By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The University of Notre Dame is 180 years old in 2022. Father Edward Sorin and his fellow Holy Cross priests started the venerable institution near two small lakes in the wilderness of Northern Indiana in November 1842. Although I am a mere asterisk in the illustrious history that followed, at least I am a mildly interesting annotation.
During my four years at Notre Dame from 1979 to 1983, I was not just a student. I was a bit of an oddity, even an object of polite curiosity. Unlike places like Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio, my home state of Utah—founded by pioneering members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—was not known widely for spawning members of the Fighting Irish community.
Almost everybody I met at Notre Dame did not know anyone from Utah. Thus, they usually asked me versions of the same three basic questions. Are you Mormon? Can you really float in the Great Salt Lake? Do you know Donny and Marie? I always gave the same (truthful) answers: “no; yes—but the brine flies are quite annoying; no.”
If I knew then what I know now, however, I would have had more to say. I might have suggested we also answer a trinity of much more interesting questions. Did you know about Florian DeVoto? Patrick Maguire? Or Jack Gallivan? All three men were Notre Dame alums who, just like me, lived much of their very interesting lives in the Great State of Utah.
According to my unscientific survey, Florian Bernard (F.B.) DeVoto, born in the mid-1800s, is the first local-resident-and-Notre-Dame-alum mentioned in a Utah newspaper. News archives indicate that he was appointed as the first teacher at the first Catholic school in my hometown of Ogden. DeVoto served in that role from 1877 to 1878.
DeVoto was of Italian descent and, according to at least one source, he yearned to paint. Instead, he studied mathematics and taught at his alma mater Notre Dame before he moved to Ogden to work as an abstractor. He married the daughter of a “Mormon pioneer” and in 1897, they had a son they named Bernard DeVoto.
One old newspaper described Florian DeVoto as a “nationally prominent Utah man of letters.” With this ND foundation, he helped educate his son Bernard. Florian must have done something right. Bernard later won the 1948 Pulitizer Prize for Across the Wide Missouri, one of his many historical accounts of the settlement of the Old West
The most detailed and colorful descriptions of Bernard’s father Florian come from Wallace Stegner’s biography about his prominent son—The Uneasy Chair: a Biography of Bernard DeVoto (New York: Doubleday & Co. 1974). In an introductory chapter called “The Amniotic Home,” Stegner described Florian as a “vagrant Catholic intellectual, a former ‘perpetual student’ and part-time teacher at Notre Dame.” Although “small” in stature, Florian was “contentious” in nature, a “bitter anti-Mormon” who once possessed “inherited money” but had lost it “in land and mining speculations.”
As a result, Stegner said Florian’s talents as a linguist and mathematician “went to waste in a hole-in-the wall title-abstract office.” Life at home apparently was not much better. Stegner argued Florian and his wife represented the “social and religious cleavages” of Utah.
Stegner wrote that Florian’s son Bernard was not born into either one of the faiths of his parents, but rather “into the area of conflict between them; and since any conflict between a good Mormon and a faithful Catholic may be expected to end in a draw, it was predictable that [Bernard] would adhere to neither.” Ironically, although Florian’s religious conflict with his wife apparently was quite intense, Stegner also noted that “despite all those years at Notre Dame, he was not a churchgoer.”
Because the Ogden Catholic community was small and because DeVoto had both taught at, and sent his son Bernard to, the local Catholic schools, Florian likely knew another Notre Dame alum of note—an Irish priest who served Ogden Catholics for a short time after his ordination.
Patrick Maguire was born August 12, 1890 at County Cavan, Ireland. He studied theology at St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth before leaving for the United States in 1916. Sometime thereafter, he earned a graduate degree from Notre Dame and went to work for the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company.
God’s calls proved more powerful, however, than those of the phone company. Maguire eventually resumed his Catholic theology studies and was ordained a priest in Denver in June 1922. He moved to Utah right away.
Father Maguire said his first masses in Ogden the day after ordination, one at the school where Florian DeVoto educated his son and the other at St. Joseph’s, the only Catholic Church in town (and where, many years later, I was an altar boy). After his short stint in Ogden, Father Maguire was sent to minister in Salt Lake City. For the next forty years, he worked tirelessly in those places where Catholicism’s rubber meets the road.
