Venerable old Milwaukee County Stadium was opened in 1953. The Milwaukee Braves and the Green Bay Packers played there, as the MIlwaukee Brewers would later. The Sitting Bull Monument, on Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was built that same year. Plans for the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier in Philadelphia began in 1954.
The top television shows at the time were The Milton Berle Show, You Bet Your Life, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Dragnet and I Love Lucy.
Kitty Kallen was atop the charts. Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, the Crew-Cuts and Jo Stafford — my favorite of the era — all had huge hits.
People read a lot of Annemarie Selinko (Désirée), A.J. Cronin (Beyond This Place), Samuel Shellabarger (Lord Vanity) and Morton Thompson (Not as a Stranger) who all held the New York Times bestseller spot during the period. Yeah, I haven’t heard of any of those, either.
That was 1953 and 1954. Let’s see what else people were doing.
This is the 11th installment of our glance through the Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, and part 10.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.
This is one of those photos they use to fill space at the beginning of each new section. We’re heading into “Activities and Snap Shots” and I was not expecting this in a wholesome book about the 1950s. I’m not here to pass judgement, but this was probably someone’s grandmother several decades later.
The editors of this yearbook should have thought about that when they were in their 20s, is all.
We don’t spend a lot of time here on buildings, because buildings are only interesting in certain ways and certain times. And, usually, they’re unchanging. But this one is new. At least it was in 1954, when it opened that January. Sometime after that, all of these people posed for the moment.
It’s difficult to imagine Foy Hall — Foy Student Union in my day — as new. It was awkward when I started, a structure that would was a vestigial branch of modernism that didn’t fit in with the Georgia colonial architectural style that predominates. By the time I graduated it had changed. I practically lived there. The newspaper was housed there, and so was the radio station. It had that old, tired feeling a building can adopt when everyone knows it is on its last legs. The care isn’t as frequent. Resources and time are spent elsewhere. Offices move to sexier places. Everything feels a little careworn.
Which is a shame. The building, just the Student Union to the people in that photograph, would later be named after the beloved Dean James Foy, who was the dean of student affairs in 1954. In fact, this yearbook was dedicated to him. You read about him a few months ago.
Here’s Foy Hall today, or at least in 2016, and from almost the same angle.
A few years back the university built a brand new building that serves as the student union. Let’s have a quick look at what it was like way back when.
This photo was too small in the book, but it’s fascinating. The cutline tells us “Display boards keep students well informed on campus activities.”
It is probably not real, but I think I have a memory of someone telling me about these things. I don’t remember the actual boards, but I know where they were.
I also know right where this room was. It doesn’t look like that today, thank goodness. With windows above your eye line, and nothing to but that relentless brick wall, you really didn’t need whatever is going on in the background, too.
This is from Homecoming, a 16-7 win over Florida. And that’s Miss Homecoming, Joan Davidson. She graduated in 1955 and became an elementary school teacher in her hometown, married her college sweetheart and they had four sons. Her husband, George, died in 1971, and when Joan remarried she added three stepdaughters to her family.
She was president of the Junior League, a director at a nursing home, and a board member of Joan was a dedicated member of this community, having served as the President of the Junior League of Columbus, served on the boards of a nursing home, the local historic foundation and chamber of commerce. She passed away in 2020, celebrated by a family of seven children, 15 grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.
She’s standing there with George Uthlaut, who we met a while back. He was a senior studying chemical engineering, a real BMOC, and became successful in oil and gas exploration and production, first with Exxon for more than 30 years, and then with Enron Oil and Gas. He and his wife, Dot, volunteered in their local hospital for 35 years, visiting patients weekly. He’s still with us and they’re living happily in Texas.
This is a pretty basic formation, really. I could do that. I could do that today!
And by “that” I mean stand there and look pleasant and casual while a woman stood on my quad. I wonder what the cheer was. I wonder what it was like to have only seven cheerleaders. There are 21 today.
Also, they had puppets. It is unclear if these are props for this photo or something they used. Maybe pom-pom technology hadn’t really caught on by the 1950s. I must confess to some ignorance of cheerleader history.
That’s Jean Dudley on the left. She married her high school sweetheart. She died in 2020, survived by her husband of 63 years, a guy who was studying mechanical engineering in this yearbook. Together, they raised a family of three sons, eight grandchildren, and ten great grandchildren. Her husband, John, did two years at Auburn, and then transferred to Penn’s Wharton School of Business. He became a stockbroker and a financial adviser. He died in 2022.
The one on the right is Ann Wilson. She’s from Mobile, and after she graduated from Auburn she got a master’s degree from Alabama. She became a social worker, working at the county level, then worked in state pensions, served in FEMA for several years and went back to state-level work. She had five children, and she’s still with us.
The woman in the middle has the incredibly exotic name of Catherine Cole, and it’s a bit too difficult to dig her out of the interwebs.
Hey, look, it’s the Auburn Knights! They were formed in 1928, and they’re still going strong today. Over the years they’ve earned and maintained a terrific reputation. Now, as then, they toured all over the region, playing colleges and clubs.
On the drums is Jerry Micklic, from suburban Birmingham. When he put down the sticks he went home and ran a business for 60 years. He died in 2014, the father of three, grandfather of four.
Betty Jean Brown was the singer for the Knights. She was a freshman. She stayed in Auburn, where she taught elementary school, sold real estate, played piano for her church and sang in the choir for 60 years. She’s somewhere in this reunion choir.
She and her husband were married for 67 years before his death. They raised two sons and three grandchildren. They toured all over the country in their RV. It seemed a lovely little life. She passed away in 2021.
There’s no context included for this photo. It’s on a page highlighting skits. They must have been funny.
All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.
