Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. I’m still adding new-to-me editions to my collection and so here we are today. The one I’m showing you here is the 1993 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 1994 Glom.
See all of the covers in my Glom collection here.
Bill Clinton was the president. No one had thought yet of shutting down the government and we were a long way from our national debate on the meaning of the word “is.” NAFTA and Nancy Kerrigan were in the news and people were still saying “information superhighway.” Others were still struggling to pronounce Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Scream was stolen, the Olympics were in Lillehammer and American troops withdrew from Somalia. Kurt Cobain killed himself. Tonya Harding pled guilty and Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Richard Nixon died.
Students in the fall before, if they followed the news, learned more about Sydney and Mogadishu and worried about an uprising in Moscow and nuclear tests in China. Early that fall I decided, for sure, that I wanted to go to Auburn. I’d had ideas previously, but that fall I made some visits and fell for the place.
There were 263 million people in the U.S. in 1994. Some 4.26 million of them were in Alabama, more than double the pre-World War II census. Guy Hunt, the first Republican governor Alabama had known since Reconstruction, had just left office as Alabama’s first governor removed from office for a criminal conviction. He paid his fines and served his probation and got a pardon. Considered by some to be an accidental governor, he was considered a bumpkin by opponents but took advantage of a splintered Democratic party. Trivia: A minister, farmer and salesman, Hunt was the last governor of Alabama that didn’t attend college. He fought in Korea instead. He’s also a man who made Alabama a two-party state. And now, of course, state politics have tipped entirely the other direction. Guy Hunt died in 2009. When he stepped down, he was succeeded in 1993 by his lieutenant governor, Jim Folsom, Jr. He ran in 1994, but was beaten by the former-Democrat-turned-Republican (and Auburn grad) Fob James. James was returning to an office he’d held 20 years earlier. Folsom would show up, a decade later, again as lieutenant governor. (Alabama is a cyclical place.)
Alabama, and much of the southeast, was hit hard by an ice storm in 1994. Heather Whitestone, who would later become Miss America, was enjoying her time as Miss Alabama. Birmingham, the state’s largest city, was in the middle of a nine-year stretch of triple-digit homicides. Local boy and NASCAR hero Davey Allison died in a helicopter accident. I was busy navigating high school. As if that was all.
