IT’S STILL A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD, but it’s rare for a house to be worth what it cost to build. Today the most expensive houses in the neighborhood, big ones on the river, can run as much as $300,000. The cheapest, one-story houses with vinyl siding and attached garages can be had for around $60,000. Chasten and I now live on the same block as Mom and Dad, and the mortgage payment on our large old house facing the river comes to about four hundred and fifty bucks.
About two miles up the hill gleams the gold leaf of the Golden Dome. Those who have never visited may know little else about us than that we host the university, along with Saint Mary’s and Holy Cross College across the street. Yet Notre Dame rose to real prominence only after our industrial fame had collapsed, and campus and community lived mostly separate lives for most of our history.
Still, if South Bend was never exactly a college town, we have long been a football town. I can still remember the first time, not yet five, when I witnessed tailgate country. Most of the accoutrements of tailgating are useless to a small child, which is probably why I have no memory of beer cans or chicken wings. But I do clearly recall a cake in the shape of a football, a cacophony of radios and gadgets playing the Notre Dame fight song, and everyone dressed in blue, gold, and green. Tailgating made no sense to me then, but I understood what a party was, and this looked like the biggest birthday party I had ever seen. Bundled up in my winter coat and accompanying my parents on a game-day walk around campus, I asked them what the big party was for. Matter-of-factly and in unison, they answered: “The game.”
WHEN I TURNED SIX, I was deemed old enough to start going with Dad, who until then had brought our next-door neighbor Leon Helak, a police officer, to sit with him in his seats in the southwest corner, Section 21, Row 42, which his faculty status gave him the privilege of buying each year. I don’t know when this literary scholar picked up his taste for American football, but it must go back in some way to his boyhood devotion to the great English soccer club Manchester United. After all, that loyalty meant he was totally at home as part of a roaring mass in the stands of a great stadium cheering for a team known by its deep and legendary tradition.
When the Man United team plane crashed on takeoff in 1958 in Munich, the disaster at once claimed the lives of my father’s soccer heroes and cemented his lifelong loyalty to the team—much as a 1931 crash in Kansas both took Notre Dame Coach Knute Rockne’s life and sealed his legendary status. Perhaps that’s why my father’s fondness for Notre Dame football showed no sign of the gap in affinity that you might expect to see between the Fighting Irish and a nonreligious Mediterranean intellectual. One afternoon thirty years after the Munich tragedy, he cheerfully guided his bewildered son up to his place on the weathered wooden bench to take in his first game, against Purdue.
It wasn’t even close. Lou Holtz was coaching; you could make out his red hair even from our corner seats two-thirds of the way up. The quarterback, Tony Rice, ran thirty-eight yards for a touchdown and later threw a fifty-four-yard touchdown pass to the soon-to-be-legendary Raghib “Rocket” Ismail. The crowd roared when Ricky Watters returned a punt sixty-six yards to the end zone, imprinting on my young brain the idea that every kickoff must be a scoring opportunity. Clutching the program my father had bought me, a four-dollar extravagance so that we could check the players by number, I stood on my seat to see the field when the fans leapt up for a big play. I was watching what would become the national championship team of 1988.
Over the years the mysteries of the stadium began to decode themselves. I finally grasped that those strange concrete forms that had looked like upside-down stairways leading nowhere were in fact the underside of the stands. I began to understand the difference between the regulars, who kept the same seats for decades as my father would, and the ones who came in one game at a time after buying tickets from one of the scalpers standing out by the Toll Road exit. I learned about penalties, rushes, passes, touchbacks, and safeties. And amid the magnificent swearing of people sitting around us I started to gather how profanity may be abusive but also poetic.
I learned about hierarchy, too. There were “alumni,” a word I came to associate with combed-over gray hair, blue blazers, blue-and-gold-striped ties, beige raincoats, and the smell of cigars. The nearer to the fifty-yard line and the closer to the field I looked, the more gray hair and beige coats. Our seats were more the domain of the “fans,” sporting Notre Dame jackets and scarves and hats and socks. And of course there were “students,” a mysterious kind of proto-adult whose ranks dominated the northwest corner of the stadium and who stood for the whole game.
Then there were the ushers—the same men each year—who conveyed in their yellow jackets and white caps such authority that it is peculiar to think that they were volunteers with day jobs, rather than full-time members of a football-oriented military order. Indeed, there actually was a football-oriented militaristic order, the elite and selective Irish Guard, consisting of tall, kilt-clad students in narrow bearskin hats, who marched out magnificently behind the band’s drum majors and performed the flag honors at the beginning of each game.
Some things I did not understand, and wouldn’t for years. At six, I could detect but not fathom the controversy when the students arrived at the vaunted 1988 Miami game wearing T-shirts that read CATHOLICS VERSUS CONVICTS. Nor could I then figure out what motivated my father’s wrath when he turned to some fans in the next row, aggravated by their catcalling Tony Rice (our second-ever black quarterback) over his grade-point average, and said to one of them, “I’d like to see your grade-point average.”
