The calendar said that Frank Leahy was sixty years old on that last night of January 1969. One look at Leahy would have labeled the calendar a fabulist. He still stood erect, five foot eleven, and his waistline barely had wavered from those postwar days when he strode the Fighting Irish sideline, an American celebrity at the peak of his command. But the crevasses in Leahy's face, the ruddy cheeks, and the thinning gray hair indicated the ravages taken by time and leukemia.
Under the patchy lawns of Lakeside, there lies a pre-colonial "Oughnum", or "good hunting land" in the indigenous Algonquian dialect. In early Spring one year, my family and I watched a pair of Red-bellied Woodpeckers bore a nest for their clutch at the rotting end of a shorn bow. They did their work several paces from where we sat each afternoon. Eventually, the excavating stopped and the female settled in. We joyfully awaited little chirps. One morning, we found two eggs broken beneath the nest and another unbroken at the center of the yard. In an Orwellian nod to Manifest Destiny, European Starlings had raided the nest and made it their own.