It’s a small (Notre Dame) world after all.
261. True story.
262. Also a true story. Bob Helle and I met up with an American in an empty Munich train station at 5 a.m. He turned out to be T.J. Hostomsky ’81J.D., a Notre Dame law student based in the London program. We compared news about Notre Dame as they got The Observer regularly. TJ then asked if we had seen the Molarity cartoons because Jim and Chuck were in Europe. Bob said to him, “This guy writes them.” T.J. made Notre Dame history a couple of years later when he appeared in the nude for the student production of Equus which prompted many letters to The Observer, particularly as it occurred during Holy Week. When last heard from, T.J. was a monk in an upstate NY monastery.
263. The Observer featured a cover story of Father Bill Toohey condemning the pending national legislation to reinstitute registration for the draft. Registration had been suspended in 1975 and would be reinstituted during the Reagan administration. My male classmates and I fell into the narrow historic era of men who never had to register for the draft.
264. The two small comments need some explanation I suppose. Andy Capp was the only English cartoon strip which had wide U.S. distribution. It was written in cockney about a drinking working class guy who never actually works. And “pimped out of our shorts” was common ND slang for getting the worst end of any deal, i.e. “Emil pimped me out of my shorts on that last quiz.”
265. This Observer featured two cover stories. The first was about the famous Republican nominee debate in Nashua in which Reagan invited the other candidates (Dole, Anderson, Baker) to debate Bush. Almost as famous as “Tear down this wall” was Reagan’s quote of the evening, “I am paying for this microphone.” And the headline was about the South Bend police raiding the Goose’s Nest (a bar formerly known as The Library.) Almost 200 hundred underage drinkers were in the bar. So many that the police could not reasonably arrest them all. So rather than select a few, they let them go. The crowd outside chanted to the tune of Pink Floyd’s The Wall – “Hey coppers, leave us kids alone.”
See the first five classic strips. Check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips. Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, also is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives.