Ratterman was quite a character...there are many, many stories about his undergraduate days at ND....some may actually be true :)
one such story was that he was suspended for trying to drive his car up the steps of the administration building.....
George was my father. Though I cannot say with complete confidence that Dad's explanations to his children ever told the full story, the official party line on the suspension was ... missed curfew. Filling in the blanks, I gather it was a repeat offense, there had been previous warnings, and he wasn't just late, he stayed out all night after partying somewhere. Though he did not dispute the missed curfew, he offered in his defense that he was in his seat, on time, for his 8:00am law school class the next morning.
Powers that be wouldn't have it. He was suspended for the rest of the semester, and after he cleaned out his room (probably in Lyons or Dillon), he took a "victory lap" by driving as far up the steps of the Admin building as his car would go.
Dad had a lot of stories that he shared with us, and probably twice that many died with him. His ND friends and experiences were closer to his heart than those from the NFL years.
A question in another thread asked whether Dad and Ziggy Czarobski went to high school together. The answer is no. Dad was from St. X in Cincinnati and I think Ziggy was from Chicago. They were good buds in college, though. Ziggy was one of the top characters of that era. You can't tell the story of the 46-47 teams without talking about Ziggy.
As wild as the football stories were, the movie I want to write about George was the Kentucky sheriff campaign drugging and framing episode that is mentioned in another thread on here. The upshot of that was that I, and every one of my nine siblings, at one point or another invoked a drugged-and-framed defense when confronted by Dad about questionable behavior. It usually got a laugh and a lighter punishment.
Matt Ratterman ’78
thanks for the info on your father MRatt
after declaring for the pros, Ratterman played one more game for Leahy-the College All Star game in Chicago vs the NFL Champ Chicago Bears & George Halas
The College All Stars won 16-0
Ratterman completed 8 of 12 passes, including a 46 yd td pass to ND teammate Jack Zilly....ND's Jim Mello also scored for the All Stars
Soon after proclaiming a candidacy taking aim at what had become known as the Sin City of the South and as a haven for organized crime, Ratterman was arrested at a Newport hotel room. The police, conducting what they said was an antiprostitution raid, reported finding him in bed with a stripper.
The misdemeanor case was thrown out. According to testimony, Ratterman had been given a knockout drug and had been taken to the hotel room while virtually unconscious in what was evidently a setup in an attempt to force him to withdraw from the sheriff’s race.
In October 1961, six people were named in a federal indictment arising out of the episode — Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had taken an interest in the case as part of a widespread effort to clean up Newport. Two of the defendants, a lawyer and a former nightclub operator, were convicted in August 1963 of conspiring to violate Ratterman’s civil rights. The others, three of them detectives involved in the arrest, were acquitted.
Ratterman, who had a law degree, was elected county sheriff in November 1961.
“We didn’t have to bust down doors — oh, we did something like that with one or two places,” Ratterman told The Cincinnati Post in 2004, recalling the anticorruption campaign in Newport. “But once we did, the other side knew what was coming, and they left quietly, on their own. We knew who was in charge of the corruption, and they knew we knew.”
I seem to remember Ratterman being one of the original TV broadcasters when the AFL started up in the early 60s. Was Ratterman a HS teammate of Ziggy Zarobski’s? If so that must have been a wild bunch.
I confused Ratterman with Elmer Angsman who did early TV work and came from the South Side Of Chicago.
Please don’t ever feel like you’re talking to yourself (and I know you said it tongue-in-cheek).
1946
Not surprised he had the charisma to win an election (despite illegal efforts to prevent him from doing so).
In case you were seeking any further thoughts on the basketball/football dual sport combination mentioned in your post. Not entirely sure that is true, family lore as far as I know.