, but many remain unaware that such excitement had occurred before. In mentioning past Notre Dame championship teams, one inevitably thinks of George Gipp, the Four Horsemen and other gridiron heroes. Back in the 1930s, though, Notre Dame dominated college basketball much the way Knute Rockne’s teams had barreled through the football landscape.

Coached by George Keogan and propelled by what one publication called “the immortal trio of Notre Dame basketball,” in 1936 the team captured Notre Dame’s last undisputed men’s national championship, playing a brand of basketball one New York Times sports reporter called “as near perfection as it could be.”

Keogan was no stranger to winning. He had one national title under his belt, and his 327 career coaching wins place him second today only to Digger Phelps at 393. After an uneven 1934-35 season in which his Irish squad posted a 13-9 record, he pinned his hopes on a few established veterans and a promising crop of untested sophomores.

The team opened with seven straight victories, mostly against lighter opponents such as St. Joseph’s College. In a sign of what was to come, sophomore scoring machine Johnny Moir took a pass from 6-foot-6 sophomore center Paul Nowak to notch the season’s first basket, against Albion, while substitute forward Ray Meyer and guard Tom Wukovits, both sophomores, combined laser passing with unyielding defense in support of seniors George Ireland, John Ford, Johnny Hopkins and Frank Wade.

They stumbled in their first big test, falling 54-40 to a speedy Purdue bunch that had been the Big Ten co-champion the year before, then followed with an unusual contest against Northwestern. After both squads had left the floor in an apparent 20-19 Northwestern victory, official scorers detected an error and declared a 20-20 tie. Since the players were already showering and much of the crowd had left, both schools agreed to accept the result, and the only tie game in Notre Dame basketball history went into the books.

Coach Keogan’s patience wore thin four days later when his team tallied a mere six points in the first half against Minnesota. Hoping to put a spark in his offense, Keogan turned to his talented sophomores, including Nowak, Moir, Tommy Jordan and Wukovits, who scored every point in a second half comeback to win, 29-27.

With an 8-1-1 record, the team began its “suicide schedule.” Over the next 10 games they would square off against eight reigning conference champions.

They began their run with a 43-35 win over Pittsburgh on January 10 and rolled past Marquette a few days later. “The game featured the playing of Notre Dame’s flashy crop of sophomores who dominated the scene from start to finish,” Scholastic magazine said of that performance.

After polishing off Pennsylvania, 37-27, the Irish headed to Syracuse for a game against a rival that had not lost on its home court in four years. Despite yielding a height advantage to Syracuse, who fielded five men over 6 feet tall, the Irish defense checked high-scoring center Ed Sonderman to swipe a 46-43 win.

The Irish now faced their harshest tests with consecutive matches against the top two teams in the country, legendary coach Adolph Rupp’s vaunted Kentucky Wildcats and New York University — the only team to which Kentucky had lost. Moir netted 17 and Nowak 11 to lead the Irish to a 41-20 victory, the most lopsided defeat of Rupp’s first six years at Kentucky.

Four days later, the Irish arrived at Madison Square Garden to take on powerhouse NYU. The game sold out three weeks before the match, and Scholastic magazine urged campus readers who wanted to listen to a radio broadcast to deluge CBS with letters asking for a transmission to the Midwest.

New York returned every starter from the team that had defeated Notre Dame the year before. Confident the local five could handle the Midwesterners, one New York Times reporter hoped that Notre Dame would at least put up a decent fight so the game did not bore fans.

The writer failed to account for both the Irish talent and Notre Dame’s national allure. More than 19,000 spectators jammed the Garden, at that time the largest crowd to watch a basketball game in New York. Keogan later admitted, “It was a sight to behold, and one that would make the blood of any coach fairly tingle.”

The outcome was never in doubt. After spotting NYU three points, Notre Dame raced to a 25-13 halftime lead. George Ireland shut down NYU’s high-scoring forwards and tallied seven points on the night. Filling in after the half for star Johnny Moir, who had gotten into foul trouble, Johnny Hopkins added another 10 as Notre Dame handed NYU a 38-27 defeat. It was the school’s first ever loss in Madison Square Garden, convincing even the infamously partisan New York sportswriters that “the finest basketball is not played in New York.” Most conceded that Notre Dame was the No. 1 team “from coast to coast” and some even urged their selection to represent the country in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Despite having garnered in 1927 his first Helms Foundation National Championship, the honor accorded the premier team in the land in the days before post-season tournaments, Keogan called his 1935-36 team the best in Notre Dame history because it had dominated a schedule no other squad could match. The team scored so speedily that they were the first to be called a “point-a-minute” squad. They set records in games won, total team points in one season, average points per game, and points in a single game — 71 against St. Joseph’s — in compiling a 22-2-1 overall record.

Moir, who established an individual season scoring record with 260 points, was named the nation’s outstanding college player by the Helms Foundation. He and Nowak were named consensus All-Americans. And while the Helms Foundation awarded the Irish their second national championship in nine years, University policy against post-season play eliminated any hope of participating in the Berlin Olympics.

Built upon the exploits of “the immortal trio” of Nowak, Moir and Wukovits, Keogan’s squads followed their 1936 run with back-to-back 20-3 records. Behind Moir’s scoring, Nowak’s rebounding and the passing and defense of Wukovits — nicknamed the “guarding angel” — in both years they convinced many sportswriters that they again deserved championship recognition. When they needed a breather, second-string forwards Ed Sadowski and Mike Crowe carried the load, but a follow-up national title proved elusive.

On March 4, 1938, the big three played their final home game before 5,500 fans. In defeating Marquette, Nowak scored 15 points, Moir 11 and Wukovits 7, earning a tremendous ovation at game’s end that recognized three years of stellar basketball and a 62-8-1 record.

After the game Scholastic writer John F. Clifford ’38 credited “the fastest breaking, deadliest shooting and sharpest passing trio in the game today” for producing “Notre Dame’s Golden Era of Basketball,” and equated their impact to that of the Four Horsemen.

Their basketball days did not end with graduation. Moir, Nowak and Wukovits became the first Notre Dame alumni to play professional ball, continuing their winning ways together for the Akron Firestones in the National Basketball League.

Two of their championship teammates made names for themselves as college coaches. George Ireland’s Loyola University of Chicago teams won 321 games over 24 seasons. In 1963 he led the school to a national title in a 60-58 overtime thriller against Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, Ray Meyer was building crosstown rival DePaul into a national power. Winning 724 games over a 42-year career, Meyer led his teams to two Final Four appearances. In 1979 he joined George Keogan in being elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

John Wukovits is a World War II historian who has written seven books about that conflict. Also a sports fan, Wukovits enjoyed researching his father’s 1935-38 teams.

Average Joe styles world-class bread

2012-01-23T08:00:00-05:00

Joe Bellavance ’89 knows how to get people to stop at his trade show booth. He fires up an oven he’s schlepped there from home and bakes his signature artisan bread. “The smell of fresh bread is like moths to the light,” he says.

The bread visitors taste was actually 10 years in the making. As a stay-at-home father of three in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bellavance enjoyed experimenting with different bread recipes. Until, that is, he discovered he couldn’t make his favorite — a crusty European bread, moist and airy in the middle, crunchy and brown outside.

“The key to a good crust is steam,” he says. He tried all the tricks, from leaving a dish of water in the oven to spritzing the crust at various times during the baking process. “I could never get what I wanted.”

Even a $200 cast iron pot he bought didn’t do it.

Eventually the self-described “hack baker” found a no-knead recipe online that approached the style and taste he wanted. Two years and countless loaves later, a business was born.

“A friend suggested that I should make an artisan bread kit,” says Bellavance, “and teach others how to make it.”

The 45-year-old serial entrepreneur is no stranger to business projects, previously working on computer software and renewable fuels. He says the bread kit idea, however, filled “my need to have creative input into the product.”

Average Joe Artisan Bread, LLC, officially began business in 2009. “I’ve taken what I’ve done and basically put it in a box,” Bellavance says. “It’s good for lazy guys like me.”

Lazy doesn’t really describe the assistant high school soccer coach, whose children are now 16, 14 and 10.

“He’s a really driven, smart person,” says Kelly Gayer, a minority partner in the Average Joe firm whose agency, Smartguys Advertising & Design, helped launch the artisan bread company. “He drives headfirst into stuff.”

Once the details of the signature crusty bread were refined, baker Bellavance put on his marketing hat. He took samples to the kitchen staff of Joseph Decuis restaurant, distinguished by AAA as a Four-Diamond establishment, in nearby Roanoke, Indiana. They were sold, and now serve his bread.

