LINKS:

Sacred Heart Basilica

Notre Dame Alumni Associaiton

Hammes Notre Dame bookstore

Morris Inn

Notre Dame brief history

Stephen Covey,  of seven habits fame

Photos/Matt Cashore, Don Nelson

The cherry woodworking, especially the fireplace frame and mantle, along with the lead came windows and overall collegiate-gothic architectural design, were a hit. Nice touches, too, are the cupola and the reception gallery's blue vaulted ceiling themed along the lines of Sacred Heart Basilica, complete with stars but minus angels. As Alumni Association staffers checked out their new offices in the Eck Center Complex earlier this year, the building clearly impressed them.

"What this says to me," said Kathy Sullivan, the Alumni Association's associate director, "is our alumni are our crowning jewel. This building, with its beauty and warmth, is a fitting place to come back to." President Edward Malloy, CSC, expressed a similar sentiment in a note to Alumni Association executive director Chuck Lennon, (left): "We shall finally have hospitality for our graduates the equal of their loyalty."

Only the Eck Center Complex is more than an alumni center. The Notre Dame campus ranks as Indiana's number two tourist stop, behind only the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, so the Eck Center also will serve as a visitors' orientation facility, with an auditorium where four busloads of travelers can view a welcome-to-campus multimedia presentation. The auditorium, reception gallery, and two floors of Alumni Association offices fit into the complex's 11,500-square-foot eastern building, directly south of the Morris Inn. Stepping west a few yards from the alumni and visitor's center will bring folks to the complex's other structure, a 70,000-square-foot Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore. This is one bookstore no one fears will go belly up in the Amazon.com era, partly because Notre Dame uses the term bookstore differently. It also defines alumni in its own way. Let's say a guy from Texas drives to South Bend for the first time, loves the Eck Center multimedia show and then makes over his wardrobe with bookstore purchases -- Notre Dame sweatshirts, ties, socks, running shorts and a jacket. Back home someone notices his new attire and steers him to the Alumni Association's Dallas club, one of 230 nationally, where he could join and even ascend to the presidency if so driven.

"Actually, there are a lot of people out there like that," said Lennon, "and they're part of this University's heritage, going back to immigrants early this century who identified with Notre Dame. In New York they rode the trains to the Notre Dame-Army football games, and that was the origin of the phrase 'subway alumni.' Today we welcome subway alumni into the association."

Most folks involved in the Alumni Association across the nation -- and, indeed, around the globe thanks to 40 foreign clubs -- can be counted as traditional, graduated alumni. A good many consider their Notre Dame years central to their educational and spiritual development, a category Frank Eck fits. He graduated in 1944 with a chemical engineering degree, pursued an industrial management career, and eventually ended up president and CEO of an industrial drainage company at Columbus, Ohio. He endowed a chemical engineering collection for Notre Dame's library in 1984, put funding into the Eck Tennis Pavilion, opened in 1987, and into the baseball stadium, opened in 1994. For the Eck Center Complex he contributed $10 million of the $21 million total cost.

While its new headquarters is visually impressive, Notre Dame's Alumni Association has through the years also made some impressive leaps in its mission.

The Alumni Association began in 1868 with the goal of preserving and strengthening "the common tie that binds us to each other and alma mater, by means of yearly reunions and by literary correspondence." Notre Dame's first alumnus, Father Neil Gillespie, had graduated 19 years earlier, and he won election in 1867 as the new association's president. The first reunion, in June 1869, featured a business meeting, Mass, a four-act dramatic production and a banquet replete with flowery toasts. Six years after that the Association's most distinguished president gained election: Father Edward Sorin, University founder and by then the school's retired president. If today's students sometimes stereotype alumni as guys in plaid pants who swap golf stories, 100 years ago the stereotype was fellows sporting whiskers who swapped Civil War yarns.

Immediately following World War I and throughout the years of Knute Rockne football, Notre Dame grew as never before. University president Matthew Walsh, during his 1922-28 tenure, took steps to ensure growth didn't destroy quality, capping enrollment at 2,500 and increasing faculty from 90 to 175. More staff seemed the order of the day, both for academic and nonacademic programs, and that's how a young alumnus named James Armstrong got his job. He graduated from Notre Dame in spring 1925, and that fall Walsh brought him back to campus to teach journalism, handle University publicity -- mostly football -- and to assist the Alumni Association. Four months and one football season later, Armstrong wanted to quit. He didn't feel adequate in the classroom teaching students approximately his own age, and he didn't like Rockne's tantrums nor the way the coach sometimes went over Armstrong's head on publicity matters.

