Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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WHERE HAVE YOU GONE? get on with his life and point them and their families in the right direction, hopefully, and get them lined up with the right agencies so they can have a fulfilling life, as we all want." The inspiration for his current call- ing came in 1997 when he heard and met former General Colin Powell, the 65th United States Secretary of State from 2001-05, during a speech at Stan- islaus State University, just south of Modesto. "He emphasized how children to- day do not get a lot of direction from home and they need to have mentors that have experienced life and let them know there is a big world out there," said Eddy, who also had been doing volunteer football and track and field coaching at Central Catholic High School for many years. "I've always had a pretty good way with young people and always seemed to get along well with kids." Eddy was 53 at the time and had become disillusioned with the insur- ance industry in which he had been an independent agent for 25 years. After passing a test to see if he could handle a classroom setting, Eddy did substitute teaching, and a year later was asked by a friend who was a school principal to temporarily fill in at a school where a full-time hire was needed. "It turns out it was a special edu- cation class of seventh- and eighth- grade kids," Eddy said. "After three weeks he came back to me and he said, 'We've interviewed several people and none of them can handle the class. You're doing a great job … and would you consider doing it full time?'" That meant returning to school to get his teaching accreditation. "I was in a program in the county where I could work a job and take classes at night," Eddy said. "It took me two years to get the teaching cre- dential." Eventually he also received his mas- ter's in education. "A lot of my former teammates can't believe it — because I almost didn't graduate from Notre Dame," Eddy said with a laugh. FRESHMAN WOES Growing up as a Notre Dame fan despite his California roots, one of Ed- dy's seminal moments was receiving the call from 1959-62 Fighting Irish as- sistant Dick Stanfel, his recruiter, that he had passed his SAT to be admitted into school. Raised by his mother in a single-parent home, though, Eddy had a limited scope of the world. "Then I found out Notre Dame was in South Bend, Indiana," he said. "I thought it was in California. I had never been out of the state until then." By the end of his first semester, Eddy was on academic probation, and then in the second semester he was expelled because of a dormitory viola- tion. "One of my dorm friends was a smoker," Eddy explained. "We had a cigarette machine on the second floor, but he had been ripped off a few times by putting in the money and not get- ting his cigarettes. We had a spring snowstorm and football practice was cancelled, so we're laying around the