He built or rebuilt Utah churches and schools, started a new parish, and helped run the local diocese. Most critically, Father Maguire tended meticulously to the unending life cycle needs of his flock. He rejoiced at baptisms, educated the young, celebrated weddings, comforted and anointed the sick, and prayed for the resurrection of the dead.
In 1948, Pope Pius XII recognized his many years of blue-collar priestly service and gave him the title of monsignor. The hardworking priest took only a few vacations. Although a naturalized American citizen, Monsignor Maguire made occasional visits to family and friends still living in his beloved Ireland.
He also enjoyed the Irish near his Utah home, and was active in the local Notre Dame alumni Club for many years until he passed away in 1966. Given that ongoing loyalty and devotion to his alma mater, Maguire almost certainly knew John W. (“Jack”) Gallivan, another ND alum who made his own unique mark on Salt Lake City.
Gallivan was born in Utah’s capital city on June 28, 1915, but lived his early years in the nearby mining town of Park City. At age six, his mother died and he moved in with her half-sister, Jennie Judge Kearns, the widow of Utah Senator and prominent mining businessman Thomas Kearns. They shared a palatial home that now houses Utah’s governors. The Kearns family also owned the state’s largest newspaper, The Salt Lake Tribune, a landmark local institution for which I have done legal work for over three decades.
Educated by the Holy Cross sisters in Utah and then by the Jesuits in California, Gallivan earned an English degree from Notre Dame in 1937. The family newspaper back home offered him a job. Gallivan accepted, stayed there for the next six decades, and worked in almost every aspect of the Tribune’s operations before he became its publisher.
Gallivan also devoted his considerable energies to civic projects. When he died in 2012, even the skilled wordsmiths at the Salt Lake Tribune struggled to list his accomplishments in a succinct way. This was their noble attempt: “He helped build the Salt Palace [convention center], pave the way for the 2002 Olympics and the Utah Jazz, house the homeless, bring faiths together and put Utah on the tourism map.”
Gallivan once explained his business and civic motives in his own words: “Our task is to make all of Utah as beautiful in man-made additions as it is in God-given wonders; beautiful in the maintenance of the good life; beautiful in social equality and justice; beautiful in the brotherhood of mankind.” God, Country, Notre Dame.
Besides Florian DeVoto, Patrick Maguire, and Jack Gallivan, there are other fine folks with both Utah and Notre Dame ties. If I only had known my local history better at the time, I also could have mentioned these men and women to my curious Fighting Irish classmates when we chatted about other aspects of Utah life.
For over a century, Holy Cross sisters from the Notre Dame and St. Mary’s community nursed thousands of Utahns back to health, and cared tenderly for thousands more as they crossed the great divide. They also educated hundreds of elementary and high school students, including me.
A Notre Dame graduate, Roger I. McDonough, served from 1939 to 1966 as the first Catholic on the Utah Supreme Court. Two of his sons were my law partners.
Utah native and retired investment banker Phil Purcell, a 1964 graduate of the Notre Dame business school, provided the leadership gift to help make possible the renovation of the Joyce Center at his alma mater and the ND basketball arena there now bears his name. Purcell attended Judge Memorial Catholic high school in Salt Lake City, just like my children.
Indeed, Notre Dame alums have run numerous successful Utah businesses, fought for civil rights here, played professional basketball, treated sick patients, helped administer colleges, designed and engineered buildings, served in public office, operated nonprofits, and engaged in hundreds of other worthy and notable activities in my home state. Some even practice law and write books about beloved Trappist monasteries in rural Utah.
So, to my friends in the wonderful ND family all around the world—I get why you want to know all about Latter-day Saints, inland salt water lakes, and the Osmonds. Who wouldn’t? We Utahns are happy to tell you all about them. Still, please do me a favor.
The next time you talk to one of the Utah Fighting Irish, borrow a line from the renowned radio host Paul Harvey (a dear friend of ND football legend Paul Hornung). Ask us to tell you all about the rest of the quite interesting Utah/Notre Dame story too.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
