...The Carey family has owned Chicago's Hawthorne racetrack since 1909. Two Carey brothers played football at ND: Tom '55 (a grandson of the elder Thomas who had bought Hawthorne back in 1909) and Tony '65. Tom played for Leahy the year that Johnny Lattner won the Heisman ('53), and many years later the third of the Carey brothers, Bob, saw his son Tim play football at Fenwick with one of Johnny Lattner's sons. Tim is now the President or CEO of Hawthorne.

For several decades Charles Bidwill, the owner of the Chicago Cardinals, pretty much ran Hawthrone for the Careys until Bidwill died of pneumonia a few months before the Cards won their only NFL championship of their Chicago years in 1947. The Bidwills still own the Cardinals, as the Careys own Hawthorne, so this was an interesting intersection of sports ownership dynasties.

(A Carey sister was married to a childhood friend of my dad's from the old neighborhood, and we used to rent a beachfront house from them in Long Beach, IN, where a lot of Careys have summer homes.)

goes back a few years before then as well.

They went 2-7, but 4 of those losses were by single-digits to pretty good opponents -- Wisconsin (5-4), Purdue (5-4), MSU (6-2-1), and Syracuse (8-2). If I recall correctly, ND lead at some point in each of those games. ND did lose badly to its two best opponents -- Navy (9-2) and Pitt (9-1), and in the season's biggest flop, lost by 10 at Stanford (3-7) -- a game ND led at halftime, 14-10. But they upset Southern Cal (7-3) and easily beat UCLA (2-8, with one of the wins coming at Stanford).

It's interesting to ponder how well ND could have fared in 1963 if Ara had come one year earlier than he did.

Devore literally had a bunch of guys playing exactly the wrong positions. I would add that the game which was cancelled because of the Kennedy assassination would have been against a 3-3-2 Iowa team, so 8-2 would not have been implausible.

Joe was bringing guys in that were absolutely not fits for the school, from all parts of the country. My dad would tell me that a bunch of guys showed up to the first day of class, listened to some of the expectations the prof had about papers, assignments, and what not, and just left campus that day and went home. I remember him telling the story about a kid from Ohio who was just the big lug of a guy and who had a really bad stutter and the prof was talking about how they were expected to do a paper every week and from the back of the class everyone heard this big dude stutter out...."hu-hu-hu-hu-horseshit!"

Dude was gone by the end of the week.

I always enjoy your ND history lessons.

having no change for food sales, he took the vending machine, dropped it down the elevator shaft and collected the proceeds.