LINKS:

George Gipp

Knute Rockne

Four Horsemen

Notre Dame Stadium

Father Hesburgh

Holy Cross Brothers

. . . The Irish were not yet known as the Irish;
. . . Knute Rockne was in his first season as the Irish football coach;
. . . George Gipp was a sophomore;
. . . The Four Horsemen were in high school;
. . . Theodore Hesburgh was 15 months old;
. . . And Notre Dame Stadium was a dozen years away from being built.

Reichert, who turned 100 last August 31, arrived at Notre Dame in the fall of 1918 and graduated in 1922 with a bachelor's degree in commerce. Along the way he played baritone in the marching band and was part of a group of students that talked Rockne into buying uniforms for the band. One day in a pre-law class he didn't have enough money to buy a pamphlet, so he borrowed a dollar from Gipp. But he never got the chance to repay the football hero before he died of strep throat in 1920.

In his first year on campus Reichert was a member of the Student Army Training Corps, the World War I equivalent of today's ROTC. After the armistice was signed, the SATC was no longer needed, but Reichert and other corps members had to wait for their discharge papers before they could leave campus for winter break. The papers didn't arrive until the day before Christmas, leading members to conclude that SATC stood for "Stick Around Till Christmas."

After Notre Dame, Reichert enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was a classmate of Adlai Stevenson, but he left to help his father run the family bank in their hometown of Long Prairie, Minnesota, about 100 miles north of Minneapolis. Reichert spent most of his professional career in the banking and investment fields and now lives near Minneapolis. He came to the game with his son Tom class of 1960. Another son, John, class of 1957, says his father enjoyed the game and the weekend even though he has almost no vision and only partial hearing.

Romaine Reichert may have lived in parts of three centuries, but he is not Notre Dame's oldest alumnus. That distinction is believed to belong to Brother Jacob Eppley, a resident of Dujarie House, the Holy Cross Brothers' skilled-care facility at Holy Cross College. Brother Eppley turned 103 last May, but he missed Reichert and Gipp because he started at Notre Dame later in life, receiving his B.A. in 1929.

One reason Eppley got a late start on college was World War I. A native of Springfield, Ohio, he tried to enlist in the Navy, as a number of young men from his town already had. They were serving together on the same ship. The Navy turned Eppley down, however, because of his varicose veins.

It turned out to be the greatest of disguised blessings because not long after he was rejected, the ship with the Springfield men hit a mine and went down with all hands aboard.

Apparently less picky about veins, the Army accepted Eppley and deployed him to France, where he served about six months during the war. He never saw combat or fired his weapon but last year was awarded the French Legion of Honor, that country's hiighest award. As part of a commemoration of the 80^th anniversary of the 1918 armistice, the French government decided to honor all living French and U.S. veterans who defended the country during the war.

Brother Eppley joined the Holy Cross Brothers soon after the war and taught high school for about 40 years as well as serving in the order's administration.

C Ed Cohen

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