I could not then have comprehended the tension involved in the fact that my father was a man of the left, no easy thing on a campus like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s. I would learn later that many of his closest friendships among the faculty were sealed amid the protests of his early years, such as the time he spoke out against the Reagan administration’s covert support for human rights abusers in Latin America during the popular president’s visit to campus. (All I knew at the time was that he took me to the airport to see Air Force One through a chain-link fence at the end of the runway.)
As reliably as most students were conservative, the humanities faculty members were overwhelmingly liberal. From dinner tables at the homes of my parents’ professor friends I would hear words and names that would mean nothing to me then but in retrospect make it very clear what was on their minds: Reaganite. Intellectual. Iran-Contra. Lynne Cheney. Half the table talk was just faculty gossip, and that was pretty understandable to me by the age of ten or so because it wasn’t that different from the talk at school. But the other part, the reference-laden intellectual and political discussion, was opaque. I would hear but not understand arguments over the uselessness of post-structuralism or the relevance of Hobsbawm’s historiography, wondering what any of it meant and how anyone could be as passionate about it as the people seated at the dinner table who just a couple hours earlier were indulgingly asking me about my loose tooth or my baseball card collection. At first I tuned it out, awaiting the first opportunity to excuse myself from the table with the other kids and go watch TV (especially if the house we were visiting had cable) or play tag. Like the coffee they would pour to go with dessert, their style of conversation was an acquired taste. But the more I heard these aging professors talk, the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator. This offered its own sort of political education. At Saint Joe, we were brought up not only to learn Church doctrine on matters like sexuality and abortion, but also to understand the history of the Church as a voice for the oppressed and downtrodden. At all-school mass
in the bleachers of the airy, aging gym, we would pray for the various places and peoples around the world experiencing oppression.
My adjustment to high school life first unfolded under the command of Father Bly, who presided from an elevated desk with a dog-eared Bible on it, as he had since the 1960s, teaching the Old Testament. He had reluctantly consented to the mixing of girls and boys a few years earlier, but had succeeded in refusing to allow his room to be renovated, so we sat in those fifties-style seats with the desk built into them, bolted on to the floor. With a sort of terrified reverence, we held still as Father Bly expounded on the wisdom of the ages, beginning with Genesis. As he lectured, he rarely budged from the stool behind his raised desk; rumor had it that with an imperceptible movement he could send that Bible flying into the forehead of any student caught sleeping.
Occasionally he would lighten things up by passing out copies from what must have been a mountainous library of National Geographic back issues, so we could look at pictures of the Holy Land or something else he considered interesting. Once, he distributed an issue that contained satellite photos of subdivisions and golf courses being built in the deserts of Arizona, made possible by irrigation schemes that diverted water from the Colorado River. You could see the giant green squares in the satellite imagery, surrounded by barren sand and mountains. There are whole towns in Mexico, he explained, where the riverbed now runs dry because the water is drained upstream in the American Southwest. Next came the moral of the story:
“This weekend, you will probably go to the University Park Mall, and you may run into some atheists,” he pronounced, lingering on the consonants at the end of the word, hissing a little, atheisssttsss, without losing his aloof posture and hundred-yard stare.
“These atheists will tell you, ‘There is no God, there is no heaven, and there is no hell.’ And how will you answer them? You will tell them, of course there is a God, and a heaven and a hell. There must be a hell. Because where else would you put the man who built this golf course!”
• • •
IN GOVERNMENT CLASS, WE WERE shown the 1989 film Romero, in which Raul Julia plays the Salvadoran bishop assassinated in 1980 by right-wing paramilitary after challenging the ruling elites in El Salvador. Shocked that this could have happened within living memory with what looked like American complicity, I began paying more attention to human rights. The school had a small chapter of Amnesty International, which raised a few hundred dollars a year and conducted letter-writing campaigns. I joined and eventually became president of the six-or-so-strong group. Here came an early lesson in the realities of organizing—it was nearly impossible to get people to volunteer to help write letters to political prisoners at the little card table I put up outside the lunch hall, but we got hundreds to come to the Battle of the Bands organized to raise money for the club.
On balance, the school faculty was far from a liberal bunch. A monument to aborted fetuses on school grounds reminded us all that pro-life politics was an article of faith, and many teachers were skeptical of the perceived bleeding-heart tendencies of their more social-justice-oriented colleagues. Mr. Dubois, who taught gym and drafting, comes to mind. He spoke with a thick southern Indiana drawl, combed what remained of his white hair back, and usually called gym class to order by barking, “LAAAAAHN UP, YOU IDIOTS.” Or occasionally, for variety, “LAAAAHN UP, YOU MORONS.” Over time, I would come to understand that this was a way of showing affection. But you can see how, at least early on, this could be a little intimidating—especially since gym class was not my scene. It would be a good ten years or so before I experienced any real level of physical fitness, so the primary objective was to survive without embarrassment. I could handle myself in touch football just by throwing my weight around, because half my classmates had not yet caught up to my then-imposing five feet eight. But basketball was more nuanced and less forgiving.
Once, after I somehow made a basket, Mr. Dubois pulled me aside at dismissal and offered something that might be described as encouragement. “Butt-man,” he began, “I see a lot of poh-tential in you. Keep working at it.”
