This story was the first to appear on our website when we started it back in late July. Somehow, it got lost in cyberspace or because I hit the wrong button. I’m sharing it again as we approach the end of the year — a good time for all of us to reflect on friends we have lost in 2021 and to cherish their memories.
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Our neighborhood has taken a one-two punch to the gut in recent months. Even as home prices rise, we feel a little poorer around here.
Earlier this year (in January), we lost our across-the-street neighbor, former South Bend police chief and St. Joseph County coroner Chuck Hurley.
And then just last month (in June), longtime Notre Dame swimming coach Tim Welsh, who lived two houses down from us, passed away.
Both Chuck and Tim were good neighbors, great guys and in recent years, cherished friends. Like me, they weren’t very handy. Yet both would always give you a hand. I loved them both.
In their professions, they were leaders of men and women. In retirement, they seemed to take pleasure into easing into the position of being just one of the guys — both of them modest, unassuming and soft-spoken.
Chuck was a homegrown product and a Washington High grad. He was proud to serve in the U.S. Marines but couldn’t wait to return to South Bend and marry his high school sweetheart, the former Joan Horvath. They ended up being married for 52 years with five children and 20 grandkids.
He was a good cop and served two different stints as police chief — once coming out of retirement to lead the department when Mayor Pete Buttigieg needed a calming influence in the department.
Tim grew up in Schenectady, New York and started out as an English professor. His sport was basketball but he fell in love with swimming while coaching in a YMCA program for a summer job. He ended up coaching at Notre Dame for 30 years — the man who won several conference titles and the univeristy’s Presidential Achievement Award.
He gave no Knute Rockne speeches. Yet he became beloved by his swimmers because of his upbeat approach to coaching and his encouraging words. It seemed there were always some of his old swimmers visiting Tim and his wife Jackie, some even staying at his home while in town.
Tim and Chuck departed in different ways.
Chuck kept his heart problems to himself. Little did we in the neighborhood know he was in grave health until he was taken to the hospital just a week before he passed.
Tim couldn’t hide the pancreatic cancer that ravaged his body over his two-year battle. He battled it bravely — undergoing surgery and several rounds of chemo. He still tried to get out on his bike and walk his dog, Danny Boy, for as long as he could.
It had always been great to have a beer with them — Chuck was Bud Lite and Tim was Modelo — either out on Chuck’s front patio or Tim’s back deck. Tim ran the men’s book club in our neighborhood. Chuck kept an eye on the comings and goings — a one-person neighborhood watch.
Both had their public disappointments — Tim’s a tragedy. When he and his women’s team were returning from a meet at Northwestern on a snowy January night in 1992, the bus driver lost control on a slippery Toll Road just a few miles from their exit. The bus overturned and the crash claimed the lives of two Irish swimmers — South Bend’s Meghan Beeler and Colleen Hipp.
Tim’s career — his life actually — became divided into two segments: before the crash and after it. “It’s always with me,” he once told me. He knew some people blamed him and he understood their feelings. He took responsibility. “I felt an enormous weight.”
A heart-felt talk with the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, the former Notre Dame president, helped him continue coaching.
Chuck never talked to me about the humiliation of losing his job as the assistant security chief at Notre Dame — a place he dearly loved. It happened in 2005 during the early-morning hours when an argument between Dave Duerson, a former Irish All-American football player and a member of the school’s board of trustees, and his wife turned physical at the Morris Inn.
One administrator insisted that Chuck be dismissed over allegations that he told another campus police office not to arrest Duerson. Chuck maintained those allegations were not true and suffered a heart attack not long after the incident. He went on to be elected to two terms as the county’s head coroner.
I could have passed on the previous stories. Yet the measure of a man often is not about how he handles success but how he rebounds from the failures and the hard times in his life. Both Tim and Chuck, humble and spiritual men, kept living their lives the way their Lord would have wanted.
They continued to lead people … help people … love people.
They were good guys. They were my friends.