Bellavance makes it clear that just about anyone can get make a great loaf with his kit. “A lot of people are intimidated by baking,” Bellavance says. “But this is foolproof.”

His 80-year old grandmother and 3-year-old niece make the bread, he says, “and have had no problems.” And those who have purchased the kit frequently send photos of their successful results to the company’s website.

The artisan kit, whose gift edition includes a sturdy bread pot, mixing bowl, kitchen tools, ingredients, cookbook and cheat sheet, makes a variety of breads, from the European style golden standard to a Margherita pizza crust to a cinnamon-raisin crown (enhanced by pecans).

“Bread is one of those things that brings people together,” says Bellavance. “I’m proud of this.”

Carol Schaal is managing editor of this magazine.

Another tour of duty

2012-01-09T08:30:00-05:00

In the days, months and years since the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, hundreds of thousands of American youths have signed up for military service to sacrifice life and limb for the welfare of their fellow Americans. Dr. Kenneth Graf ’66, a surgeon near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and member of the U.S. Army Reserves, has spent much of that time trying to keep them from having to.

Since enlisting in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in 2003, Graf, now 67, has been deployed as a combat surgeon to various battle zones in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and served a tour at the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. He’s been on active duty around 18 months over the past eight years.

The first war zone Graf witnessed, however, was in Lower Manhattan in November 2001, as he looked on with his wife, Lynn, at the devastation wrought by the deadliest attack on American soil since the Second Battle of Bull Run.

“It was still smoking and smoldering at the time,” Graf recalls. “I knew our country was going to have to do something, though I didn’t know what they were going do. So I talked to a recruiter and asked if they’d need a surgeon.”

Graf, a draftee during the Vietnam War, had served one stint as a medical officer in the armed forces three decades earlier, mainly performing physicals on draftees stateside. Despite his 25 years of private practice experience as a general surgeon, it took a while to get a recruiter who would accept the then-58-year-old’s offer.

Although Graf did meet a few surgeons about his age during basic training in 2003, it was rare enough to warrant a nickname during his training. “They called me Grandpa in the tent. And that was about right,” says Graf.

While no number of private practice surgeries can truly prepare doctors for the horrific wounds they witness in combat, Graf says that the time in which he began practicing medicine — before the technologies widely available now and the specialization they’ve ushered in — helped prepare him to treat the broad range of injuries he’s seen under the austere operating conditions of theatres such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We did some brain surgery, chest surgery, just about anything you could think of,” Graf says. “It was a challenge to keep them alive.”

In his most recent tour in 2010, Graf led a team of three other surgeons and about 16 medics as the chief surgeon of the small Forward Operating Base Sharana in the Paktika Province of Afghanistan. The base is along the Pakistani border and, Graf notes, “far from all the hospitals.” Though the temporary tents eventually gave way to manufactured steel buildings, Graf’s team never had an X-ray to diagnose injuries. Instead, the medical workers relied heavily on versatile ultrasound machines and first instincts reinforced through military-specific training like the two-and-a-half week crash course his team received at a trauma center in Miami.

“We usually use our own clinical judgment and our own exams,” says Graf.

Whether sawing open a skull or reconstructing a vital artery, cradling a young life in one’s hands is never a more awesome responsibility than when the solider is on the table because he decided to put the lives of those back home into his. And the reward for keeping a soldier alive under unkind odds is both professional and deeply personal.

“That’s what keeps you going. Those kinds of moments are priceless and unforgettable,” Graf says. “You think, ‘This is why I‘ve trained. This is what I’m here for. This is my vocation.’”

The primary focus of combat surgeons faced with the often horrific trauma injuries seen only in war is “damage control.” Graf and other combat surgeons do their best to stabilize a patient as quickly as they can with the limited resources available.

“You stop the bleeding,” says Graf. “And you say a prayer and hope for the best.”

And you waste no time moving on to the next person who needs care.

If more complicated surgery is needed, the protocol in Afghanistan is to prepare a soldier to be able to survive a helicopter ride to Bagram Air Base — since 2007, a full-fledged permanent hospital — or a flight to the Landstuhl military hospital in a C-17 Globemaster flying hospital.

Not all of the people Graf sees, however, have the benefit of air care available to them. As is one of the collateral tragedies of war, many of those Graf has treated have been civilians with nowhere else to turn. Civilian pediatric injuries in particular have been estimated to account for 12 percent of hospital bed time in U.S. medical facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Graf recalls an episode in Tikrit, Iraq, when a 77-pound girl, reported to be 16 years old, arrived in hemorrhagic shock after a gunshot wound to the pelvis. Because of the girl’s malnourished state, Graf’s team had to adapt from how they’d treat military personnel in the same situation throughout her 83-day hospital stay that required 30 operations.

Two thousand miles away in Afghanistan, however, that treatment would have been unthinkable during his first tour there in 2005. As much as he and the other surgeons wanted to help, a decade of Taliban rule and its lingering influence meant civilian families would rarely permit U.S. male doctors to treat female civilian patients. By 2010, Graf says, the attitudes of civilian families appeared to have changed significantly.

“That was something we’d ask a husband or father, and they’d say, ‘Do everything you can to save the life of my wife or daughter,’” Graf says. “They were only too happy to have anyone taking care of their loved ones.”

Just as important, Graf adds, is the support U.S. doctors have received from their commanding officers, typically soldiers with some kind of medical background, whom he has never seen turn down a request to care for civilians. In contrast to the brutality met by captured U.S. and coalition forces, Graf points out the unique position of U.S. surgeons, who have treated Taliban rebels who are brought to the hospital and, in some cases, are flown for follow-up surgery to Bagram Air Base.

“I’ve been fortunate never to have to decide between postponing surgery for an enemy soldier to care for a U.S. or coalition soldier,” Graf concedes. “It’s just good fortune for me not to have to live with that kind of decision. My mission [as a doctor] is life goes first. It doesn’t matter whether it’s yours or theirs. You have to do what you have to do. You take an oath.”

In many cases, the sense of responsibility of the U.S. military to the civilians unwittingly caught in the crossfires of a war they didn’t ask for has not ended on the operating table. Graf highlights the perilous missions of the 101st Airborne Division “Screaming Eagles,” famed for their participation in D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and Hamburger Hill, who would arrange to return dead Afghanis from the hospital at Bagram Air Base back to their villages to be buried before sundown, in deference to Muslim custom.

“They didn’t have to do these things. It wasn’t a stated mission,” Graf says. “To protect the culture to that extent is pretty special, and I don’t know any other group or country that might do that.”

Relationships formed during war are done so at one’s own peril when they can be severed in the blink of a roadside bomb. For every friendship Graf made, such as a local Afghani surgeon who made countless trips in the cover of darkness pooling civilian patients to and from FOB Sharana, Graf has heard stories like that of a 7-year-old child killed by Afghan rebels because his grandfather was providing assistance at the base.

“Those are the kinds of things you take home and you don’t forget.”

When he’s not abroad or training to go, Graf’s full-time job at home is as a general surgeon at Lebanon VA Medical Center in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where he’s worked the past four years. How long Graf will remain home, he doesn’t know, but he suspects the day may be coming soon where he’ll be asked to hang up his fatigues and stick to caring for patients more often closer to his age.

“When I’m 69, they’ll probably say ‘Thank you for your service’ and give me my honorable discharge from the military. But we’ll wait and see. That hasn’t happened yet. With my health I’ve been really blessed to be able to do these things, and I still will as long as there’s a need.”

Tim Dougherty, who interned at this magazine, is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

Cafe Choice books

2012-01-09T05:30:00-05:00

Quotable Notre Dame, edited by Jim Langford ’59 and Jill Langford ’80 (Corby Books). From one-liners to short vignettes, this paperback offers a compendium of quotes that draw from the University’s 170 years of existence. Insights from presidents, professors, priests, sports figures, students and alumni are included here, in such categories as history, academics, student life, athletics, and spirit and spirituality. Black-and-white sketches and photography enhance the book.

Hawai’i’s Pets: Photos of Our Animal ’Ohana, photography by Deb McGuire, written by Tim McGuire ’85 (Mutual Publishing). From dogs and cats to horses, rabbits, goats and even reptiles, the book showcases the island group’s pets — called ’ohana or extended family — in stunning natural settings. The photographer also provides tips on how to capture you own personable pet shots. A portion of the proceeds are being donated to the Hawaiian Humane Society.

