The first and only time I sail for France I am 18 years old, nearly fearless and eager for new adventures. I will have to deal with my shyness around meeting new people, but I am ready to conquer this demon and expand my horizons.
Not too long ago, I noticed a book, A Concise History of the Catholic Church, in the reading room at my parish church—St. Thomas à Becket in Reston, Virginia.
It’s been more than 40 years since my folks dropped me off at Cavanaugh Hall with just two suitcases. I didn’t think much about being a first-generation college student that day. I was just thrilled to be at Notre Dame.
Poem from The Living Dark
I was expecting this to be an emotional trip back to campus. It was to be mine and my mother’s first trip back to Notre Dame since the death of my father nearly six months prior.
They came from Rosary, Barat, Mundelein, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods and a dozen other “satellite” women’s colleges. In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, they were the daughters, sisters, cousins, friends and high school sweethearts of Notre Dame men.
Alumni Association Awards
Rex Rakow ’82MSA, director of the Notre Dame Security Police Department since 1985, was presented the James E. Armstrong Award for distinguished service to the University shortly before his death March 7 after a long illness. He joined the NDSP in 1979 as assistant director, having previously been director of campus safety at Albion College in Michigan. Rakow, 55, served as president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators from 1993 to ’94. He earned his bachelor’s degree in police administration from Indiana University and completed the FBI…
Unknown, a suspense film written by Matthew Waynee ’95 about five men locked in a warehouse with no recollection of who they are or how they got there, was recently released in theaters and is now available as a DVD. The film, whose stars include Greg Kinnear and Jim Caviezel, has been described as Memento…
Compiled by Carol Schaal ’91M.A.
BOOKS
Stigma, Philip Hawley Jr. ’74 (HarperTorch). This fast-paced debut thriller moves between Southern California and the rain forests of Central America as Luke McKenna, a doctor with an enigmatic past, searches for the cause of a Mayan boy’s death. What he uncovers instead are signs of a global conspiracy with overtones of medical mayhem and murderous enemies he must evade. The author is a pediatrician in Los Angeles who has done volunteer work among remote Indian tribes in Central America.…
Imagine you find your home in the Alaskan Yukon territory, with a bitter wisp of cold that never seems to end. For Casey Dame ’92, the coldness could be found inside as well. The first five years of his life were spent in a foster home while he dreamed that a kindhearted family might add him to their loving brood. In that time, other dreams emerged—dreams of monsters, dragons and spaceships, the kinds of things numerous children believe in but must eventually put aside in adulthood, when the real world of the 40-hour work week firmly takes hold.…
A Cave of Candles: The Story Behind Notre Dame’s Grotto, Dorothy V. Corson (Evangel Publishing House). Along with a history of the grotto and the people, events and stories associated with it, the book also offers tales of the history, spirit, legend and lore of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s. Photographs and painting illustrate the book. More information can be found at www.nd.edu/~wcawley/corson.htm…
Editor’s note: The letters that appeared in the Spring 2007 print issue are marked with a double asterisk (* *).
Religious differences
* *It was nice to read in “Oasis of Hope” (Winter 2006–07) how small groups of Catholic and Islamic students can get along. The expression, “Every journey begins with a single step,” comes to mind.…
Denis A. Goulet, professor emeritus of economics and policy studies, and William and Dorothy O’Neill Chair in Education for Justice, died December 26, 2006, in South Bend. He was 75 years old.
A much admired lecturer with an endearing weakness for puns and wordplay, Goulet taught at Notre Dame from 1979 to 2002. He was profoundly influenced by the writings and example of such intensely religious French intellectuals as Charles de Foucauld, Simone Weil and the “worker priests” of the last century. In his career, the “hunger and thirst for justice” exalted in Matthew’s gospel found precise and compelling academic description.…
Campus Ministry is good at keeping up with changes in communication technology. Now it is inviting Domers to keep up with the prayer of the Church by visiting ndprayercast.org.
On Ash Wednesday—February 21—Notre Dame spirituality became downloadable from the new website in 20-minute “prayercasts.” The audio-only files, accessible through most computers and MP3 players, include readings, psalms, a homily from a Holy Cross priest and the kind of sacred music many will remember from the 11:45 Sunday Folk Choir Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.…
When Annie Kleva first walked into the Student Health Center in 1994, she found a facility that too closely resembled the infirmary built for students and Holy Cross priests during the Great Depression. The director of University Health Services looks back on those days with a shudder and a smile.…
23rd in a series
Hall Portrait: Pasquerilla East
Year Built: 1981
Capacity: 250 (currently overloaded at 268)
Male or Female: Female
They call themselves: Pyros. In the 1980s, they called themselves the Purple Elephants to match the hall initials. The name was changed to the Pyros in an effort to claim the title of “hottest dorm on campus.”…
A piece of local political circus generated more than the usual buzz around the annual Notre Dame Student Film Festival.
Welcome to Snyderville, which took its name from the greeting on the road sign for Roseland’s Pizza King restaurant, captures the zero-tolerance approach to municipal governance espoused by Roseland Town Council member David Snyder and his wife, former town council president Dorothy Snyder, who works at University libraries.…
Take your time on this one—up to 25 minutes if you like: What’s a “cooee"?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary online, it’s an attention-getter, a call beckoning others to come, a Down Under colloquialism that out in the bush can take the place of “hello.” Word lovers dazzled by the flexibility of English may like to know that the word derives from the language of the Australian aborigines and found our tongue shortly after James Cook claimed New South Wales for the crown. To Americans, it would mean something like “within shouting distance.”…
When Catholics discuss their Church’s commitment to the protection of human life in all its forms, many focus on beginning-of-life issues and neglect the end-of-life ones.
