When they asked me, “Do you want to be discharged?” “How soon?” I enjoyed my time in the service but I wanted to go to college. And all of my friends, most of them had gone to USC, and I got into the discharge center and found out that I could go to college and get $250 towards books and tuition a semester. I went down to USC and no resumes — no nothing — you walk in and they said, “O.K., here. Fill this out and you’re going to start next week.” And of course you know that he graduated from UCLA. UCLA at that time was $29 a semester, so it was reasonable and Bob could stay at home and he drove, so he could go to and from school. Outside the student organization he didn’t participate in much.

My mother used to say — now we both lived at home — and she’d say, “Now when you come to the breakfast table, I don’t want any of your bickering over what school is better than the other school because you both know that as far as I’m concerned there’s only one, and that’s Notre Dame.” And so Bob and I couldn’t discuss that we beat your team yesterday and so on and so forth.

His whole field is political science and psychology. My field is mathematics. Bob was not a good mathematician. I graduated in civil engineering. He wouldn’t know more about civil engineering than the man in the moon. So I couldn’t go there for help. Oh, he used to call Republicans “fat cats.” That’s what he called all the Republicans. “Oh, those fat cats.” He did not like the Republican Party and I don’t know how that fits in with his field of thought, how a person of his intellect should look at politics so I can’t criticize him. My tendencies would be Republican, yes.

At that time, he had developed a personality that was in conflict with mine. I played three years of water polo at USC and because all my friends were there, they had all joined the fraternity, so I joined the fraternity and spent four years fraternity life in USC. He was not fraternity-minded and he helped originate–I forgot what they called it now, but it was a group of students. The fraternities ran schools in those days. They didn’t run anything about the teachers, but they controlled politics. And he said, “Well, we’ll fight them.” At the fraternity house some of my fraternity brothers would say, “What’s this I hear about your brother over at UCLA? He’s not a fraternity man.” I said, “Whatever he wants that’s fine with me.”

John "Jake" Gaudino,
Robert Gaudino's brother