The Available Parent: Radical Optimism for Raising Teens and Tweens, Dr. John Duffy ’86 (Viva Editions). When sullen silence and slammed doors replace hugs and smiles, what’s a parent to do? The author, a clinical psychologist, suggests strategies to keep the lines of communication open, first discussing what doesn’t work — such things as snooping, lectures, overindulgence, coddling and micromanaging — then what does, from showing respect to supporting a teen’s interests to reinforcing positive behavior.

Grace Notes: True stories about sins, sons, shrines, silence, marriage, homework, jail, miracles, dads, legs, basketball, the sinewy grace of women, bullets, music, infirmaries, the power of powerlessness, the ubiquity of prayers, & some other matters, Brian Doyle ’78 (ACTA Publications). The book’s subtitle gives an idea of what the storycatcher, who says he is “charged with finding stories that matter” celebrates. The committed Catholic uses 37 snapshots here to “point at shards of holiness.”

Books, Crooks, and Counselors: How to Write Accurately about Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure, Leslie Budewitz ’84J.D. (Quill Driver Books). What is evidence? The burden of proof? The discovery process? Can judges question witnesses? Mystery writers may know plots and characters, but not all know the fine points of the law. This guidebook by a practicing lawyer and mystery writer addresses legal issues to help writers correctly incorporate the law into fiction.

Ending Dirty Energy Policy: Prelude to Climate Change, Joseph P. Tomain ’70 (Cambridge University Press). America’s dependence on fossil fuels can be eased, the author asserts, but changing energy policy won’t be simple. Here he proposes “two dramatic changes”: America must promote and support new energy markets, and the country must reject its 20th century model of government regulation. “New market structures, new products, and new technologies,” Tomain writes, “require new, and in many instances dynamic, regulatory responses.”

Battling Goliath: Inside a $22 Billion Legal Scandal, Kip Petroff ’83J.D. with Suzi Zimmerman Petroff (Frame House Press). When discouraged dieters heard about fen-phen, many rushed to their doctors for a prescription for the weight-loss drug. Unfortunately, some then suffered devastating lung and heart damage. Attorney Kip Petroff details his decade-long fight against a pharmaceutical giant to bring justice to the drug’s victims. “It’s going to get ugly,” he was told, and it did.

Monk’s Tale: Way Stations on the Journey, Edward A. Malloy, CSC, ’63, ’67M.A., ’69M.A. (University of Notre Dame Press). In the second of his projected three-volume memoir, the priest and ND president emeritus covers the years from 1975 to ’87, and his life as “a teacher, dorm staff person, international traveler, major administrator and board member.” He includes the process that led to his election as ND president and the thankless job of reassigning some parking spots.

Trauma: My Life as an Emergency Surgeon, Dr. James Cole ’87 (St. Martin’s Press). From his work in the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to his civilian practice in trauma surgery, critical care and emergency general surgery in Illinois, the doctor’s account of his life spent saving lives is not for the faint of heart. The cases he highlights include an attempted suicide by crossbow, a woman whose body is invaded by flesh-eating bacteria and a construction worker impaled on a row of steel poles.

Linebacker in the Boardroom: Lessons in Life and Leadership, Marvin A. Russell ’77 (Outskirts Press). A member of the 1973 Notre Dame national championship football team, the author talks about “the demand for excellence and accountability in all things we do.” He offers tools to help readers transform themselves into high performers by finding their impact zones, or “individual opportunities to make a difference.” University President Father John I. Jenkins, CSC, and football coach Brian Kelly are among those quoted in the book.

Cafe Choice web extra

Panic in the Pews: Do You Wreak Holy Havoc? Lisa Bergman ’96, illustrated by Erin Bartholomew (St. Augustine Academy Press). Highlighting the behavior of young churchgoing miscreants through words and drawings, this book offers comedic advice on how not to act in church. Bergman says her six children “hardly ever” behave like the hooligans pictured here.

All About Exchange-Traded Funds: The Easy Way To Get Started, Scott Paul Frush, CFA, CFP, ’99MBA (McGraw-Hill). This “All About” series book is designed to help beginners learn the fundamentals of exchange-traded funds, including all aspects of investing and trading in these complex investment vehicles. The book includes a look at different types of EFTs and a sample EFT portfolio

Organic Referrals: The Collected Best-Practice Referral Wisdom, Al Depman ’73 (CreateSpace). Designed for those in the financial services industry, the collection highlights five key elements of the referral practice. “Good referrals are cultivated and earned,” the author notes, as he offers tips on how to make the process organic. Depman is also the author of How To Build Your Financial Advisory Practice and Sell It at a Profit.

I’ve Been Picked! Chopper’s “Tail” of Adoption, Chopper Steedley-Tolan, (AuthorHouse). It’s a dog’s life for Chopper, but that’s a good thing when the shih tzu goes to his forever home. Readers ages 4 to 8 can follow as the puppy makes new friends and finds new ways to have fun and make mischief in his new family. Amanda L. Steedley ’00M.S. helped Chopper out with the writing and illustration of the colorful book.

Brainrush: A Thriller (Book One), Richard Bard’73 (CreateSpace). When an MRI gives combat pilot Jake Bronson extraordinary cognitive powers, a dangerous terrorist wants a piece of the pilot’s new-found talent. The chase is on, as Jake must fight both for his survival and that of his girlfriend and her autistic son. Mixing political thriller with science fiction and action, this debut novel is the first in a series.

A Noble Quest: Cultivating Spirituality in Catholic Adolescents, Arthur David Canales ’95 (Believer’s Press). In this resource for parents, youth ministers and others who work with young people, the author discusses 12 pastoral practices that he believes will bolster Catholic identity and spirituality in teens. Those include Bible time, contemplation, journaling, music, prayer and retreats. Each chapter ends with small group discussion questions.

Denman Ross and American Design Theory, Marie Frank ’86 (University Press of New England). Denman Ross (1853-1935) focused his design theory on the abstract, a change from John Ruskin’s romantic naturalism. Color illustrations are included in this cultural and intellectual biography of Ross, whose theory attracted artists, Arts and Crafts artisans and architects. The author is an associate professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Brad S. Gregory (Harvard University Press). The author argues that the Protestant Reformation of the Middle Ages actually served to reinforce the sense of religion as subjective and arbitrary. “Despite the hopes and dreams of Reformation protagonists,” he writes, “the result of their distinctive approach to scripture alone was . . . an undesired, open-ended range of rival truth claims about answers to the Life Questions.” The author is a Notre Dame professor of history.

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930, Kelly J. Baker (University Press of Kansas). In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan carefully designed its messages to resonate with Protestant America. Each chapter here presents one component of that Klan era’s world view. Also included is a deep look at the Klan-Notre Dame riot of 1924, when students protested a parade of the anti-Catholic group in South Bend.

The Ethics of Organ Transplantation, edited by Steven J. Jensen’93Ph.D. (Catholic University of America Press). Is it okay to remove organs from those ruled brain dead? What about infants born without a brain? Is a market in organs acceptable? Contributors — including theologians, philosophers, physicians and an attorney — discuss these and other issues surrounding the transplant debate.

Valren, Kerry Castorano ’05 (The Little Things Publishing). Set in the medieval era, the fantasy novel follows the journey of the fierce Freyja, who was saved from her abusive father by the Valren. As war in the kingdom breaks out, she must join the battle against those who would destroy her adoptive family.

Salvation Means Creation Healed: The Ecology of Sin and Grace: Overcoming the Divorce between Earth and Heaven, Howard A. Snyder ’83 with Joel Scandrett (Cascade Books). The author says, “my main interest is in the power and relevance of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom for the world today and tomorrow.” The theological divorce of earth from heaven exists, he writes, when we, among other things, “think salvation is about the soul only, not the body; see no spiritual significance in material things . . . see spirit and matter as two opposite and irreconcilable categories.”

The Glossa Ordinaria on Romans, translated and with an introduction and notes by Michael Scott Woodward ’92Ph.D. (Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University). As the introduction notes: “The Gloss on Romans is a collection of sources from many periods and places. . . . Education [in the 12th century] began to flourish into what would become universities, where the master’s role was to elucidate traditional, authoritative texts. And chief among these was the Bible, not standing alone but with the accompanying Gloss.”

Tales from the Hidden Apple, Edward Vasta ’52 (OakTara). A professor sees himself clearly, thanks to a wayward dog; a futuristic assassin gets surprise assistance; and a mute child’s keen vision, hearing and sacrifice cause music to rise to the heavens — these are among the 17 stories that the ND emeritus professor of English offers here. The tales focus on “what is seen with the heart … what really matters.”

