The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1918 — 31 MARCH 1931
The factory city's other product was a football team, and in the 1920s it outsold the wagons: Knute Rockne coached Notre Dame from 1918 to 1930 and compiled the record by which college coaches are still measured: 105 wins, 12 losses, 5 ties — a winning percentage of .881 — with consensus national championships in 1924, 1929 and 1930, by the university's own accounting. The 1924 team gave the language its most durable sports nickname on October 18, 1924, at the Polo Grounds in New York, where Notre Dame beat Army 13–7 and the New York Herald Tribune's Grantland Rice led his account: "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again... Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone." The image had been pitched in the press box at halftime by Rockne's student publicity aide, George Strickler, fresh from the Valentino film of the Apocalypse; Strickler staged the famous photograph of the four backs on horseback when the team came home to South Bend, and the name never came off.
The Horsemen closed the season by beating Stanford in the Rose Bowl. In November 1928, by Rockne's own later telling, he carried into the halftime room against Army the dying wish he said George Gipp had made of him years before — "win one for the Gipper" — and Notre Dame won. For the length of the 1920s the doings of a small Catholic university on the edge of an Indiana factory town were front-page news from coast to coast, and "South Bend" became a dateline the whole country could place. The city's own industry honored the coach in the currency it knew: Studebaker named a car for him — the Rockne, built in 1932 and 1933, after his death.
It ended in an airfield's weather. On March 31, 1931, Rockne — 43 years old, travelling to California to help produce a film about his own program, The Spirit of Notre Dame — was killed with seven others when his airliner, Transcontinental and Western Air Flight 599, broke up in a storm and crashed near Bazaar, Kansas. The funeral was broadcast nationally; the city and the campus buried him as a head of state. Sports has its own section in this record, and Notre Dame its own; the Story of South Bend section registers only the civic fact: between the wars, the most famous thing in South Bend was not made in its factories.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame athletics — Rockne's coaching record of 105-12-5 (.881) and the consensus national championships of 1924, 1929 and 1930; the Four Horsemen of 1924 and the Rose Bowl victory over Stanford.
- University of Notre Dame, "125 Football" moments — the Army game of October 18, 1924 at the Polo Grounds (Notre Dame 13, Army 7), Rice's lede, and George Strickler's part in the name and the horseback photograph.
- City of South Bend reference history — the Gipper speech of November 1928 as Rockne retold it, and the crash of TWA Flight 599 near Bazaar, Kansas, on March 31, 1931, that killed Rockne and seven others en route to the filming of The Spirit of Notre Dame.
- sports and notre-dame sections, this record — Rockne and the program in full.