I notice you say "book bag," and not "backpack."

No one had backpacks at ND when I was there. We all had book bags. They had a rubberized interior with an olive drab exterior, made out of a canvas-like material that once it began to rip, total collapse was not far behind.

Professors, teacher's aids, and graduate students carried briefcases. I don't recall regular students sporting them. We students were like members of Easy Company hustling to take out the German machine guns and 88s (They were 105s!) at Brecourt in Normandy, "Weapons and Ammo only!" We weren't like our children in the late 80s and 90s who had backpacks with every damn book for the whole day inside, risking lower back injury and pinched nerves and collapsed disks - all before puberty!

We carried one or two books in our book bags ("Weapons and Ammo only!") and the main risk we lived with was some Engineering student picking up our book bag with our Sociology or Freshman English books in it and us being left with his undecipherable Freshman Biology notes and his drawings of the bar-eyed and straight eyed drosophila melanogaster fruit flies that looked like something a drunk Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí cooked up after six hours of partying on the Costa del Sol while eating eels and drinking Sangria.

Our crappy book bags invariably got ripped and soaked when manhandled by students who moved our bag off a hook in the South Dining Hall in favor of one for themselves and by the time we sorted through... not ours... not ours... not ours... Ours! we would sling ours onto our preferred shoulder and brave the elements of raw and frozen Northern Indiana and "soldier on" into the wind, the sleet, and the snow, our brows set low against the steel-gray gloaming, hoping that we are prepared for the spot quiz that our professor will spring on us while we are thinking about the creamy thighs of that St. Mary's girl who smiled at us at the last mixer and who we hope will grace us with a date at some time in the near future and who will click-clack the heels of her penny loafers on the gleaming entry floor of the Le Mans Hall foyer in a rapid pace to match the beat of our lonely heart as she walks toward us, back straight, eyes bright, and with just a hint of a smile to quicken our soul as a phalanx of pinched-face nuns side-eye her with slitted eyes, suspicious about what is on the pretty coed's mind and whether she is saying a Hail Mary as she strolls toward that Notre Dame man who is thinking about "you know what."