Armstrong was in luck, however. The Alumni Association decided it needed a full-time, paid director, and its board of directors offered Armstrong a $4,000 salary and $8,000 working budget for 1926. Among his duties would be publishing the Alumnus magazine, organizing local clubs, planning reunions, maintaining a placement bureau, establishing scholarships and maintaining a 12,000 name mailing list. Armstrong didn't have to deal with Rockne much the next football season, but he greeted so many alumni on game days that he joked, "I am going to get an automatic hand shaker for those Saturdays." Sore hands and all, he remained in the job 41 years, building a widely emulated organizational model.

Chuck Lennon, the sixth man to hold the position Armstrong invented, greets people so naturally that an automatic hand shaker for him would be like an Etch-A-Sketch for Picasso. And if the visitor has ears for Notre Dame lore, Lennon can tell stories, like how he and other fielders patrolling old Cartier Field's far reaches watched baseballs soaring off freshman Carl Yastrzemski's bat during drills, four decades ago. Lennon graduated in 1961 with a biology degree, stuck around another year to earn a master's degree in education, and served Notre Dame athletics as assistant baseball coach and assistant basketball coach a few seasons. He spent most of the 1970s doing community development work in South Bend and accepted the Alumni Association position in 1981. Plenty of alumni recall Lennon from their first day on campus, as he likes to direct campus traffic and invite freshmen to the Alumni Association office for a welcome gift: a mug suitable for coffee or stashes of pens.

Greeting, keeping campus lore, reminding 18-year-olds they'll be students for four years but alumni forever -- that's what all schools hope for in an alumni director, but there's a lot more to Lennon. If Armstrong built the alumni machinery, Lennon revved the engine and took the machine for a ride no one else even contemplated. To Florida, for starters, in 1983, '84 and '85, the heyday of wild spring break flings at Fort Lauderdale. To the amazement of some observers, the Alumni Association went to the beach, too, and set up a center where Notre Dame students could pick up information on local dentists and doctors and could phone home for three minutes to tell their parents they were okay. Alumni association leaders believe they communicated to students that their organization did real, useful service.

About the same time, the association brought back to campus a committee of African-American alumni, some of whom held good memories of Notre Dame, some who did not. The University's commitment to building a diverse student population, the association directors thought, wasn't only the domain of admissions. Minority alumni provided vital perspective; the African-American committee adamantly stressed the need for more minority professors. A Black Alumni organization formed in 1985, followed by an Hispanic organization in 1991 and an Asian Pacific one in 1995.

"Acting as mentors, helping students succeed at Notre Dame, is an important part of what we do," says Joyce Jordan '82, a Washington, D.C. alumna who chairs the Black Alumni of Notre Dame. "We're a resource for recruiting potential students, too. Students can say, 'There's someone who looks like me, came from my neighborhood, and they made it at Notre Dame.'"

"Some people shy away from talking about our efforts to increase student diversity here, like it says something bad about our past, but this work is something to be proud of, " said D'Juan Francisco '89, the association's director of alumni clubs and student programs. "We know young people who attend Note Dame will go on to be leaders. But if we don't give them an opportunity to be part of a population reflecting diversity, they may not be effective leaders."

Other kinds of minorities enroll and graduate, too. Not all students are Catholic. Many care nothing for football, be it that of Bob Davie or misty recountings of the Four Horsemen. If outsiders might guess the Notre Dame Alumni Association to be thoroughly steeped in -- and perhaps blinded by -- the imagery the general public associates with the school, insiders say the organization under Lennon recognizes that not everyone has the same Notre Dame expectation or experience. A survey in the 1980s indicated recent graduates weren't exactly lining up to join local alumni clubs, which they perhaps viewed as groups of middle-age men glued to TV football games. The time was right to start talking the language of community service and lifelong learning, values long implied at Notre Dame but promoted pointedly on campus beginning in the 1970s. And so it has come to pass. Income tax preparation for lower-income clients, soup kitchens, home improvement for the elderly and disabled -- more than 80 percent of local clubs now claim regular service projects.

David Johnston '71, who will become president of the association's nationally elected board of directors this July, says, "Community service and continuing education have taken the Alumni Association beyond being sort of a good old boys club." Among projects Johnson's Colorado Springs club can claim is support of its community's Center for the Prevention of Domestic Violence. For 13 years the club's arranged for and housed a student volunteer from Notre Dame's Summer Service Project. Club families have housed the students.

"The last thing we want is for alums to do community service to promote Notre Dame," said Ed Trifone '88, the association's community service director. "If we're going to call ourselves Catholics and Christians, it's up to us to be Christ's light. We promote service, become sales people for service, and we hope others follow our lead."

