If you still need a Father’s Day gift for a Notre Dame football fan in your life, you could be in luck. Two longtime university staffers have written a new photo book on the storied program.
The cover shows 1988 National Champion quarterback Tony Rice carrying the ball against USC, and the last page features a shot of 1950 Head Cheerleader Dick Herrle playing with the team’s Irish terrier mascot.
In between are 250 pages filled with photos from the Notre Dame Archives, some never before seen. On Saturday from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the McKenna Auditorium, authors Charles Lamb and Elizabeth Hogan will talk about “Fighting Irish Football: The Notre Dame Tradition in Photographs.”
Hogan says it wasn’t always easy to select the photos.
"The University Archives has hundreds of thousands of football-related photographs and for a book that maybe has a couple hundred, coming up with those selections was difficult," she said.
Hogan is the university's senior archivist for photographs, while Lamb is semi-retired from the archives and works as a media assistant for Fighting Irish Media. Their new book is similar to one they compiled and wrote in 2017, called "Notre Dame at 175: A Visual History," featuring all types of photos in the archives.
"Over the years we just have a lot of our favorites and a lot of those being football," Hogan says. "So we wanted to put together a book that showcased the photography within the University Archives, and we wanted to highlight the photographs and talk about why the photographs are compelling imagery."
Lamb says the book has about 140 entries, each with a few photos from a game and some text about them.
"The entries are short enough to be read quickly, sort of like a number of different stories," Lamb says. "So you don't have to read the book from the beginning to the end. That's how it's designed to operate."
The event is free and open to the public and will also be featured as part of the Notre Dame Alumni Association’s Reunion Weekend programming.
