From Northeast Philly to Grays Ferry, the choice is easy: Notre Dame over Penn State

The crew from Northeast Philly was a few tickets short, the secondary market was charging more than $1,000 to get in, and kickoff at Notre Dame Stadium was approaching.

The guys who crammed every Saturday into Walt’s Circle Tavern to watch the Fighting Irish would have to be creative if they were to find a way into the game.

“That’s when I saw the kids,” Ernie Gallagher said.

The kids each had a box of programs to sell at the “Game of the Century” in November 1993 between No. 2 Notre Dame and No. 1 Florida State. Gallagher didn’t need a program. But he sure could use the badge the kids wore around their necks.

Gallagher gave each kid $50 for their programs and the badges, walked into the stadium as if he was hawking souvenirs, and then passed the badge through the gate to another guy. Northeast Philly found a way.

“We just kept sliding that pass through,” Gallagher said. “We probably got six to eight guys in.”

Notre Dame plays in South Bend, Ind., but the Irish have long had a pull on fans across the country. And Philadelphia is a big terminal for the school’s subway alumni, the fans who passionately follow the team but didn’t attend the school.

Gallagher, 58, got hooked on the Irish as a kid in the 1970s, grew up on Lindsey Nelson highlights, has been to Notre Dame more than 40 times, and ran a bus trip in October for 200 people to see the Blue and Gold at MetLife Stadium.

So no, Gallagher won’t be conflicted on Thursday night when Notre Dame plays Penn State in the Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, Fla., with a trip to the national championship game on the line. Gallagher will be at Hard Rock Stadium for the big game. This time, he won’t have to “sell” programs.

“One guy actually walked around and sold the programs,” Gallagher said. “He made the money back.”

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The city’s connection to Notre Dame traces back to the pockets of Irish Catholics who filled neighborhoods in Northeast Philly, Grays Ferry, and Southwest Philly.

They packed the bars on Saturdays and attended Mass the next morning at churches like St. Barnabas and St. Gabriel. For decades, Philadelphia felt like a satellite campus about 670 miles from South Bend.

“When you grew up in the neighborhood, it was St. Gabriel’s and it was Notre Dame,” said Phelim Dean, 63, who owns Dean’s Bar, the Grays Ferry taproom his grandfather opened in 1933.

For Gallagher, the Notre Dame football team meshed perfectly with his Irish Catholic upbringing. It seemed like everyone at St. Martin of Tours in Oxford Circle agreed. The Fighting Irish were their team.

Gallagher didn’t go to Notre Dame but loved that every dorm had an assigned priest and that football players roomed with non-athletes.

“The whole thing is special,” Gallagher said. “I tell people that Notre Dame to me is Disneyland to other people. Every time I go, it gets better.”

Dean’s mother was a superfan, and his father used to take train trips to see the Irish in the 1950s. Guys from Grays Ferry ran bus trips for years to South Bend that started with a drink at Dean’s, where a Notre Dame flag hangs above the bar.

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“My uncle was a subway alumnus,” said Bob Sumner, 66, who coordinated those bus trips and is best known as Notre Dame Harvey. “They followed the Irish.”

A college football team from Indiana bonded Philadelphians from different neighborhoods, proving to be a thread that could link someone from St. Gabe’s to someone from St. Martin’s. In the 1980s and 1990s, a football weekend at Notre Dame often felt like a summer night in North Wildwood as every bar seemed to be filled with people from Philly.

“When guys went to college or got a job on the police force or as a fireman, you went to North or you went to Dougherty, you went to Judge, and you became friends over Notre Dame,” Gallagher said. “You all had something in common.”

Sumner took his first pilgrimage to the Golden Dome in 1977 thanks to Jack Keenan, an old-timer from the neighborhood who lived a block from Dean’s and had a Notre Dame basement. Keenan, Sumner said, created the “monster” that became Notre Dame Harvey.

He runs a trip to Notre Dame every year and earned his nickname in the 1980s for incessantly calling sports talk radio to talk about his favorite team. Now, he said only his wife, Debbie, calls him by his given name.

Dean’s is where Sumner went after summer league games at Lanier Playground, cracked open a quart of beer, and bickered about Penn State and Notre Dame. The neighborhood gave birth to Notre Dame Harvey, but Sumner said it was split back then between blue and gold and blue and white. Thursday night is the big one.

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“To me, Philadelphia is Temple University. If you’re going to cheer for Penn State, they’re 290 miles away from Philadelphia,” said Sumner, who cheered for the Irish when they played Temple at the Linc in 2015. “It’s not a city school. People say ‘You’re cheering for Notre Dame. They’re 600-some miles away.’ Anyone can cheer for anyone, but don’t criticize me for cheering for Notre Dame. It goes back to what we stand for. Irish Catholic. I have a lot of respect for those guys, but I think sometimes, they don’t give us a lot of respect. We’ll see what happens Thursday night.”

The Northeast Philly guys were in South Bend for another early 1990s football weekend. Again, they didn’t have enough tickets. No worries, they knew a way in. No programs this time. Go to Gate 813, they heard, and tell the ticket taker you’re from Philly.

“My buddy Jimmy Kilkenny, he’s a monster. He blocks the whole view,” Gallagher said. “We brought in like 25 guys. The crazy part is that the guy thought he was getting like $700. But typical Philly, we put two 20s on the outside and 40 ones on the inside. The guy thanked us.”

The crew from Northeast Philly would never be denied. They even traded Tastykakes for tickets.

“It was the [Southern Cal] game,” Gallagher said. “These guys from California, they couldn’t get Tastykakes. I was in the vending business, so I’d bring cases of Tastykakes. We became friends with this one guy. Every year, he would give us two tickets and we’d give him two cases of Krimpets.”

Gallagher now has season tickets and travels to South Bend two or three times a year. He has connections throughout campus and secures hundreds of tickets every year for the bus trips he runs. Gallagher said he does not make a dime. His reward is seeing the look on the face of someone making their first pilgrimage, reminding him of how he felt years ago.

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Gallagher already has his tickets secured to the national championship if Notre Dame wins Thursday. He can leave the Tastykakes at home. The Northeast Philly guys don’t have to get creative anymore to find their way inside. But how did he know to see the guy at Gate 813?

“Notre Dame Harvey told me,” Gallagher said as two guys from different Philly neighborhoods were bonded by their allegiance to a football team in Indiana.