A Portrait of the Priesthood: Three Priestly Ontologies, Father Antonio Anderson, SOLT, ’85 (Tau Publishing). The missionary priest serving in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, just across the border from Laredo, Texas, here present his view of the essence and spirit of the priesthood. “As valuable as his words are in understanding today’s priest, his life and work among the poor of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, offer a far more valuable picture of what today’s priest should be like,” says Rene Henry Gracida, D.D., bishop emeritus of Corpus Christi Texas.

AIA New Jersey Guidebook: 150 Best Buildings and Places, Philip S. Kennedy-Grant ’78M.S., ’79BArchitecture, Mark Alan Hewitt, Michael J. Mills, photography by Alexander M. Noble (Rivergate Books/ Rutgers University Press). A group of local architects selected structures that highlight the Garden State’s architectural heritage – from ball parks and diners to works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. The historical significance and architectural features of each building are explained in this compact book that is organized by region.

The Soul Sphere: Book 1, The Shattered Sphere, David J. Adams ’85 (CreateSpace). In the land of Arkania, an ancient sphere that was created to contain the Dark One is smashed, and armies of demons and resurrected dead now roam the world. This first in an epic fantasy series follows an unlikely band that contains an elf, goblin and a warrior as its members gather the shards and seek to restore order to their world.

Sites to behold

2012-01-09T03:00:00-05:00

Notre Dame football expanded into the digital world along with the Internet and blogging explosion over the past decade. Here are some sites for the Notre Dame and college football fan.

Related article
The House Rock Built

The House Rock Built: The Muppets take South Bend.

Her Loyal Sons: A mix of humor and game analysis.

One Foot Down: Some of the best play breakdowns available for ND football fanatics.

The Blue-Gray Sky: Now defunct, but an in-depth and unrivaled accounting of the Charlie Weis era.

ND Nation: A popular message board for fans.

Inside the Irish: Legacy media goes nontraditional.

Every Day Should Be Saturday: The gold standard for college football blogs, even if it is run by a Florida fan.

Domers in the News

2012-01-09T02:00:00-05:00

In November, Pope Benedict XVI named Charles J. “Charlie” Brown ’81 as the new papal nuncio to Ireland. A long-time aide to the pope working since 1994 in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the former monsignor from the Archdiocese of New York was elevated to the rank of archbishop along with his diplomatic appointment. The Vatican’s previous ambassador to Ireland was recalled last summer as diplomatic relations became strained after a government report charged Irish bishops with covering up clerical child abuse cases. . . . Thaddeus “TJ” Jones ’89, an official of the Pontifical Council for Social Commissions, was the project coordinator for news.va, the Vatican’s news aggregator website that launched last fall. Among other duties, Jones also coordinates worldwide telecasts of papal ceremonies and events . . . . Only days after its release, Brainrush, a sci-fi political thriller by Richard Bard ’73, jumped to the Amazon Action/Adventure Bestseller list through an unusual promotion: Readers who bought Bard’s book also received the No. 1 and No. 3 bestselling Kindle thrillers as well. The former Air Force pilot and 36-year cancer survivor, who went on to run three security technology companies, received a fan letter for his novel from singer David Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash fame. . . . Tom Bettag ’66 has joined NBC’s new newsmagazine, Rock Center with Brian Williams, as a producer. In a career spanning more than four decades, the veteran TV newsman has served as executive producer at CBS News, ABC News and CNN. For many years Bettag was executive producer of Nightline with Ted Koppel. He also worked with Koppel on the Discovery Channel’s program Koppel on Discovery. James O’Connell, M.D., ’70, president of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP), was awarded the Massachusetts General Hospital Trustees’ Medal, which honors American physicians and scientists “whose lifetime contributions have uniquely benefited humankind. BHCHP is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive health care program for the homeless, serving more than 11,000 individuals each year. . . . Thomas Shilen Jr. ’81 has been named chief financial and administrative officer of CBS News. Previously, Shilen had served as senior vice president, controller and chief accounting officer for CBS. . . . John Michael ’94, ’98J.D., ’98MBA is the new play-by-play announcer for the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team. Previously, the former trial attorney served as the TV broadcaster for the Columbus Blue Jackets of the NHL. . . . Jon Theisen ’70 was appointed a circuit court judge in Eau Claire County by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. . . . Illinois Governor Pat Quinn recently named Michael Latz ’85, ’89J.D. as a commissioner on the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission. An attorney in private practice, Latz is a former assistant state’s attorney for Cook County, Illinois. . . . Betsy Paulsen Crapps ’92 is the founder of Mom Prom, a “ladies’ night out” for charity that has become a national movement (momprom.org). The events provide an opportunity for women to wear their old formal dresses and dance while raising money for a worthy cause of their choice. . . . Jamie Reidy ’92, whose memoir of his time as a pharmaceutical salesman became the Hollywood romantic comedy Love and Other Drugs, received the Angel Award from The Good Shepherd Shelter of Los Angeles for his volunteer efforts there. The shelter is a haven for battered women and their children. . . . Kiana Peacock ’94 and her husband, Jason Evans, have been named by Calista Corp. as publishers of three Alaskan weekly newspapers and two specialty shoppers.. . . . Joe Brockington ’07 and his working German Shepherd, Yogy Policia Slovakia, were awarded the Highest Auslander Trophy and Helper’s Favorite Dog at the Mid-Eastern Regional Schutzhund Championship. Schutzhund (German for “protection dog”) tests the traits of working dogs, such as German Shepherds. Brockington, who was a four-year letterman on Notre Dame’s football team, is co-owner of the dog with his former ND teammate Tom Zbikowski ’07. . . . Rob McLaughlin ’91 and his wife, Colleen (’91 SMC), have established the McLaughlin Family Endowment for Excellence to Fight Domestic Poverty. The endowment will fund initiatives from the Center for Social Concerns such as the Appalachian Program, which provides volunteer experiences for ND students in Appalachia. . . . Hollywood actor William Mapother ’87 offered a Notre Dame audience a sneak preview of his recent science fiction movie, Another Earth, which premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival. The independent film deals with parallel existence, among other things. Mapother is perhaps best known for his character Ethan Rom in the TV series Lost. Mapother’s newest film, A Warrior’s Heart, in which he plays a lacrosse coach, was released in December. He also appears in the upcoming Lifetime cable channel original movie, The Drew Peterson Story, about a suburban Chicago police officer charged with the death of his third wife after his fourth wife’s mysterious disappearance. . . . Thomas Ealy ’82 was recently named president of Encompass Insurance, a division of the Allstate Insurance Company . . . . Travis Smith ’95 is the new CEO of Jo-Ann Stores, Inc., the leading fabric and specialty craft store company in the United States. . . . Attorney Ron Blubaugh ’60 received an award from the state bar of California in recognition of his legal work on behalf of homeless people. . . . Amanda Polk ’08, who was a member of the Irish women’s crew team, helped the U.S. eight-boat team forge a come-from-behind gold medal win at the 2011 World Rowing Championship in Bled, Slovenia. Previously, Polk competed with the U.S. four-boat team that won a silver medal at the 2010 World Championships in Poznan, Poland. . . . Tracy Miner ’80, a member of the litigation practice and chair of the white-collar defense group of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo was elected to the board of directors of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. . . . Long distance runner Molly Huddle ’06 competed in the track and field World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, last summer. Earlier she won a national championship in the 5000 meter run. Another outstanding women’s track and field athlete, Mary Saxer ’09 finished fifth in the pole vaulting national championships last year. Both Huddle and Saxer are expected to make the U.S. Olympic team . . . . Doctors Robert Simari ’82 of the Mayo Clinic and Jay Traverse ’82 of the Minneapolis Heart Institute at Abbot Northwestern Hospital presented the results of their adult stem cell research at the American Heart Association scientific meeting last fall. The two medical researchers, who are friends and ND classmates, found that treatment with stem cells from a patient’s own bone marrow is beneficial only when administered shortly after a heart attack. Their study found no benefit from the treatment two to three weeks after the attack. The Vatican has approved the use of adult stem cells, condemning only those derived from embryos. . . . Former Notre Dame All American defensive lineman Pete Duranko ’66, a star of the 1966 National Championship team who later played eight seasons for the Denver Broncos, died in July. He had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease in 2001.

