May 2, 2006
Former Notre Dame baseball standout and current Monogram Club board member Dick Nussbaum was voted president-elect of the Notre Dame Alumni Association by the Alumni Board during its spring meeting last week. He will serve beginning July 1 along with Gene Bastedo, who begins his year as Alumni Board president. The two top Alumni Board officers also hold ex officio positions on the University Board of Trustees. Nussbaum’s year as president-elect will also be his third and final year as Alumni Board director of Region 8, overseeing 10 alumni clubs in Indiana and Kentucky.
A partner since 1996 with the South Bend-based law firm Sopko, Nussbaum and Inabnit, Nussbaum currently serves as an advisor with the Monogram Club, after completing his three-year term (’02-’05) on the board of directors. During his time on the Monogram Club board, he has served as the chair of the student welfare committee.
The four-year monogram winner graduated from Notre Dame in 1974 with a degree in English, and again in ’77 from the Notre Dame Law School. He has been a partner since 1996 with Sopko, Nussbaum and Inabnit, a general practice firm in which he handles the majority of the real estate transactions.
Nussbaum served from ’98-’03 as the general counsel for former Indiana lieutenant governor (and former Notre Dame catcher) Joe Kernan, who then served one year as Indiana’s governor following the death of Frank O’Bannon in September of 2003. Nussbaum was named a special counsel to governor Kernan during that time.
The Pittsburgh native previously worked in 1998 for the city of South Bend’s Corporation Counsel, as the head of the city’s department of law. He also signed on in 1991 as secretary and league counsel for the Midwest Baseball League. He worked for the St. Joseph County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office from 1979-88, as a felon trial deputy and lead counsel for 60 widereaching trials, and was a 20-year partner of the general practice firm Krisnor and Nussbaum (’77-’96).
Nussbaum has served as chairman of the St. Joseph County Drug Free Council (part of the Healthy Community Initiative) and was president of the Notre Dame Club of St. Joseph County in 1995-96. He also has been a board member for both the Women’s Care Center and Catholic Charities, is an attorney for the South Bend Center for the Homeless and recently was elected the Region 8 Director for the Notre Dame Alumni Association (with a term from ’04-’07).
Nussbaum led the 1973 Irish baseball team in batting average as a junior (.333) and totaled just four career errors while patrolling center field. He is part of one of the most successful father-son combinations in the 113-year history of Notre Dame baseball, as his son Matt played a number of positions with the Irish and was a two-year starter, in addition to serving as a senior captain in 2000 before later following in his father’s footsteps as a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School (’04).
The oldest of Richard and Mary Nussbaum’s five children, Nussbaum was born Sept. 4, 1952, and was a baseball star at Moon Township (Pa.) High School. He and the former Mary Pat Leyes were married at Notre Dame on July 24, 1976, and are the parents of three children: Matt, Dan (Holy Cross College) and Kathryn (Saint Mary’s ’06).