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Another three additions to the Glomerata section. The Eisenhower years are here, the growth period as the university, under President Ralph Draughon, fought to modernize antiquated systems and transform Auburn into a contemporary institution.
The book listed above, 1952, has received an in-depth treatment on the site, as has the 1953 edition.
If you’d like to start at the beginning of the covers section, go here. As always, check out the university’s collection as well.
That was after lunch. There was a little bit of falling ice before barbecue with Brian. And it really picked up on my way back to campus. By the time I’d parked I was faced with having to walk through that.
Two hours later, the ground looked like this:
That’s just ice. The sidewalks were slippery and the roads were getting worse. The university canceled classes, including mine, to close early. That decision was just in time. After putting a note on the door, gathering up all of my things and stopping by the boss’ office I made it off campus with pretty much everybody else. It took me half an hour to go the 1.8 miles from the campus to the interstate. The roads got a little slippery and everyone in the city left work at precisely the same time.
After that, apparently, everything got worse. There were plenty of reports of bad roads, fender-benders, an accident with a fatality up north and lots of stories of no progress on the roads.
I found one slippery spot, on an overpass, and soon after outran the traffic and then the freezing rain.
So I spent the evening making recruiting phone calls for our department. One very nice lady asked how the weather was.
“Well, today isn’t the right day to ask that question … ”
She laughed. They were getting ready for it to land on them, she said.
So I worked through the evening on phone calls until it got to late to do that. We had dinner with our friends Shane and Brian. Shane’s father is in town, and he walked in with his Airborne veterans hat on. He cuts an imposing figure, but is a nice guy. Turns out his grandfather was close friends with a former president of Samford. Small world.
Also, it was National Signing Day. I (re-)wrote this piece for The War Eagle Reader and received a few nice comments.
I must be doing something right, even the spam comments that come into this site are complimentary. I guess the plan of attack has changed: kill ’em with kindness. Better than ads for pills and bank notices. Not as good as the fake Rolex ones, though.
Lots of meetings today. Had a long sit-down about our website. I wrote a two page memo on all of the changes we’re about to make. And then there was a newspaper meeting, where we marked up pages of newsprint. This is the first paper of the new semester, which is always a difficult thing. How does one write about things that happened days or even weeks ago with a new angle?
The next two weeks of the paper will surround Step Sing, the song and dance revue that features about 20 percent of the student population. At least they know what they’ll be writing about.
Met with the boss, did a little reading and a little writing. A lot of grading.
The students in the class I’m teaching refine their resume over the course of the semester and I’ve been compiling notes to help with the task. Resumes are both tedious and important, of course. I talk about clarity, brevity, accuracy, consistency.
Many of the resumes I looked through tonight were quite good. Now the drum beat will grow louder. “Get involved. Work at the campus paper, the campus television station, or the magazines or radio.”
This is an introductory class in our curriculum, of course, but it is fun watching students realize the importance of that idea. Journalism and public relations and broadcasting are careers built on examples of quality, so we encourage students to get involved early and keep working on campus until they graduate and move into the professional realm.
Which is why I graded resumes until almost midnight.
The groundhog says there are 13 more weeks of that.