Deaths of Notre Dame alumni

2012-01-09T02:00:00-05:00

George W. Cannon, Jr. ‘36, 08/29/2011, Ocean Ridge, FL
Francis J. Ryan ’36, 10/23/2011, Hibbing, MN
Thomas P. Foy, Sr. ’38, ’39 JD, 10/08/2011, Bayard, NM
George R. Laure ’38, 09/30/2011, Portage, MI
Robert M. Reilly ’38, 08/21/2011, Miami Beach, FL
Frank R. Kelly, Jr., M.D. ’39, 07/11/2011, Richmond, VA
Daniel A. Tobin, M.D. ’39, 07/27/2011, Louisville, KY
J. Robb Brady ’40, 09/19/2011, Idaho Falls, ID
E. Paul Chaput ’40, ’41 MS, ’45 PHD, 06/30/2011, Austin, TX
Walton J. Wuebbold ’40, 10/16/2011, Hamilton, OH
George E. Miles ’41, 08/17/2011, Rumson, NJ
Donald C. Tiedemann ’41, 09/15/2011, Valparaiso, IN
Thomas J. Hart ’42, 07/08/2011, Poinciana, FL
Robert E. McCormick, D.D.S. ’42, 08/17/2011, Oceanside, CA
Robert W. O’Hara ‘42, 08/10/2011, Chicago, IL
Floyd F. Richards ’42, 08/16/2011, Southport, NC
Gilbert A. Zimmerman ’42, 09/25/2011, Rancho Murieta, CA
Harry A. Florence, Jr. ’43, 09/08/2011, Vista, CA
Donald F. Haller ’43, 10/28/2011, Evansville, IN
Robert D. LeMense ’43, ’55 JD, 08/19/2011, Mequon, WI
Kenneth B. Schoen ’43, 09/10/2011, Columbus, OH
Rev. Ambrose J. Wheeler, CSC ’43, 07/10/2011, Notre Dame, IN
James T. Clauss ’44, 10/05/2011, Clarence Center, NY
Robert W. Galvin ’44, 10/11/2011, Schaumburg, IL
Robert J. McBride ’44, 10/05/2011, South Bend, IN
Vincent C. Scully, Jr. ’44, ’49 JD, 07/19/2011, Peotone, IL
Elmer D. Silha ’44, 09/21/2011, Libertyville, IL
James M. Whalen ’44, 10/12/2011, Palos Hills, IL
Francis E. Moore ’45, 09/03/2011, Beverly, MA
William A. Nelson ’45, 12/14/2010, Morganton, NC
Marvin E. Larson ’46, 08/07/2011, Tucson, AZ
Walter P. Barbu ’47, 07/17/2011, Green Bay, WI
Robert C. Gorski ’47, 12/13/2010, Miller Place, NY
James E. Quinn ’47, 05/17/2011, St. James, NY
Henry L. Kochman ’48, 04/16/2011, Granada Hills, CA
Thaddeus J. Manyak ’48, 09/25/2011, Milwaukee, WI
Francis A. Puyau, M.D. ’48, 10/05/2011, Baton Rouge, LA
Richard D. Van Paris ’48, 08/13/2011, Mishawaka, IN
Robert J. Weigand ’48, 08/08/2011, Fort Wayne, IN
Edward J. Bosley ’49, 07/14/2011, Torrington, CT
John P. Carroll ’49, 09/01/2011, Huber Heights, OH
Edward H. Lomber, Jr. ’49, 09/13/2011, Canandaigua, NY
Robert O. McCoy, Jr. ’49, 10/08/2011, Fayetteville, NC
Herbert H. McDade, Jr. ’49, 08/17/2011, Boynton Beach, FL
James J. McLaughlin, Jr. ’49, 10/08/2011, South Bend, IN
John F. Moorhead ’49, 07/19/2011, Haverford, PA
Francis B. Parise ’49, 09/06/2011, Brooklyn, NY
C. Eugene Schaffer ’49, ’91 MA, 09/09/2011, Stamford, CT
Robert G. Warrick ’49, 07/23/2011, Spring Hill, FL
Rev. Msgr. John D. Daniszewski ’50 MS, 08/31/2011, Erie, PA
William J. Ensign ’50, ’51 MA, 08/08/2011, Columbus, OH
John F. Giles, III ’50, 09/29/2011, Dallas, TX
Donald C. Narducci ’50, 08/18/2011, Cheshire, CT
Honorable Charles J. Perrin ’50, ’51 JD, 08/13/2011, Springfield, IL
Eugene C. Romano ’50, 05/13/2011, Port Orange, FL
Dr. Jay A. Young ’50 PHD, 10/13/2011, Silver Spring, MD
Dr. William F. Argue ’51, 08/07/2011, Manchester, NH
Nicholas A. De Filippis ’51, 08/07/2011, Ridgefield, CT
Howard H. Fenn ’51, 07/16/2011, Mission Viejo, CA
Robert J. Klingenberger ’51, 08/16/2011, Fort Wayne, IN
Alfonso G. Medina ’51, 07/23/2011, Fort Worth, TX
Joseph L. Rigali ’51, 09/19/2011, Westchester, IL
Lt.Col. William J. Stelpflug ’51, 08/15/2011, Auburn, AL
Frank J. Vogt ’51, 08/07/2011, Ocala, FL
John P. Boyle ’52, 08/10/2011, Stevensville, MD
Grant A. Feldman, Jr. ’52, 08/17/2011, Edina, MN
Robert A. Gullie ’52, 08/30/2011, Mechanicville, NY
James O. Horrigan ’52, 09/25/2011, Portsmouth, NH
Robert O. Laird ’52, 09/03/2011, Tulsa, OK
Thomas A. Mathews, M.D. ’52, 10/17/2011, Washington, DC
James P. O’Shea ‘52, 08/27/2011, Sunnyside, NY
Edgar A. Smithe, Jr. ’52, 07/26/2011, Hollidaysburg, PA
William E. Balok ’53, 06/26/2011, Leesburg, FL
Dr. Frank T. Birtel ’53 MS, ’60 PHD, 09/01/2011, New Orleans, LA
George J. Higgins, Jr. ’53, 08/31/2011, Overland Park, KS
Francis P. Jackman ’53, 08/14/2011, Annapolis, MD
Harvey Y.D. Lung ’53, 01/25/2011, Honolulu, HI
Boris M. Mehoff ’53, 09/28/2011, Springfield, OH
James B. Patterson, M.D. ’53, 09/22/2011, Lorain, OH
Rev. Donald W. Whipple, CSC ’53, 02/24/2011, Notre Dame, IN
George A. Banks ’54, 10/15/2011, Unionville, CT
Edward J. Connors, Jr. ’54, 08/07/2011, Arlington, VA
Camiel P. Dekeizer, Jr. ’54, 04/21/2011, Mishawaka, IN
Paul F. Kelley ’54, 09/21/2011, Cincinnati, OH
Dr. Robert R. Martinez ’54, 10/08/2011, Kingwood, TX
Joseph P. Shelley, Jr. ’54, 09/18/2011, New Rochelle, NY
Glen A. Sliger ’54, 07/05/2011, Ventura, CA
Charles J. Brown ’55, 09/14/2011, Prattsville, NY
Raymond P. Manley ’55, 10/14/2011, Boardman, OH
H. Paul Newman ’55, 08/22/2011, Milwaukie, OR
L. Donald Peters ’55, 09/22/2011, Santa Rosa, CA
William F. Quirk ’55, ’58 JD, 08/01/2011, Bronx, NY
Paul R. Reed ’55, 08/08/2011, Spring, TX
Bernard J. Smyth ’55, 08/29/2011, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
John F. Stephens ’55, 08/31/2011, Pekin, IL
Stephen E. Surbrook ’55, 09/28/2011, Winter Park, FL
John P. Curry ’56, 09/23/2011, Portage, MI
Thomas R. Falcinelli ’56, 08/14/2011, Riverdale, MD
James A. Gammon ’56, 08/03/2011, Chevy Chase, MD
Captain Robert W. Kesteloot ’56, 09/23/2011, Potomac Falls, VA
Dr. Aron Kuppermann ’56 PHD, 10/15/2011, Pasadena, CA
Michael L. Burke ’57, 07/24/2011, Laguna Niguel, CA
Robert E. Miller ’57, 10/18/2011, Michigan City, IN
John L. Minard, M.D. ’57, 08/20/2011, Granger, IN
Donald J. Murray, D.D.S. ’57, 10/16/2011, Vero Beach, FL
Daniel A. Navalance ’57, 03/28/2011, Abita Springs, LA
Felix Tardio ’57, 07/04/2011, Canonsburg, PA
Sr. Mary N. Blute, RSM ’58 MA, 10/20/2011, Swansea, MA
John F. Chihan, Jr. ’58, 06/01/2011, Bangor, MI
Sr. M. Barbara Cison, OSF ’58 MA, 08/28/2011, Mishawaka, IN
Frederick C. Oczkowski ’58, 09/06/2011, Edison, NJ
Dr. Karl T. Chambers ’59, 07/03/2011, Greenwood Village, CO
Thomas E. Hill ’59, 07/03/2011, Riverdale, NY
William D. Hoag ’59, 09/09/2011, Norwalk, CA
John D. Steinberg ’59, 09/23/2011, Wisconsin Rapids, WI
Patrick J. Chambers ’60, 09/04/2011, Vestal, NY
Charles Clark, Jr. ’60, 08/29/2011, Dallas, TX
Robert J. Diersing ’60, 08/17/2011, Delaware, OH
Joseph J. Halisky ’60, ’60, 08/14/2011, New Orleans, LA
G. Marrin Lewis ’60, 10/08/2011, Fredericksburg, VA
James M. McGowan, M.D. ’60, 09/17/2011, New York, NY
Frank L. Schreder ’60, 10/12/2011, Oxford, PA
Chalmer G. Smith ’60 MA, 06/28/2011, South Bend, IN
Louis C. Chapleau, Jr. ’61, 05/08/2011, Long Beach, CA
Leland N. Chester ’61, 08/11/2011, Portland, OR
David R. Eckert ’61, 10/07/2011, Louisville, KY
James C. Oster ’61, 10/10/2011, Wilmington, NC
John M. Sanders ’61 MA, 08/15/2011, Fort Madison, IA
Sr. M. Benedicta Berendes, IHM ’62 MMUS, 10/02/2011, Scranton, PA
James E. Fitch ’62, 09/22/2011, Chesterland, OH
Sr. Marie P. Hoare ’62 MA, 07/15/2011, El Paso, TX
Robert L. Jones ’62 MA, ’78 PHD, 09/13/2011, Syracuse, IN
Lawrence M. Mandyck ’62 JD, 09/05/2011, Atlanta, GA
Dr. Francis H. Morrell ’62, 08/05/2011, Cape Canaveral, FL
George C. O’Keeffe ‘62, 09/28/2011, Boise, ID
Dr. Daniel D. Sullivan ’62, ’67 PHD, 07/27/2011, Carlsbad, CA
Philip R. Amend ’63, 08/11/2011, Santa Clara, CA
Elio Bafile ’63, 08/01/2011, Bradenton, FL
Anthony E. Coppola ’63, 04/20/2011, Naugatuck, CT
Edward A. Anderson, Jr. ’64 MS, 08/03/2011, Falls Church, VA
George F. FitzPatrick, Jr. ’64, 09/06/2011, North Andover, MA
George W. Pfeifer ’64, 07/26/2011, Bloomington, MN
Richard H. Snooks ’64, 07/31/2011, Columbia, MO
Michael J. Walusis ’64, 08/20/2011, Hermitage, PA
David W. Burns ’65, 09/16/2011, Coshocton, OH
Thomas R. Franck, Sr. ’65, 09/28/2011, Norwich, NY
Dr. George B. Olson ’65 PHD, 09/25/2011, Tucson, AZ
Joan M. Thibodeau, Ph.D. ’65 MA, ’68 PHD, 09/07/2011, Danielson, CT
Frank J. Malley ’66, 10/09/2011, Eagan, MN
Grant E. Marquis ’67, 05/26/2011, Murrysville, PA
Loretta E. Martin ’68 MA, 07/11/2011, Hurst, TX
Leonard J. Pellecchia ’68, 07/08/2011, Brick, NJ
Robert L. Harness ’69, 08/28/2011, Town And Country, MO
Thomas V. Proch ’69, 09/22/2011, Pittsburgh, PA
Thomas A. Walsh, Jr. ’69, ’73 MBA, 08/05/2011, Metuchen, NJ
Rev. James W. Hasse ’70 MA, 06/19/2011, Cincinnati, OH
Sherrill A. Fridmann ’71 PHD, 09/06/2011, Niagara Falls, NY
Paul A. Kaminskas ’71, 07/15/2011, La Porte, IN
Paul J.A. Stewart ’71, 10/08/2011, Fort Myers, FL
William G. O’Hare, III ’72, 04/12/2011, Beverly, MA
Richard J. Eschmann ’73, 04/05/2011, Arnold, MD
William A. Imparato ’73 JD, ’73 MBA, 08/26/2011, Scottsdale, AZ
Ernest J. Szasz ’73, 06/23/2011, Indianapolis, IN
Thomas J. Ferguson ’74 MS, ’75 PHD, 08/04/2011, Boxford, MA
Richard Maksian ’74, 10/03/2011, Fort Myers, FL
F. Thomas Day, M.D. ’75, 06/10/2011, Manistee, MI
Bro. John A. Flynn, FSC ’75 PHD, 06/07/2011, Lincroft, NJ
Dan J. Schroll ’75 MFA, 06/14/2011, Red Bank, NJ
Harry J. Kevorkian ’76 MA, 10/09/2011, Granger, IN
Douglas D. Wilhelm ’76, 09/26/2011, Aiken, SC
Robert C. Komasinski ’78, 08/20/2011, Michigan City, IN
James J. Close ’81 MSA, 08/31/2011, Chicago, IL
Douglas A. Garofalo ’81, 07/31/2011, Chicago, IL
Robert R. Kemper, Jr., MD ’87, 09/13/2011, Key Biscayne, FL
Joseph J. Keller, III ’89, 09/12/2011, Cherry Hill, NJ
Charles E. Chopin ’96 MSME, 09/07/2011, Barrington, RI
Timothy M. Lane ’01, 08/28/2011, Covington, KY
Jacqueline E. Bayley ’02 JD, 08/27/2011, Novi, MI
Xavier T. Murphy ’11, 10/11/2011, Anderson, IN