Joe Delaney, president of the Notre Dame Club of Staten Island, says his club's 100 members support eight service projects annually -- "the same projects each year, but the challenges are never the same" -- including March of Dimes, Special Olympics and a foundation that improves education for special needs students attending parochial schools. Not every member takes part in each project, but annually in April all hands are needed for a massive Bread of Life food drive the club organizes. In 1998 students in 64 area schools collected 50,000 items for the campaign. New York's city council recently honored the club for its work, but the best testimony comes from agencies that feed Staten Island's needy, who say they'd have to pull funds from other services were the Notre Dame drive to cease.

Delaney, like two-thirds of the Staten Island membership, is a subway alum. He graduated from Seton Hall, appreciates the education he got there, but never forgot hearing his father -- a New Jersey cop -- speaking of Notre Dame. "To him what Notre Dame meant most was helping immigrant people to come up through the ranks. He really admired Father Hesburgh, and to me, community service sends forth the values that Father Hesburgh and all of Notre Dame represented to my family."

Not being a Notre Dame graduate, Delaney added, is sometimes an advantage in reaching into the community and gathering volunteers. "We've got guys who didn't go to any college," he said, "and often they bring skills, like truck driving, that others of us may not have. It's great seeing a New York City policeman and a doctor sitting down to work on the same effort."

Notre Dame isn't the only university to say community service makes for good alumni activity, but it's the undisputed leader in scope of services. Most other schools, said Trifone, typically identify a single cause. Likewise the Alumni Association established itself as the leader in continuing education in 1986 by initiating the Hesburgh Lecture Series, where the University's best professors hit the road to speak at public functions organized by local clubs. Topics range from "Defending the Guilty Client: Can A Christian Do It?" by the Law School's Robert Blakey, to "Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love: What Students Learn From the Greeks" by David O'Conner, an associate professor of philosophy.

"Over the years we've seen the Hesburgh Lectures move more and more toward topics that touch people's lives," said Kathy Sullivan, '82M.A., '87Ph.D., who head the association's continuing education program in addition to serving as associate director. "Beyond the lectures, we've created a niche role in continuing education based on alumni needs, and some of out best ideas originate not on campus, but from our alumni."

Joseph Murphy '45, a Casper, Wyoming, physician, in 1982 suggested that Notre Dame stood uniquely qualified to put together a medical ethics seminar where medicine, theology, law, philosophy and business could be combined to examine real struggles medical professionals face. That marked the beginning of an annual conference, held on campus in March, and open to students, alumni, and anyone else intrigued by ethics in this area of biomedicine and other profound medical developments. Continuing education programs also include a yearly excellence in teaching seminar, teleconferences beamed by satellite to clubs, and the only University version of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People training.

"The Seven Habits lend themselves to adding religious faith, which becomes Notre Dame's stamp on the program," said Sullivan. "A direction I see us going in the future is expanding our role in faith leadership in alumni's workplaces."

But would the alumni of 1868, who hoped merely to stay in touch by correspondence and reunions, recognize any of today's association? Maybe so. Mary Pat Dowling publishes Alumni, the association's long-running newsletter, now mailed three times a year to 110,000 readers. Other correspondence means are developing, too. Alumni Information Technology director Brian Egendoerfer's got on-line discussion groups up and running, linking classmates, professional colleagues, even new parents. "The groups aren't highly populated yet, but they will be," he predicted. As for reunions, June's still the month to return to campus for four days. In recent years reunion attendance has averaged 3,000, and an alternative to South Bend in the summer has been offered in the form of a spring Florida Fling, drawing 300-600.

It's possible, considering money crunches faced by the original association organizers and later by James Armstrong, that those long-ago alumni would find today's association ledger fully as impressive as the Eck Center. Armstrong in 1926 fretted that bills submitted to the board for an Alumnus issue might delay his paycheck. Today the university underwrites the Alumni Association's general budget, which provides for 12 professional and 13 support staff positions. Some additional money is raised, much of it for community service and continuing education, through an arrangement with VISA and by sales of apparel, special license plates, travel packages and alumni directories. Alumni often confuse the two, but the Alumni Association and Department of Development -- which raises money for scholarships, endowed chairs, research, buildings ande other University needs -- are separate.

For the Alumni Association, the Eck Center offers a step up from the staff's cramped quarters in the Main Building. "Alumni and other visitors will be able to walk in and not feel like they're intruding in someone's office space," noted one staffer. But still, as Chuck Lennon stressed, "The Dome will always be the center of campus for visitors."

And alums, traditional and subway, will always have stories to share. How alumni went out of their way to open homes to students caught on the road by the spring break blizzard of 1993. How a widow said she found peace by attending an Alumni Association grieving workshop. How the Notre Dame Club of Ireland has committed itself to service in Dublin's Ballymum section, one of Europe's most impoverished neighborhoods.

For the Notre Dame Alumni Association, it is the corporal revolutionizing work of the spirit.