Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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the university's athletics department. For his last quarter-century on cam- pus, that office was a wood-paneled room that looked out on the indoor turf field at Loftus Sports Center. The walls quickly filled up with photos of the countless lives he had touched while coaching, revealing the soul of both the man and the program he built. Smith was the first man hired to C harles "Lefty" Smith held an office on Notre Dame's campus for 44 years — longer than any other employee in the history of BY DAN MURPHY work in the Athletic and Convocation Center when it opened its doors in 1968. He coached the varsity hockey team for the first 19 years of its exis- tence and continued to work on cam- pus until the end of 2011, two months after the team began playing in a new rink bearing his name. Three days af- ter peeling the last pictures from his Scotch tape-pocked office walls, Smith died of natural causes in his South Bend home on Jan. 3. He would have turned 82 years old two days later. Everyone who knew Lefty well remembers the pictures. Like pencil markings crawling up a kitchen wall, they measured the growth of the Irish hockey family. Smith won 307 hockey games and a WCHA Coach of the Year Award at Notre Dame, but his most treasured trophies were the countless photos he received each year from former players as they added chil- dren and wives to their lives, and he displayed them as such. Forever the proud patriarch, Smith knew as much about his former players' children as he did about them. The man who had a wife and eight kids of his own al- ways ran his team like a big family. "For me, his office summed it up," said Dave Poulin, a former player un- der Smith and one of his successors as a Notre Dame coach. Poulin's new job as the Toronto Ma- When Notre Dame made hockey a varsity sport in 1968, Smith was hired as the first new employee of the Athletic & Convocation Center (ACC). ple Leafs' vice president of hockey op- erations limits his chances to get back to campus, but when he did find the time, Lefty's office was always his first stop. "His office was all about the team and the families his team had created," Poulin noted. "There are a lot of guys that are much closer than at other pro- grams or other schools, and it's largely because of him. He was the one com- mon strand. When you went back to campus you could go see Lefty." 74 MARCH 2012 Former coach Lefty Smith was the patriarch of the Irish hockey family LOSES A LEGEND NOTRE DAME all day long on Saturdays in the fall when hockey alumni would come back to the South Bend campus. For- mer players would gather to hear one of college hockey's best storytellers relive snippets of his long history in Poulin said the office was packed the game. Like the time he watched a Zamboni drive straight through the boards while he and longtime assis- tant Tim McNeill learned how to take care of a rink the hard way in the early days of the Joyce Center. Or the time a room full of tough-guy hockey players BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED PHOTO COURTESY NOTRE DAME MEDIA RELATIONS