2011 big event: Regis bids farewell to his morning TV show

2012-01-06T08:00:00-05:00

Regis Philbin, Notre Dame class of 1953, ended his morning talk show duties on Live! with Regis and Kelly on Nov. 18, 2011. The man who holds the Guinness World Record for “most hours on TV” often spoke enthusiastically of his alma mater on the air, regaling audiences with affectionate descriptions of everything on campus from his favorite duck in Saint Mary’s Lake to the courtrooms in the new Eck Hall of Law.

Father John Jenkins, CSC, president of Notre Dame, was among those who paid tribute to the popular daytime host. His appearance followed that of former Irish football coach Lou Holtz and included the presentation of a replica of Holy Cross Father Anthony Lauck’s statue of the Visitation, which stands outside the campus bookstore. “I had to come out on behalf of the whole Notre Dame family to tell you how much we love you and how proud we are of you,” Jenkins told the humbled entertainer, adding, “We expect to see more of you now.”

Some highlights from his final show include his no-tears pledge; a personalized version of a song from the Broadway cast of Rent referencing Philbin’s on-air minutes, “nine hundred ninety-five thousand six hundred minutes” and the possibility of hosting a new game show.

ND monogram winners serving at Pearl Harbor, 1945

2011-12-22T09:05:00-05:00

John Hickey Jr. ’69, son of John Hickey ’44, found the attached photo in his father’s scrapbook recently. “He told me that someone had gathered all the ND monogram winners they could find serving in Pearl Harbor some time in 1945,” Hickey wrote.

The photo shows, left to right: Jack Wiethoff – Track ’43; John Hickey – Baseball ’44; Ralph Vinciguerra – Basketball ’43; Frank Leahy – Football ’31; Bob Faught – Basketball ’44; Ray Brancheau – Football ’34.

The senior Hickey, his son wrote, also won the Byron V. Kanaley award in 1943. The Kanaley Award has been presented each year since 1927 to senior monogram athletes who have been most exemplary as both students and leaders.

The Damage Done

2011-12-06T09:00:00-05:00

Peter Grant ’83 played interhall football for Notre Dame’s Grace Hall. Dave Duerson, a classmate and casual acquaintance of Grant’s from the dorm, was an All-American defensive back and an 11-year NFL veteran who won two Super Bowl rings. Their athletic careers could not have been more different.

But Grant and Duerson were alike in competitive passion. They played hard. And in the end, the game did not distinguish between them. It turned their intensity into an insidious, mysterious disease. Years removed from their last athletic collisions, they suffered a toll far worse than aching knees or arthritic hips, a loss impossible to repair or replace. They lost themselves and, within days of each other last February, their lives.

