"Night watchmen sat by doors with a list of students who had not been checked in," recalls Myers. "When you entered, you signed a sheet and the watchman entered the time, so that all who arrived later than midnight could be punished. Once such watchman was Walt, an elderly and unpopular guardian at the door of Sorin - "at various times during the night, he would patrol the corridors to make sure that nothing sinister was happening. Like many of the old guys Notre Dame hired to do this kind of work, Walt identified himself as a Guardian of the System and was quite officious with students. All watchmen dressed in cop-like uniforms and some were reputed to be retired South Bend patrolmen. They certainly relished their role as assistant disciplinarians, and some, like Walt, lived it to the hilt."

As an added incentive for students to mind regular bedtimes, electricity would then be cut off to dorm rooms at 11 o'clock. "It would of course have been unsafe to turn off the electricity in an entire dormitory and plunge it into blackness," notes Bowen. "Suppose someone got sick? So there were two wiring systems: one for the lights and outlets in all the students' rooms, and another for the corridors and bathrooms. Only the first was shut off at night."

The necessities of academic life being what they are, in the sophomore, junior, and senior halls, it was a tolerated common practice for students to move their chairs out into the corridors when the lights went out to continue studying or goof off quietly. Both Bowen and Myers recall many a late night when students even moved tables and typewriters into the bathrooms and worked there to finish papers. "And if you were coming in from a late movie, you could leave the door of your room open and have enough light to find your toothbrush and pajamas," adds Bowen. In addition to all of this, there were rules against making noise in the dormitories even when you were allowed to be awake -- a quiet and studious atmosphere must be fostered. If you felt rambunctious, there were places outside to go and play sports.

Each undergraduate residence hall had a rector, with a proctor stationed on each floor - both were either priests or brothers of the CSC order that ran Notre Dame. Also, a few bachelor professors lived in suites in the residence halls among students, professor of English Frank O'Malley being the most famous. Halls also had their own chapel for daily Mass; though attendance was optional, it was very much encouraged with the not-so-subtle requirement of "morning mass checks" two or three times a week.

"You had to appear - fully dressed and awake - at a little table where a student sat and have your name checked off," explains Bowen about these morning attendance checks. "This table just so happened to be outside the door to the chapel, and the time when you were required to appear just so happened to be immediately before the 7:00 morning Mass. We were not required to attend Mass, just required to show up ready to attend. Clever, no?" Bowen feels these checks became a non-issue after the freshman year, as the "job" of attendance taking was given to student athletes who checked off the entire dormitory whether anyone showed up or not. "I don't believe I went through this routine even once in my final three years, and I never got in trouble about that. Nobody did. It must have been obvious to the priests who supervised the dormitories that everyone was getting credited for showing up when hardly anyone ever did. I suspect that they didn't complain because they were a bit ashamed of this transparent ploy. There were always some students at morning Mass; they were the ones who came because they wanted to be there. I doubt that anyone ever went to Mass just because of a morning check. I know that, after the first couple of weeks of my freshman year, I always turned around and went back to my room -- and possibly got back in bed again!"

Residences were also "bombarded" with handbooks, leaflets, pamphlets, and sermons urging the Right Sort of Behavior. Bowen recalls that at the beginning of every semester students found, slid under their doors, a sheet of paper with a handy matrix for recording their class schedule. "Above the chart was a diagram that urged us to 'Break This Vicious Circle With Planned Living!' The circle was surrounded by numbered stages in the progress of moral decay, from minor self-indulgence (such as sleeping late, one assumes) all the way to Sin. I remember one friend remarking that some of the stages in the middle sounded quite a bit worse than mere sin; the only one I can remember (about halfway around) was 'Whining self-love.'

"At least twice a week, a single sheet called the Religious Bulletin (also see Paradigmatic Sunday Sermon, A) was slipped under each door; it contained a short written sermon that many of us, quite often, found condescending and offensive. I remember one that descended to overt antisemitism. Warning us of the moral dangers of attending South Bend's 'Art Cinema' (which tended to feature nudie movies and suchlike 'art'), it included an imaginary dialogue between two purveyors of smut that included the line: ''Morality' is a Sunday-school word - but we didn't go to Sunday school, did we, Hyman?' This was written by the Prefect of Religion, the priest who was charged with our moral and spiritual well-being."