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Twenty-one-year-old Johnny Lattner has lived most of his life in a German-Irish neighborhood on Chicago's far west side. Johnny, who is of German-Irish descent himself, was a gangling, sensitive boy until he was ten or so: "I was sort of a sissy, I guess. But my pa wouldn't break up a fight if he saw me in it. He wanted me to learn." Johnny learned, and football taught him. When Johnny was in the sixth grade, his father gave him a helmet, and. like other millions of American youngsters, Johnny soon found himself playing football and filling out. A good deal of personal determination entered into it. His mother remembers that Johnny went on a cod-liver-oil binge, once drank 17 pints of it in a single week. "Do you know who his idol was in those days?" asks Mrs. Lattner. "It was Superman." Johnny recalls: "By the time I was in the eighth grade, nobody picked on me any more."
At Oak Park's Fenwick (Catholic) High School, which last year sent about 17% of its graduating class to Notre Dame, Johnny began to round out in other ways. Fenwick Trainer Dan O'Brien recalls Johnny as a "sort of dual personality around here. He seemed like a backward type when he was in the dressing room, not saying much or paying much attention to what was going on. But when he was on the football field, he suddenly became aggressive—not offensively so, but intelligently so."
By being intelligently aggressive on the football field. Johnny won All-State honors as an end in 1948, his junior year. The next year Captain-elect Lattner was shifted to halfback, where he became a bread & butter boy for Fenwick Coach Tony Lawless. Known as "Big John" to his teammates. Lattner averaged 18 yds. a carry. He made All-State again, the first player in Illinois records to do it two years in a row at different positions. He also led Fenwick to the finals of the Chicago championship. Fenwick lost, but Johnny will never forget the crowd that turned out for the game. "There were 67,000 people there that day," says Johnny with a mixture of pride and awe.
A Gold Nugget. After the football seasons at Fenwick, Johnny found time to 1) captain the basketball team and lead it in scoring for four straight years, 2) win two track letters as a dash man (10.3 for 100 yds., 22.3 for 220). Such athletic prowess did not pass unnoticed by the college football scouts.
In the postwar gold rush for playing talent, Lattner was one of the most sought-after nuggets in Illinois history. Turning down countless other offers, he visited the campuses of six schools—Michigan, Illinois, Purdue, Kentucky, Kansas and Indiana (which made a strong social impression on Johnny by supplying him with a white summer tux and a stunning brunette date for a dance). The offers for his football services included the standard ones of room, board and tuition, with sometimes an additional alumni deal which Lattner will not discuss. He accepted Notre Dame's relatively modest offer: free tuition (a $620 item), room & board ($830), for which he does nominal chores. His current job: "night check" on the third floor of his dormitory at curfew. As Lattner and other Notre Dame footballers put it: "I'm in on a ride."