But some weeks later, he stopped to talk to me with something else on his mind: he’d heard I was getting mixed up in Amnesty International. Mr. Dubois was not fond of “Ay-rabs,” so I could see where this was going. I stiffened, and told him that I was, that I was running our chapter now, and that I felt that was consistent with the values we were being taught in theology class. There must have been a little more force in my voice than either of us had expected, because he responded with a respectful nod followed by a cheerful snort: “Well, to each his own, I guess.” He smiled and returned his gaze to his clipboard as he proceeded toward a new victim on the gym floor, a sophomore whom he had decided for some reason to nickname “Re-cruit.”
By high school I had traded my oversized, thick glasses for contact lenses, but my eyesight was getting worse every year, smothering my childhood aspiration of becoming an astronaut or at least a pilot. But in the meantime I had begun to wonder what it would be like to be involved in public service directly, instead of reading or watching movies about it. Could political action be a calling, not just the stuff of dinner table talk?
I got onto every mailing list I could, and from every political persuasion, from the local Republican Party to the Democratic Socialists of America. I wanted to find out how people went about being involved in ways more impactful than lonely letter-writing campaigns. And I decided to try my hand at leadership in student government, first losing an election for student body treasurer but then winning one for senior class president. In an assembly in the dining hall, the five or so candidates for class president gave our short speeches, using a closed-top trash can as a kind of makeshift podium, and once the scraps of paper got counted up, I had won my first election.
I kept up top grades, and by senior year a flow of mailed college recruiting brochures accumulated into an avalanche on our dining room table. Sifting through them, I tried to picture a future as a college student. There was something distant and even intimidating about the imagery—confident, smiling, diverse students in sweatshirts chatting and laughing in small groups on tidy quadrangles, or walking cheerily with their backpacks through autumn foliage on slightly different variations of the universal college campus. It was hard to picture myself at ease like these students; I wasn’t even at ease in the halls of my own high school, even as a class president. But the letters and brochures made it seem like the colleges were happy to have me. I applied to about ten of them, hoping above all for a shot at Harvard. The odds seemed long—I’d heard of even valedictorians from Saint Joe being turned away—but I had to make the attempt.
When I got home one day and saw a letter from Harvard on the mail table, I didn’t get my hopes up too much. It was not a thick envelope. I feigned nonchalance, setting my backpack down before heading back to pick up the letter that might hold a key to my future, while my parents kept a discreet but unconvincing distance in the living room. I usually open letters with my finger, but this one deserved a letter opener. Pulling out the page of watermarked paper, I read the opening line over and over again: “I am delighted to inform you . . .”
Slowly, I allowed myself to believe the letter from this dean of admissions, and by the time I studied the bottom, with a little “Hope you will join us” written in ballpoint pen near the signature, it felt like the establishment had thrown its doors open and beckoned me inside.
All I had to do was leave South Bend.
I HAD NEVER BEEN TO BOSTON, but I wound up going twice during that last semester of high school. The first was a planned college visit after I got admitted, sleeping on the floor of a freshman dorm and learning what to expect from the campus, at least physically. The second was an all-expense-paid trip that came as even more of a surprise than the admission to Harvard.
At the urging of my teachers, I had submitted an entry to an essay contest sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library as part of thei
r annual Profile in Courage Award. Around South Bend, President Kennedy was on par with Lincoln. As the first Catholic president, he had won the undying loyalty of the white ethnic working class, and as the man who had invited America to shoot for the moon, he was the first example of presidential leadership that I had understood as a child. Participating in the contest seemed almost like a duty.
I worked for days on an essay about Carolyn McCarthy, who had run for Congress on gun policy issues after her husband was shot and killed on the Long Island Rail Road. I had nearly finished the essay when I went online to research a couple last details—and found out that the previous year’s winner had written about the same person. I would have to start from scratch.
Rushing to come up with an alternate plan, I decided to write about someone I had found even more interesting, if a little more edgy politically. An obscure Vermont congressman, Bernie Sanders, had been reelected for years as a socialist—in a (then) generally Republican state. At a time when vagueness and opportunism in politics seemed to be the order of the day, here was an elected official who succeeded by being totally transparent and relentless about his values. “Socialist” was the dirtiest word in politics, yet he won because people saw that he came by his values honestly. Regardless of whether you agreed politically, it certainly seemed like a profile in courage to me.
Years later, when I was running for mayor, I would check my mailbox one morning and find a mass mailing from the local Republican Party (I guess I was still on the list) warning that Pete Buttigieg was dangerously leftist, citing the high school essay as proof. I wasn’t too worried about it—by then even many local Republicans were supporting me—but it prompted me to go back and find the essay.
It definitely reads like something written by a high schooler, starting with the opening sentence: “In this new century, there are a daunting number of important issues which are to be confronted if we are to progress as a nation.” Other comments fit the times then but no longer ring true—such as when I lamented that a strong conservative like Pat Buchanan “has been driven off the ideological edge” of an increasingly centrist Republican Party. But the basic premise still holds: that candidates for office can easily develop “an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power,” and that Sanders was an inspiring exception.
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