I dunno, Art. I'm just a simple kid of German ancestry who was born and raised in Quincy (called "Downstate" to you Chicagoans).

But, my very own brother, who I thought had been reared to know better, forsook his heritage and married a South Side Irish girl who comes from a South Side Irish family of long standing (and, knowing that family, falling down, weaving, stumbling, and laying on the sidewalk). I'll ask her, but I suspect that it has something to do with the economic differences.

To keep this thread musical, when my wife was working at Notre Dame, home of the "Fighting Irish" and a place legendary to some on the South Side, she scotched the rumor that "The Beatles" owned the rights to the ND Victory March (a/k/a "Cheer Cheer For Old Notre Dame"). The royalties are collected by a company that was once owned by Apple Records, but the rights were and are owned by the University of Notre Dame. And you can bet that they collect each year, too!

If you meet a die-hard ND fan, you can flatten 'em with two trivia questions: 1) Who is buried on the 50 yard line in ND stadium? and 2) What is *under* the stadium?

The answer to 1 is nobody -- Rockne is usually thought of, but he's buried across town. The answer to 2 is more interesting: a rifle range, installed by the Navy when they used ND as a training facility in WWII -- it's not used anymore (lead dust), but a friend who once shot there while she was in law school says it's unheated and colder than the center of Dante's Hell.

Back to musicality: the Victory March is *not* the school song of ND. "Notre Dame Our Mother" is, and it's sung after every football game, win or lose.

Mike
(who knows more trivia than is good for him)