Hall of Honor Recipient
Elmer Layden
Class of 1921
Inducted in 1998-99
In 1924, the famous sports journalist Grantland Price wrote that the backfielders on Notre Dame’s football squad rumbled up the field like the Biblical “four Horsemen”: Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. A legend was born and the first Golden Age of Football had begun. One of the immortal four was a fullback from Davenport, Elmer Layden, Class of 1921.
In that year, Elmer was understandably named to the All-American Football team. For two years after graduation, he coached football at the then Columbia College in Dubuque (now Loras), during which time he married Edythe Davis from Bettendorf. He went on to become varsity coach at Duquesne in Pittsburgh from 1927 to 1933, where he developed the team into a major football power in the East. His career soared to another level when he became the head football coach at his alma mater in 1934, a position he held until 1940. Upon retiring from Notre Dame, he became the first commissioner of the National Football League in 1941, and was eventually inducted into the College Hall of Fame for his contributions to the sports
From 1946 until his retirement in 1968, Elmer worked as a sales executive at General American Transportation Company in Chicago.
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