Dillon Hall Diaries: Singing With The Temptations

I thought that, from time to time, I might do a post about what life was like at Notre Dame "back in the day," i.e., from 1965 to 1969. That was the four year span I spent there as an undergrad, majoring in finance. I have decided to label those posts as "Dillon Hall Diaries," in honor of my old haunt.

I lived in Dillon Hall from my sophomore year through my senior year. In those days, ND was all guys, and there were eighteen residence halls. Dillon, located on the South Quad right between Alumni Hall and the South Dining Hall, was home to over four hundred of us, by far the largest dorm. When you are a student at ND, and even after you graduate, people familiar with the school always want to know what hall you lived in. That was the quickest way to identify someone, even moreso than his major. There were (and are) no fraternities at ND, so the dorm you resided in functioned somewhat like a frat house. If your first mental image of a frat house is a bunch of guys living like slobs and never missing an excuse to throw down a beer or two, you could equally apply that concept to most of the Irish dorms, including Dillon. We studied very hard, but we partied heartily too. When college guys like us would go days, maybe even weeks, without talking to a girl, let alone having one visit us where we lived, it was not surprising that we just might have gotten a little rough around the edges.

Yes, it is true, we did in fact have maids. They showed up around 10:00 a.m., as I recall, and they were gone by about 2:00. They made the beds, and did a little mopping and dusting. Lord knows we would have never done those jobs ourselves, so my thinking is that the university hired those poor women to keep the city of South Bend from condemning half the dorms as uninhabitible. Most of the maids were gradmother types. Looking back, I'd say they were brave.

Every dorm also had a rector who was a Holy Cross priest. Ours was Father Flannigan, an art professor and a good guy. Like me, he lived on the first floor of our four story building, but he was at the opposite end next to the hall chapel. Because Dillon was so big, we also had a couple of other priests living in our midst. One was Father Burtchaell, a theology prof whose most interesting characteristic was his British accent. Father Burtchael was a nice enough guy, I suppose, but he had an aristocratic air about him which always made me think that the only reason he was quartered in Dillon was due to the lack of a vacancy in a more refined dorm like Fisher or Pangborn.

I mentioned above that Dillon was right next to the South Dining Hall. None of us had much spending money, and what little we did have was usually saved for weekend six packs. Therefore, we were economically forced to eat all of our meals in the South Dining Hall. Almost no one bothered to get up in time for breakfast. Instead, rolling out of the sack ten minutes before our first class was our preference. We knew we were not passing up a great meal. Lunch, even though our first meal of the day, was typically on the run. The food was crummy, the coffee tasted day-old, and since everyone was on his own schedule, being able to eat lunch with your friends was hit and miss. Dinner, on the other hand, was a different story, in many ways the highlight of the day, not because the evening grub was any great shakes, but because of the camaraderie before and during that repast, and especially afterwards. Instead of dessert we'd all have our cup of java and a smoke while discussing (and solving) the world's problems before venturing off for a long night of studying.

In my senior year there was a group of six or seven of us who lived in Dillon, and almost every night before we headed off to the South Dining Hall for dinner we would gather in one of the guys' rooms to sing along to the Temptations Greatest Hits album. The Temptations was our favorite Motown group. Although we were all white, one of our group, Joe Renice from Long Island, sounded exactly like David Ruffin, the lead singer on many of the Temptations' tunes. One evening during our sing-along, I was sprawled out on the top bunk, lying on my back with my eyes closed, singing my heart out. As usual, the music was so loud that I could barely hear my "fellow Temptations." About three fourths of the way through a song, I realized that I was the only one singing. I opened my eyes, propped myself up on an elbow, looked down and there was Father Burtchaell standing in the doorway. He looked like he wanted to laugh, but managed to restrain himself. For the rest of the year, every time I ran into him he made sure to ask me how my singing career was coming along.