Collisions

Spero Karas ’89, the Atlanta Falcons team physician, talks about the intricate, delicate calibration of the brain in a way that suggests he keeps his in fine working order: “Brain cells communicate through ion channels, a normal flux of sodium and potassium and calcium, and then less implicated, of course, magnesium. There’s a fine balance of these as cells communicate with each other in the brain.”

To explain how a high-speed collision can jostle that communication into incoherence, Karas reduces it to a layman’s image: think of the brain at impact, he says, as a racquetball bouncing around a court. “You can imagine those cellular processes going haywire during a blunt-force trauma.”

That’s how someone suffers a concussion. When a collision generates g-forces strong enough to interfere with brain-cell functioning, the immediate effects are familiar: wooziness, confusion, slurred speech. “There’s still no treatment for it, there’s still no medication, there’s still no really firm diagnostic tool,” Karas says. “There’s very much still that we don’t know.”

Doctors do know that a player should never return to competition until the symptoms have subsided and an objective level of neurological functioning has been restored. Computerized testing before an injury occurs, now common at all levels for athletes in high-impact sports, establishes their baseline level of cognitive ability. After a concussion, they must return to that level before receiving clearance to play. This method identifies subtle variations in memory, orientation and reaction time that observation alone might miss, which helps prevent debilitating injuries to vulnerable brains that can occur if players return too soon.

But there’s another hazard, more difficult to identify, and possibly more dangerous: the cumulative effect of hit after hit after hit that never causes a diagnosed concussion. “Linemen might take a thousand, fifteen-hundred hits to the brain every season. That’s the nature of the position,” says neuropsychologist Robert Stern, co-director of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy — the “brain bank” that investigates trauma-induced disease. “They may not complain of any symptoms, or few symptoms, or irregular symptoms.”

Nothing, in other words, that keeps a player off the field. Yet each collision could be contributing to the development of a degenerative condition with far worse consequences. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is the contemporary term for the disease forensic pathologist Harrison Stanford Martland identified in 1928 as dementia pugilistica. Punch drunk.

Repeated blows to the head can lead to this mental state that causes symptoms similar to — and, Stern says, often diagnosed as — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease or the more general term, dementia.

Neuropathologist Ann McKee examines brains donated to the research center, which now has more than 70 from deceased football and hockey players, boxers, and military veterans who experienced combat trauma. On thin slices of the brain stems, McKee identifies the pathology that distinguishes CTE from those comparable diseases. An accumulation of the protein tau inhibits brain-cell function. The condition progresses slowly, but nothing can detect CTE in a living patient. More and more cells die and, depending on the areas of the brain affected, memory loss, mood or behavioral changes offer the first indication of a downward spiral that no treatment can prevent.

A fog

Before she got to know him, Dave Duerson’s future wife, Alicia, feared him. He played with such ferocity that she couldn’t imagine him acting any other way. Their first meeting dispelled that notion, and they stayed together for more than 25 years. “He was so sweet and kind,” Alicia told The New York Times. “He could leave the game on the field and go back to being Dave.”

For more than a decade that included Super Bowl titles with the Chicago Bears and New York Giants, he left the field and went back to being a loving husband and doting father to the couple’s four children. But sometimes just getting home after games was a challenge. In interviews after his death, Alicia recalled driving him because he felt too foggy to be behind the wheel himself.

Tregg Duerson ’08 doesn’t remember much about his father’s “Double D” football persona but recalls him “sleeping like a whole day” to recover from the physical punishment of NFL games. To Dave Duerson, the symptoms — dizziness, nausea, headaches — were routine. With some rest, he was ready to go again.

One report estimated that Duerson suffered 10 concussions, a number that sounds low to Tregg, given his dad’s aggressive reputation and the era when he played. “I think it was a much different culture than today.” And that number doesn’t even account for the untold number of normal hits that he just slept off.

Questions

Repeated blows to the head — whether or not they are severe enough to produce concussions — are a known cause of CTE, but those collisions alone are not enough to trigger the disease. Otherwise every former athlete in a high-impact sport would be debilitated later in life.

A growing body of research, especially the identification of CTE in 14 of the 15 deceased professional football players who donated their brains to Boston University’s study, has stirred public concern. And it’s not just pros, the people who exposed themselves to the risk for decades dating back to youth football. At age 21, University of Pennsylvania defensive end and team captain Owen Thomas committed suicide. His parents donated his brain, which had the telltale buildup of the protein tau associated with CTE. An anonymous, deceased 18-year-old high school football player is the youngest person ever shown to have the disease.

Stern notes that the prevalence of CTE among his center’s subjects reflects, in part, a self-selected group whose mental problems gave them or their families an incentive to seek a posthumous explanation. Still, 14 out of 15 professional football players is a startling statistic, especially for a condition all but absent among the general population. Although the victims have a history of repeated head trauma in common, the underlying susceptibility — why them and not their teammates? — remains a mystery.

“Are some people genetically more prone to developing the disease? Is it things like the age at which someone starts getting their head hit, or the overall duration of the exposure to brain trauma? Or the repetitiveness without rest in between hits?” Stern says. “We just don’t know any of those answers.”

Multiple hits

Katie Grant ’11 can only imagine her father as a high school athlete. If Peter Grant played football and hockey anything like he competed against his son, Zachary, “I’m sure he was very intense,” Katie says with a laugh.

He must have been. By his own account, Grant suffered seven concussions, including two that put him in the hospital. Once he was carted off the field, unconscious.

The specifics of the injuries — the circumstances, the severity, the length of recovery — have been lost in the retelling and the vague recollections of family and friends. “We also don’t know,” Katie Grant says, “if he took the full amount of time to heal after them.”

That’s a crucial piece of information. Using an individual’s baseline results, doctors today determine when players can return based on computerized, objective measurements. In the late 1970s, when Grant played high-school sports, identifying how many fingers a trainer held up might have been enough. “Now what’s important is screening, avoiding a second injury to a compromised brain,” Karas says. “That’s where the catastrophic, irreparable damage occurs.”

It’s possible that Peter Grant suffered that kind of irreparable damage before he even graduated from high school.

Long-term fears

Tim Ridder ’99 remembers his concussion and its aftermath the way most people might recall their 4th birthday party. “Remembering,” he says, “is kind of a funny word to throw in there.” From a video of his sideline evaluation and recollections of family and friends — but not from memory — he has cobbled together an account that has become the story.

During a preseason practice as a ND freshman offensive lineman in August 1995, Ridder suffered a concussion on one play and, unaware, returned to the line of scrimmage for the next. After the snap, he never moved from his stance. Assistant coach Joe Moore barreled toward him, raging. But when Moore got there, he found Ridder dazed and in tears, and summoned the doctor.

Longtime Notre Dame sports-medicine specialist Dr. Jim Moriarity went to work, with a camera recording the examination for teaching purposes. In addition to answering Moriarity’s questions, Ridder follows the doctor’s finger with his eyes, touches his nose, and wobbles trying to put one foot in front of the other like a drunk driver failing a field-sobriety test. “I think at that point I told them I had won the Blue-Gold game on my own,” Ridder says, “and I had never even been a part of the Blue-Gold game.”

He hadn’t even officially enrolled as a student. Freshman orientation was the next day, but instead of attending the event, he somehow ended up on the other side of campus, where a friend found him. Over the next week, he called home four times to tell his parents he had suffered a concussion. Not only were they aware of the injury, but Ridder’s father was at the practice when it happened.

Now 34 and a middle-school principal in Leadville, Colorado, Ridder thinks about the potential long-term effects of his “one and only” diagnosed concussion that kept him out about six weeks. All the hits from a football career that included two years in the NFL already reveal their residual aches in his knees and shoulders. He can live with those things. “I don’t want my brain to be the thing that happens early,” Ridder says.

Even that threat — memory loss, dementia, mood or behavioral changes — comes with a sense of culpability. “I did this to my body,” he says. “I had a lot of fun doing it; I knew what I was getting myself into.” Then he reconsiders the thought. “Maybe not completely,” he says, but common sense suggested what science has begun to establish — the correlation between repeated hits and mental decline later in life. Ridder remembers a professor telling him that if men were meant to play football, they wouldn’t have to wear an exoskeleton.

He thought more about the physical consequences then, conscious that his body could absorb only so much punishment without retaliating. That awareness shaped the message he delivered to children about the importance of education: “I’d say, ‘Your body falls apart, but your brain doesn’t. Take care of your brain because that’s what you’ll have going for you long after your body breaks down.’”

