The Lesser-Known Alumni Stories of Notre Dame History

Sometimes, the best stories aren’t the most well-known. Always, the best stories are the craziest.

These are the kinds an alum recounts with old buddies at a tailgate or at every college reunion. The kinds of stories their kids usually respond to with, “You did what?” The kinds of stories you don’t normally find in a magazine (probably for a good reason).

“Tell me your craziest story,” I asked anyone who would answer. The result was a hodgepodge of anecdotes that all make up the lesser-known side of Notre Dame’s rich history.

Dave Tracy ’86 began by sharing how an ambitious food sales endeavor led to a lasting legacy.

“Back in 1984, my cousin Scott Tracy and I competed against a couple other Dillon Hall guys for the right to run Dillon Hall food sales during the school year. Our audience was Dillon’s Hall Council and Dillon’s rector, Fr. Mark Poorman, in those days. Our presentation was three-fold: 1) extensively clean and paint the dungeon that held Dillon food sales back then, 2) share one third of our net profit with Dillon Hall Council and 3) add milkshakes as a new menu item alongside the pizzas and subs.” Milkshakes? Dillon? This sounds familiar.

“The cleaning and fresh paint appealed to Fr. Poorman. The money appealed to the Hall Council. And the milkshakes are still featured today at Dillon Hall’s Milkshake Mass.” The Observer dubbed Dillon’s food sales that year “the culinary showplace of South Quad.”

Other stories, such as that of Craig Brummell ’90 also reflect the culture of Notre Dame residential life. Some call it community building; Craig called it “a hall full of guys with too much time, limited supervision and a sacred duty to prank each other as often as possible.”

“This was back when every room had a push button phone, and you could tell who was calling by the ring: a single ring meant on campus, a double ring meant off campus and off campus meant it mattered. One night, fresh back from the library (or maybe the bars), my roommate and I loaded our receiver with shaving cream and set our sights on Brother Mark, who lived directly across the hall and had stayed out the longest that night. For the first call, we left our phone on the floor outside our door, and at the single ring, Mark picked it up and got an earful of Barbasol!

“For the second call, we set the phone just inside our open doorway, in plain view, and gave it the all important double ring, so he fell for it again. By the third call, you’d think the man would have developed trust issues. Instead, we lured him out of his room and down the hall, Barbasol’d his own phone, and hid inside our room to watch. The double ring went off, and Mark sprinted the length of the hallway, wheeled into his room and snatched up the receiver, only to hear two voices say, ‘Hi, Brother Mark!’ He turned around, shaving cream on the side of his face for the third time that night, and there we were, directly across the hall, laughing our heads off.”

Craig wasn’t the only one whose craziest story involved dorm hijinks. Andrew Reinhart ’86 shared a story involving another aspect of Notre Dame tradition: dorm rivalries.

“For reasons now lost to the fog of fading memory, a group of my dormmates decided to ‘liberate’ the Dillon Hall flag that hung on the upper floor of Dillon facing South Quad.” For reference, Andrew is a proud former resident of Howard Hall.

“Late one night in the spring of 1985, a group of us assembled underneath the flag and built a human ladder to snag it. I was at the top of the ladder; I was quite a bit lighter in those days.

“What we didn’t plan for, however, was that the flag was fastened with a number of beer mugs and other noisemakers that we thought would alert the residents that we were up to no good. With a final hard tug, we pulled the flag off the wall, collapsing our human ladder. I tossed the flag to the fastest runner in our group, and he took off toward the lakes (and probably Michigan). The rest of the group disappeared in different directions, but we reconvened later to celebrate our (dubious) achievement. Long story short, high-level dorm-to-dorm negotiations ended with the return of the flag to its owner. But we have celebrated our exploits for the last 40 years.” Now that’s the kind of story that gets retold at a reunion.

If you’re an avid Scholastic fan, you might recognize Andrew’s last name. His daughter (and my former Editor-in-Chief) Tess Reinhart ’26 had a crazy story to share too. Like father, like daughter!

“Sophomore spring, my friends and I were looking for ways to add variety into our seemingly empty weekends without the demands of football. We were driven primarily by our desire to turn this weekend activity into an annual tournament or competition. This is when one of us had the brilliant idea to host our own ‘Slap the Bag.’ Expectations were set: a wine bag race (zero-proof wine, of course) where each girl in my friend group was responsible for drafting a four-person team and assembling a theme with costumes. First team to finish the whole bag wins.

“This event generated so much attention that each year we had to up the ante more and more. My junior year, 17 teams and themes were set, an Airbnb had been booked far from campus to contain the chaos, and there was a time to beat from the year before. It was a typical South Bend December, meaning a blizzard was also rolling in and Ubers were cancelling left and right. Miraculously, teams began rolling in, one after another, each covered in more snow than the last. The once-freezing house began overheating with excitement, and my friends and I were thrilled to share crazy stories like these (albeit disgusting, filthy and vomit-inducing) with the best people in the best place as the clock ran down on our precious time at ND.”

Ann Allie ’01 had a bit of a different story to tell. Hers also involved an off-campus house, although with less wine and more wild animals.

“My senior year, I lived with three other Farley girls in a house on Angela Boulevard. One day, I came home to a pile of empty Mountain Dew cans strewn about the floor by the recycling bin. I figured it was my roommate and ignored it, assuming it was someone else’s mess. But the next day, another roommate noticed someone had gotten into her snack cookies in the pantry, and she started asking questions. What we found were teeth marks through the plastic packaging of the Little Debbie’s — and they weren’t human. As if on cue, a squirrel came flying out of the ceiling into the kitchen! There was a lot of screaming and running around for all of us humans and the squirrel. In the chaos, it ran around the living room and up the stairs ultimately into the ceiling again. Our landlord gave us a cage trap with peanut butter.

“We then realized it had pooped in our washer, helped itself to snacks in our pantry, left paw marks on the dust of the end table and gotten into the recycling bin without anyone noticing.” The squirrel, for the record, escaped unharmed. I can’t say the same for the Little Debbies.

The origins of Milkshake Mass, piles of shaving cream, a stolen flag, a (nonalcoholic) wine bag race and one well-fed squirrel: That’s what Notre Dame’s history looks like when you ask for the craziest version. Maybe these stories don’t belong in a magazine, but they definitely shouldn’t be forgotten. After all, the best stories are the craziest, and what else are you supposed to talk about at a tailgate?