… and enabled a community of friends to thrive and grow

 

On a recent spring Saturday evening in Brookland, District of Columbia, I sat around a table with a dozen friends, kicking off a bachelor party with a feast of a slow-cooked suckling pig.  Looking around, I realized that a third of the guys, passing heaping plates of food, draining their pints, telling crazy stories, and laughing mightily, were former Irish Rover editors.

I was the founding editor-in-chief of the Rover, but in the years since I graduated from Notre Dame, that night around that table was a rare moment of realizing just how deep the paper’s impact has been in creating lasting friendships.  As a board member and founder, I had been primarily concerned with the paper’s influence on campus life and its role in launching successful careers.

Indeed, the accomplishments of Rover alumni are great, even just considering those in the field of journalism: managing editor, American Spectator; editor, RealClearPolitics; various positions with the Fox News Channel; USA Today board member; reporters at the Washington Times, USA Today, and the Weekly Standard; a number of television appearances.  Two alumni (including me) have gone on to run the Collegiate Network, the national organization that funds and supports independent college newspapers like the Rover.  So many other alumni have achieved positions of success and influence in politics, finance, law, business, and academia.  And the Washington Post recently cited the Rover in an article about Notre Dame’s curriculum.

But sitting at that feast in D.C., I realized what I most appreciate about the Rover:  the friendships it has created—friendships that, for me, have lasted and thrived 10 years after graduation.

This makes sense, because the Rover was founded in friendship—and with a lot of help from professors, philanthropists, and Providence.  After our first issue, December 2003, most of us took off for the London Program.  We oversaw the paper over pints of bitter ales from our London Bureau (one of the Rover‘s many international bureaus in those early days): the Captain’s Cabin Pub on Haymarket Street.  We figured an entire ocean and half a continent would buffer us from criticism.

It did not.  A professor from back home emailed me a little critique of an article I had written. Before I could reply, boom, there he was, in the lobby of the London Program.  But he bought me a drink and we hashed out our differences civilly at the Sherlock Holmes pub, and all was well.

So many Notre Dame professors have been part of the Rover community, including legends like the late Ralph McInerny, in whose Hesburgh Library office we used to meet, and the recently passed Charlie Rice, who encouraged me during my time as editor never to back down from a worthy fight, so long as the cause was just and we conducted ourselves with a joyful charity.  The late Bishop D’Arcy always boosted our spirits and reminded us not to forget the poor.

Then there are the relationships within the Rover.  Among the staff, there have been many marriages, starting, I think, with Dave and Cara Cook, two members of the founding class.  This coming May, Brian Boyd, former executive editor, and Esther Simms, who used to referee production night fights, will be wed.  And then there are burgeoning family dynasties:  the Forrs, the currently reigning Bradleys, the Gillens, the Lindsleys (my sister Laura was an editor), and more.

There were friends from outside, too.  We were always scrambling to make a newspaper, producing it on the fly—once being forced out of the computer lab in Riley Hall mid-production. But we fortuitously had people looking out for us.  During my senior year, President George W. Bush was giving a speech on campus, and the Notre Dame administration refused event credentials to the Rover.  Fair enough.  We did not quite get along.

The morning of the speech, an unidentified number called my cell phone, quite early, given that I had been at Corby’s the night before.  It was the White House’s director of communications.  I thought it was a joke.  He asked how many credentials I needed.  When I showed up at the JACC, the Notre Dame officials grudgingly had to let me in to the speech.  Turns out we had an avid reader in the West Wing.

Around the same time, we needed 500 dollars to pay for an issue we had just printed.  I had already spent what little I had on previous editions and on the production software.

Entering South Dining Hall with a few Rover friends, I somehow got into a conversation with a woman selling Chicago Tribune subscriptions.  We gave her the latest Rover, which we had finished in the wee hours.  Within just a few minutes, she loved it, was moved by it, and began to tear up a bit.  I said nothing to her about our financial predicament.“Hang on,” she said, reaching for her purse.  She pulled out her checkbook, wrote a figure, and handed me a check.  Five hundred dollars.

“Hang on,” she said, reaching for her purse.  She pulled out her checkbook, wrote a figure, and handed me a check.  Five hundred dollars.

If that woman had not written that check—if so many others had not undertaken seemingly small acts—so much good would be lost.

The song “The Irish Rover,” for which the paper was named, is about a boat crossing the Atlantic to America.  At the end, the lyrics say the ship met a bleak end: “the poor old dog, was drowned.”

Thinking of the laughter around that table at the bachelor party, of all the great friendships that this newspaper has produced, I have to thank that Chicago Tribune saleswoman, and so many others, for keeping the Irish Rover, newspaper version, afloat—with needed funding, fine journalism, contagious energy, and a genuine passion for Notre Dame.

Joe Lindsley has worked for the Weekly Standard and other publications and once managed a Ukrainian-Celtic-gypsy rock band.  He writes and travels frequently.  Check out his sister Laura LaPlante’s new website at acorntortilla.com.