Moving forward

After he retired from the NFL, a champion with a charitable heart who had received the league’s Man of the Year award for humanitarian work, Duerson’s professional success shifted to a new arena. His business aspirations were at least as grand as anything he pursued as an athlete — and he paid his dues like a rookie to achieve them. After retiring from football in 1993, he became a McDonald’s franchisee, which requires months of training that includes working in a restaurant. “A year before that, this guy was in the NFL,” Tregg Duerson says. “That’s saying something. He was very hard-working no matter what he did.”

After owning three McDonald’s franchises, he bought a majority stake in meat-supplier Fair Oaks Farms and later started Duerson Foods. He remained involved in NFL labor issues and became a Notre Dame trustee. In business, he was the same ambitious, charismatic success story he had been in football. Even then, whether he recognized it or not, the damage already had been done.

Crash test

Helmets don’t help. Not enough, anyway. Most current models are not designed to protect against concussions at all. They are meant to prevent skull fractures — and they do. “But the head still moves around inside the helmet,” neuropsychologist Stern says, “and the brain, more importantly, still moves around inside the skull. That’s what causes brain trauma.”

A Virginia Tech study — sort of a crash test for football helmets — released a star-rating system in May, the first comprehensive consumer safety information ever published on the industry. As if to illustrate how little had been previously known, the NFL’s most widely used helmet — the league does not mandate what players wear — finished next to last in the study.

There have been improvements. New helmet models absorb more g-forces before they reach the brain; this could reduce the number of concussions. But no current technology can prevent them. Says Stern, “Equipment is not the answer — or it’s not the sole answer.”

As Stern and others continue to pursue research breakthroughs, they know this much: Eventually, some of the people exposed to the thwack of helmet on helmet, over and over again, will get sick. “The key to how to help prevent CTE, or at least decrease the risk,” Stern says, “is to reduce the overall exposure.”

That means less hitting in practice, a precautionary tactic beginning to gain traction. The new NFL collective-bargaining agreement limits contact in offseason workouts and regular-season practices. At the college level, the Ivy League has imposed the most stringent hitting restrictions yet. The rule, implemented this season, allows tackling, or contact of any kind, only twice a week. Current NCAA regulations permit five full-contact practices.

Loving life

There is a history of depression in Peter Grant’s family. In his early 20s, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he managed for decades with medication. He was open about his condition with his wife and three children, but it was controlled so well that nobody else would have known. “He was always his usual self,” Katie Grant says.

Outgoing and active in his West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, community, Grant chaired the town finance committee, served on the Bridgewater Savings bank board and coached kids’ sports. An accountant with an undergraduate degree in business, he built a career in finance and operations for The Boston Globe and later worked as a media consultant. “He loved his job and the media business in general,” Katie Grant says.

She describes all her father’s interests that way. He loved to talk, he loved to read, he loved to travel. He especially loved Notre Dame. That influenced his daughters. Katie graduated in May and younger sister, Chrissy, is a senior. (Their brother, Zachary, is in high school.) The memory of her dad’s animated campus visits makes Katie laugh. “It was almost too much.”

A sporting chance

Tim Ridder’s torn. He believes safety should be a priority, equipment and medical treatment should be state-of-the-art, and athletes should have as much information as possible about the risks of participation. On the other hand, he loved playing football, and he would hate to see the sport suffer if reasonable precautions could be put in place. “We have to make sure we’re not creating another Rome,” Ridder says, “where there are gladiators dying on the field depending on whether Caesar gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.”

Some former players believe that’s how they were treated. Claiming the NFL mishandled concussion treatment and concealed evidence for decades about the long-term effects of head injuries, in July a group of 75 former players sued the league. The NFL vowed to fight the suit, but its approach to head-injury awareness has changed in recent years.

A league medical committee formed in 1994 produced reports downplaying the ramifications of multiple concussions. A 2007 pamphlet informed players that “current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is treated properly.”

The message shifted before the 2010 season with locker-room posters describing the threat of depression and dementia, new rules about concussion treatment, and a $1 million donation to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. “It is the hot-button item in the NFL,” Karas says. “It’s probably what we spend the most time on in our disability meetings. What is the NFL but a large corporation that employs thousands of people? And being able to characterize the amount of injury and potential disability and getting these guys back safely is the number-one medical issue in the NFL.”

Duerson’s fall

Duerson understood football-related disability as well as anyone could without medical training. And he knew the horror stories all too well.

Part of a six-member panel that evaluated retired players’ disability claims, Duerson heard about the suicides and the substance abusers. He listened to stories about wild personality changes — violence, irritability, depression.

Duerson could sense himself unraveling in similar ways. At first, he made offhand comments about his brain, expressing concern over symptoms he already felt and fear of how they might progress. His children never knew about those worries. “He was a very prideful man,” says Tregg Duerson, who had never heard of CTE before his father died. “He would not have had that conversation with me.”

But unmistakable changes in personality and judgment altered the course of Duerson’s life. The patient man and prudent executive his family knew began to lash out in profane explosions and make bad business decisions that led Duerson Foods into financial peril. “He always had a very strong temper,” Tregg Duerson says, but in retrospect, he can see how the disease intensified that trait. “I think toward the end of his life, his temper was more quick — he was easily agitated.”

Duerson’s personal problems splashed into the newspapers in 2005, when he was arrested after pushing Alicia against a wall at the Morris Inn on the University campus. He pleaded no contest, resigned from the Notre Dame board, and soon he and his wife were divorced. Everything seemed to be falling apart because his personality had changed in cataclysmic ways that he feared with chilling prescience.

Mental collapse

In December 2009 something changed. Medication that had controlled Peter Grant’s mental illness for more than two decades stopped working. He became lethargic and withdrawn. Depressed.

Grant’s doctors adjusted the dosages, to no avail, and searched in vain to explain alarming mood changes. Home for Christmas that December, when her father’s new symptoms surfaced, Katie Grant thought he was preoccupied with work. When he visited Notre Dame two months later for Junior Parents Weekend, she recognized the depth of his depression.

His usual enthusiasm for a trip to South Bend vanished. “He just sat in the hotel room, didn’t want to do anything, didn’t even want to walk around campus,” Katie says. “It was a 180-degree transformation from anything I had ever seen.”

Through the summer and into the fall of 2010, it got worse, still without explanation. He had manic episodes — not sleeping, running around, talking incoherently. “Really sort of out of his mind,” Katie says. One episode in October left him hospitalized for two weeks. After his release, he remained unstable. Alternately manic and depressed, Grant would claim to be feeling all right on his better days, “but it was a lot worse than he was letting us know.”

There was no violence or anger, just withdrawal and forgetfulness. A dinner conversation would disappear in the fog of his mind, and when the subject came up again a day or two later, he would be upset that he hadn’t been told about it before.

That change was especially jarring for Grant’s family, who counted his intelligence and sharp attentiveness among his most notable characteristics. He was always on top of things. The difference could not have been lost on Grant himself, either, and they imagine that the frustration of his prolonged mental descent took an untold toll.

“I definitely think he felt hopeless,” Katie says, “that he just wasn’t going to get better.”

Duerson felt the same way. His financial problems reached their nadir in 2010, when he filed for bankruptcy and Alicia sued to collect unpaid child support, seeking assets that included his NFL Man of the Year award. By then he lived in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, a family vacation destination where he moved full-time. In retrospect, he might have moved there to retreat from life as he felt his ebbing. Duerson’s friend Ray Ellis told the Miami New Times, “He didn’t want to crumble in front of an audience.”

Legacy

On February 8, Peter Grant committed suicide. Nine days later, Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest, a report that reverberated around the country because of the reason he did it that way: to preserve his brain for CTE research.

Both the Grant and Duerson families donated the brains. Grant’s showed a mild level of CTE, Duerson’s much more advanced. Announcing the findings in Duerson’s case, the neuropathologist McKee displayed slides showing extensive damage to areas that affect “judgment, inhibition, impulse control, mood and memory.”

There’s solace in the CTE diagnosis for both families, insight into the torment that led Grant and Duerson to take their own lives. Beyond the emotional comfort, Stern says, their donations establish a legacy of medical evidence that transcends their own tragedies. Uncertainty still surrounds the disease. Players are left to wonder whether they will suffer a similar fate, or if hints hidden in the brains of previous victims will reduce the impact.

Jason Kelly, a former sports columnist for the South Bend Tribune, is an associate editor of the University of Chicago Magazine. His most recent book is Shelby’s Folly: Jack Dempsey, Doc Kearns, and the Shakedown of a Montana Boomtown. Email him at jasonakelly@comcast.net.