A Hillsdale Christmas Story
Written by Doug Goodnough
Here it is, December already. Christmas is on the doorstep. At Hillsdale College, we are gearing up for holiday parties, gift exchanges, and final exams, not necessarily in that order.
And we’re also preparing for a college football bowl game. On December 6, the Chargers will play the Upper Iowa University Peacocks in the Albanese Candy Bowl. If you love football and gummy bears, this game is for you. Billed as a match between the Great Lakes Valley Conference and the Great Midwest Athletic Conference, it is a chance to showcase NCAA Division II football and get in on the bowl season that is usually reserved for the larger publics and privates.
The bowl tidbit that caught my attention is that the winner of the Candy Bowl walks away with the prestigious traveling prize—the Leg Lamp Trophy. If you aren’t familiar, this is homage to the now-famous movie A Christmas Story. It was the “major award” the father (“The Old Man”) received for winning a newspaper contest.
The movie was based on the book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. The author, Jean Shepherd, grew up in Hammond, Indiana, just a short drive away from the bowl game’s location in Hobart.
And the trophy also has a special Hillsdale connection. The director of the eventual movie A Christmas Story happened to be Hillsdale alumnus Bob Clark, ’64. The 1983 film is now a Christmas classic, and Clark’s vision for it has been well documented.
However, who was Bob Clark the student? Last spring, I met someone who actually lived with him for a time at Hillsdale. Jim Lucadam, ’65, was just a freshman and did not know he was supposed to sign up for on-campus housing. So he found an off-campus house on Manning Street. One of his housemates was Clark, an upperclassman and football teammate.
Lucadam first “met” Clark while trying to tackle the stout fullback during a team scrimmage. It did not go well.
“He used to run about a foot off the ground. I went to tackle him, and he just ran me right over,” Lucadam said of Clark. “He jumped up, laughed in my face, and thought it was funny. And I did, too. We became friends.”
Clark, who came to Hillsdale from Florida, grew up in the shadow of the Everglades. He had stories to tell and told them well.
“Bob told us all of these stories about when he was in high school in Florida,” Lucadam said. “We loved to hear his stories. He was an English major and loved to write.”
Some of those stories ended up in the other notable film Clark directed, Porky’s. But that’s a story I’m not willing to tell, at least not on this blog.
Being from Florida, Clark found Michigan winters to be a problem, especially when returning to Hillsdale from Christmas break.
“He came back with a 1952 gray Chevrolet with bald tires,” Lucadam said of Clark. “Cars didn’t come with heaters or anything, so he almost froze to death driving it back. And he never had driven on snow before.”
He drove Lucadam and some friends up a snow-covered West Street past Curtiss Dining Hall and slid right into a snowbank.
“Everybody [in Curtiss] was up there laughing,” Lucadam said. “So we realized we had to do something.”
They took him out to a frozen Baw Beese Lake and taught him how to drive on the snow and ice.
“He had no clue how to do it,” Lucadam said.
Clark did know how to scuba dive, and he taught classes in the pool at Stock’s Fieldhouse.
“He would teach the class on Sunday evenings, and they would use the [air] tanks,” Lucadam said. “After the class left, there would still be some air in the tanks. So he invited us down to go scuba diving. He didn’t teach us how to do anything. He just had us swim around the pool until the tanks were empty.”
So there’s your Hillsdale Christmas Story. If you want more on Clark, you can read a detailed article in The Collegian.
Have a Merry Christmas, and may there be leg lamps for all, including the Chargers football team.
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s senior director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in December 2025