9/29/23 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Seeds of Caring Project with Grades 1 & 8.

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

Many Catholics in Columbus cheer for the Buckeye football team all the time with one notable exception. For many, their loyalty and feeling of kinship to the University of Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish splits that loyalty.



Fortunately, the football contests between these two schools happen infrequently. Last Saturday’s match in South Bend was a close one with Ohio State pulling it out in the end.

When I was in high school at St. Charles in the early Seventies, the Buckeyes, like now, were a dominant team. Woody Hayes prowled the sidelines and two-time Heisman winner, Archie Griffin, a graduate of nearby Eastmoor High School, was making his mark.

I was not a football player. Far from it. I was the slowest two-miler in the history of the track team there and broke equally dismal records running cross country my senior year. Instead, I did some of the plays and worked on the school newspaper. I also helped to run the Film Club.

You may be asking yourself what the connection between Film Club and football is, particularly as it relates to the limited Notre Dame-Ohio State series of games. It lies in the projection booth of the St. Charles Theater.

I don’t know if it is still there, but in the back of the theater there was a projection booth accessed by a narrow staircase in the back corner. The Film Club offered a series of movies there at lunchtime that would run over the course of a week. I remember screening Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and a Henry Fonda western called The Tin Star. Mr. Ed Hoffman, an English teacher there (brother to the legendary Sister Margaret Hoffman) was our moderator, although it seems as if he trusted us to run the movies ourselves.

Showing the movie through the projection booth was really cool and allowed us to recreate somewhat the big screen experience for the handful of students who attended. Movies back then came on big reels rather than streamed over tiny fiber optic wires. We even had two projectors, so that when the signal for the end of a reel (usually a brief dot of color) showed on the screen, we could turn on the second reel for a seamless transition.

In the room was some of the original equipment from the early days of St. Charles. We also discovered some old film footage of the time when Notre Dame came to play Ohio State back in 1935. That connection between Catholics in Columbus and Notre Dame reaches back almost 100 years because the Fighting Irish, rather than flying to Columbus and staying in a hotel, took a bus here and stayed in the college dorms in the portion of St. Charles that was a college seminary.

My memory is dim of what was in those clips. I hope that they have been preserved. I seem to remember a large contingent of faculty, mostly priests, greeting the team. I also seem to remember that they practiced at St. Charles and there was footage of that as well.

Both teams were undefeated going into that match and Notre Dame beat Ohio State in the Fourth Quarter after the Buckeyes, trying to run out the clock with a 13-12 lead, fumbled the ball. Bill Shakespeare, the quarterback, not the playwright, threw a pass to Wayne Millner to end the game with a final score of 18-13.

In 1936, the Buckeyes traveled to South Bend and were beaten again. Ohio State had to wait nearly 60 years to play and beat Notre Dame in 1995.

For many Catholic high school students, aspirations to be accepted and attend Notre Dame is a dream come true. Some high school seniors from Central Ohio, Catholic and public high school students alike, are awarded the Joyce Scholarship to Notre Dame. It is a tremendous accomplishment as it pays all tuition and expenses for four years there. (The Joyce also awards scholarships to Ohio State). Kathy Cook, an OLP alumna and the daughter of one of our previous Fourth Grade teachers here, won this prestigious scholarship when she graduated from Watterson in the Eighties.

Notre Dame alumni abound in Columbus and live in harmony with Ohio State alumni, except for those rare meetings on the gridiron. May both teams continue to have great seasons!

Jim Silcott