Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/123805
where have you gone? South Bend detract from an otherwise alluring football destination. Plus, Dampeer wasn't a Notre Dame fan, nor was he Catholic. Playing for the Longhorns was somewhat enticing. "Truthfully, there were those two years where Texas was our biggest rival," he said. "We lost to them in a heartbreaker the year I was hurt, and we came back and won the next year. The real reason I chose Notre Dame without question was the academics. Texas still had a jock dorm for athletes — it was a palace. We didn't; we were spread throughout the campus." And that campus was still without a female presence at the time. But in December 1971, an attractive young lady from nearby Saint Mary's College caught his eye. He and Susan Combs were married two years later, and 40 years of marriage yielded a son, Andy, a daughter, Claire, and four grandchildren. Susan hailed from Sturgis, Mich., which is just 45 miles east of Notre Dame and where the couple settled for 18 years until 1999. Dampeer was a national sales representative for Harter Corporation and Telemark at the time. He has since moved into financial planning and currently serves as an officer of retirement counseling at 1st Source Bank. He and Susan, who is an assistant to the president at Saint Mary's, have lived in South Bend for 14 years. "In retrospect, that was the luckiest thing that happened to me at Notre Dame," Dampeer, who received his MBA at DePaul, said of meeting Susan. There were other charmed moments as well. A self-described "late bloomer," Dampeer was just 5-8, 130 pounds as a freshman at Kermit. A lack of speed put him at guard and defensive end — positions at which he earned all-state status as a senior in 1967-68. He received far fewer scholarship offers than many of his Notre Dame classmates, but was caught on film while playing a road game at Permian High, whose football team was the subject of the 1990 best-selling book Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team And A Dream. Notre Dame got a copy of the tape sent by someone trying to promote a group of other players, but Parseghian took notice of a feisty lineman instead. Dampeer and Parseghian are still close to this day. When Parseghian's statue outside Notre Dame Stadium was dedicated on Sept. 22, 2007, Dampeer was one of 200 of the coach's former players on hand for the ceremony, which included fellow All-Americans John Huarte (1964), Jim Carroll ('64), Tony Carey ('64), Kevin Hardy ('64, '66, '67), Jim Lynch ('65, '66), Nick Eddy ('66), Pete Duranko ('66), Jim Seymour ('66, '67, '68), George Goeddeke ('66), Mike McGill ('67), Mike Oriard ('69), Clarence Ellis ('70, '71), Greg Marx ('72) and Dave Casper ('73). Luck can only take a man so far, though. A determined Dampeer, who can be seen at many Irish games every fall (though he does tend to leave early), did the rest on his own. "It was a wonderful decision," he said. ✦