Notre Dame senior Will McAuliffe and junior Andrea Laidman are seeking to bridge this divide through the creation of a student campaign against the death penalty in Indiana. The pair founded Notre Dame Against State Killing (NDASK…
From Kerry Temple ’74
One afternoon while we were working on this issue the time seemed right to visit Father Hesburgh. It’s only natural to think of the man who presided over the University for 35 years when you’re asking Notre Dame people to write about what they’re doing here. Hesburgh has spent a lifetime answering that question, and his response has been to combat racism, promote peace, serve presidents and popes, spread justice and determinedly push his school into the front rank of higher education. In doing this (and a whole lot more) Hesburgh became one of the nation’s most prominent leaders and an exemplary citizen of the world simply by performing—he will say time and again—his duties as a Catholic priest.…
Richard C. Notebaert, the Denver, Colorado-based chairman and CEO of Qwest Communications International Inc., was elected the sixth chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees in February. His three-year term begins July 1. An alumnus of the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a bachelor’s degree as well as a master’s degree in business administration, Notebaert is no newcomer to the University. His election follows 10 years of service on the board, for which he chairs the University Relations and Public Affairs and Communications Committee. He is also one of the University’s 12 fellows, the top governing body of the University that consists of six Holy Cross priests and six lay members. The fellows elect the trustees, adopt and amend bylaws and are charged with maintaining Notre Dame’s Catholic character, a priority Notebaert emphasized in the announcement of his new responsibilities. Notebaert has been widely praised in the telecommunications industry for resurrecting Qwest, then one of the four Regional Bell Operating Companies, from financial ruin since joining the firm as its top executive in 2002. He also serves on President George W. Bush’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. He succeeds Patrick F. McCartan, an 18-year veteran of the Board of Trustees who served as its chairman for the past seven years. . . . Notre Dame may have lost…
The eight Millennium Development Goals, which set the bar for Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages and indirectly for the Notre Dame Millennium Development Initiative, were aggressive human development targets established at the United Nations’ Millennium Summit in September 2000. They call on member states to work toward the following by 2015:…
In the global fight against extreme poverty, the most important weapon may be humility.
Such is the hypothesis of Father Robert Dowd, CSC, ’87, the political scientist charged with leading Notre Dame’s distinctive involvement in a serious international push to eradicate global poverty by 2025.
Dowd, a scholar of East African political culture, is the director of the Notre Dame Millennium Development Initiative (NDMDI…
I started my wildflower garden six years ago. My husband and I bought a house, and it needed a new septic tank. The contractors dug up the east side, tearing up the grass. They left dirt. I decided to cast seeds on top of the sewage. Then, a year later, with the raw dirt, one-year perennial starts and a 2-year-old, my husband left me.…
After her stroke, my mother-in-law required six weeks of rehab.
It is my duty to open the lake house this year without my father, my first time without him. It won’t be easy. The challenge is getting the water started after a frigid winter of dormancy during which pipes improperly drained the previous fall may have cracked. Cracks and breaks destroy the vacuum the pump seeks to make in order to draw water from the well. It’s a question of pressure. If a certain measure of pressure cannot be established and then maintained by the system of pump, valves and exposed copper piping, there’s no water.…
The scene could not have been more fitting. As the lights were being turned out on what was a nearly empty gym, there stood 10-year-old Sean Guthrie, looking more prizefighter than point guard, with bloodstained teeth and an upper lip about twice its normal size. I watched as he slowly—reluctantly, really—shuffled off the darkened basketball court. Moments earlier, I had tried in vain to find just the right words to send a ragtag collection of fifth graders off after our season-ending loss. All season I had tried to teach them about sportsmanship, teamwork and maybe a little about basketball. Little did I know what I would receive in return.…
My father-in-law sent four sons to Notre Dame and helped send five grandchildren as well. He did not attend college himself. He went to war, enlisting the day after his high school graduation in 1944. Leonard joined in the Navy and was sent to the Pacific theater. This much we always knew.
Leonard told us he was a cook in the Navy, and so he was. He liked to brag about cooking pancakes and eggs, hundreds of them, flipped and scrambled for the waiting sailors. Mostly, though, he did not talk about the war. He was not one to reminisce, not like my husband’s Great-Uncle John, who sat on his sister’s front porch and told us stories of his time in France during World War I. Uncle John was animated, glad to have an audience, telling us about the trench rats able to detect poisonous gas before the soldiers. He was fine until he mimed taking the gas mask and placing it on his face. Then his hands began to shake and his voice to tremble and he could not go on.…
What am I doing here? Sitting breathlessly while listening to Maya Angelou read her poetry while she is seated directly across from me or embracing the sudden onset of emotion after placing a wreath on the tomb of a soldier at Arlington National Cemetery or discussing America’s fight against terrorism with Condoleezza Rice on the anniversary of 9/11. These are some of the moments that I have been lucky to be a part of because of my job as a network news anchor, but it would be disingenuous if I didn’t say that it wasn’t just hard work that got me to the great place where I am now.…
I recently attended a theological conference in Missouri. As I drove down a residential street near my childhood home I passed a house with a Notre Dame flag in the front yard. I was immediately seized by an almost overwhelming desire to stop the car, walk up to the house and introduce myself. It was as though I had found a long-lost cousin who I knew would be happy to see me. Most Notre Dame alumni will relate to what I was feeling. Once you’ve attended Notre Dame you forever feel a connection with and love for fellow alumni and for this great institution.…