We return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. This is a quick tour, where we are spending just two weeks on this particular year. The photography is a bit limited, but there are great stories, so we’ll wrap up 1926 in this large batch before moving on to another book next week. Enjoy a few pretty pictures from the Plains. (See part one here.)
These were, as we learned last week, troublesome days on campus. The university president, a man named Spright Dowell, wasn’t viewed as particularly effective. The university was about to celebrate its 70th anniversary, but the buildings needed work, the faculty needed raises, the sports programs were all struggling. and the university needed some actual respect from the state. It’s a persistent tale, particularly in those early years. The students hanged him in effigy.
Curiously, people seemed to like him as an individual, but didn’t seem to think much of his job performance. The newspaper editorials were unsparing, and they took turns at pointing at all of these problems and more. Of course, one of the newspaper bigwigs was on the board of the university. The ties and tendrils were everywhere, as they always are. Dowell knew the score, at least somewhat. He pointed to the athletics issues. He mentioned, the next fall, that perhaps he could have spent some more time being a man of the people. Perhaps he had in mind here his predecessor, who was well liked. Instead, Dowell said, he chose to spend his time focusing on the money problems. Certainly, when he said that, he had a lot of influential people in mind. Weeks after he said it, and before this book was terribly out of date, he would resign from the university. His tenure would end after seven trying years. He became the president of Mercer University the next year, where he’d stay for 15 years. But this isn’t about him. It’s about what’s inside this book, a handsomely produced, 375-page piece of history.
We wrapped up last week with the athletics section of the century-old book. The next few pages showed the “Beauties.” These women don’t always show up in other areas of the annual. In some editions they seem to just be local people. They were selected for this by Florenz Ziegfield Jr., the director of the Ziegfield Follies, which was still a cultural high water mark for the country.
I’ve not yet found the rhyme or reason for how all of that worked, other than Ziegfield liked the photos they sent him. Also, these women can sometimes be difficult to trace if they took their husband’s name in public mentions. If nothing else, we can get a glimpse of the hair and some of the clothing styles of the day.
Nell Thomas, for instance. I believe she was from Montgomery. She might have been the daughter of a prominent appellate judge. (But even there following her digital trail gets fuzzy.)
Bertrice Black was from Birmingham. She would get married in 1927 or thereabouts. Her husband would become an accountant, and served as a captain in the army during WW2. They had one daughter. Bertrice, sometimes, or at least later, it was Beatrice, died in 1977 at age 73.
Eula Martin is a name that feels so incredibly familiar I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to figure out if I’ve ever written about her before. I have not. Clearly, though, she had a thing for flappers and fur. Also this is one of the most soft-focused photos in the book. (I happen to be an expert on fuzzy focus.) She attended Howard College, the modern Samford University. She was a dancer. And this seems to be a photo that became her promotional headshot. Martin, or someone with the same name, was quite active in the social pages of the late 1920s. She came from a family that had lived in the state when it was still a territory. She wrote poetry. Throughout her long life she would join all of the important social and community organizations that a woman of her stature should maintain. She would marry — 99 years ago today — a man that we’ll meet in just a moment. They had a son. She passed away at 90, in 1995.
Martha Porter likewise doesn’t show up elsewhere in the Glom. She was from Tuscumbia, in the northwestern corner of the state. She became a teacher in a little town on the Tennessee River. She got married the next year to a Bama grad. He was a roofer and would eventually become the president of that local firm. He died in 1970, she lived until 1993. She lived in Florida for several decades. They had one daughter, a woman who passed away just a few years ago, who has a lovely obituary.
Elizabeth Chester just looks here like a silent movie starlet. She’s from Atlanta. She’s not otherwise in the Glom. I can’t find anything about her for certain.
And this is Margaret Whittle. She’s from Atlanta. If you know anything about her, pass it on.
Good as it is, the problem with books of this particular vintage is that the casual photos are almost always small. Usually they are of spotty quality. The equipment available to a poor college campus might not have been the best. Or maybe its the photographs. Perhaps my limited digitization. Whoever we blame, and blame me, the few pages of casual campus life all look like this, and if you get cutlines they are usually short on details that help us find out more about the people in them.
You see some fans here, some sort of band thing, a line where students wait patiently in line to register for classes, and two shots of the Wreck Tech parade, which was part of the festivities before the Georgia Tech football game. (It was the final game of the year, in November, in Atlanta. The good guys lost.)
There’s a section called Death, and it’s filled with poems and prose and jokes that probably made sense to the 21-year-olds who were already feeling nostalgic, but most of it is lost to us as personal reference. There’s some fun art in there, filling up the space, though. This took up a full page. Some of it looks like campus, some of it doesn’t seem familiar at all.
We have a rule that we always show the bikes that wind up in the Glom. Apparently that applies to the ones that are drawn, as well.
They look almost as cool as the real thing, anyway.
Here’s another one of those little marginalia doodles that is destined to become some sort of clip art around here.
This is the staff that put together the book. The business manager is Ben Screws Gilmer, of Montgomery, who was a senior studying electrical engineering. He’d worked on the Glom for two years. The blurb by his portrait in the class section recalls him as a gentleman, a conscientious student, and “As to him being a ladies man, we take great pleasure in referring you to Atlanta.”
Perhaps he was legendary.
He went to work at Bell System right after graduation, starting as an installer. Phones, wires, poles, I don’t know, but he did that for a month and then went into the company’s leadership training course. That was a wise choice by the company and him. He found his way into marketing and development, and then into regulatory work. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War 2, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He returned to Southern Bell, became an assistant vice president and, before long, was running much of the phone company’s business in nine states. He also worked for Northwestern Bell, Pacific Telephone, and, eventually AT&T, where in 1967, he became the president of the company. He also served as either director, chairman of the board, or trustee of more than thirty civic and charitable organizations. The university gave him an honorary doctorate in the 1950s. In 1975, he was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor by the state legislature. He is similarly honored in the Alabama Business Hall of Fame and the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame. His industry peers in Georgia would likewise honor him. All of that started right here. He and his wife had a daughter. When he died, at 98 in 2004, he also had two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
The editor was Charles Snook, a senior architecture major from Birmingham. Snook was in all of the leadership organizations on campus, it seems. He was also an ROTC captain. Who knows when he had time to attend class. Later, he served as a commander in the Navy. In his professional life he went to back to the Birmingham suburbs and worked as an architect. Snook was vice president of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects and worked on at least one of those downtown revitalization projects that are necessary from time to time. I can’t readily find a list of his projects, to confirm it, but the odds are very, very good I know of some of his work, if I’ve not been in the actual buildings he designed — albeit decades later, of course. He had one son, who became a reverend, as did one of his five grandchildren. He died in 1973.
The art editor is William Sandifer, a senior from Mississippi who was also studying architecture. He was another prominent campus leader. Part of his yearbook blurb jokes that he majored in letter writing and minored in sleeping during class hours. And this was one of the men who helped design the Empire State Building, the World’s Fair, and several U.S. embassies. He’d served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the war, mustered out as a colonel, with Manila as his last duty station. In 1947 he and his wife purchased a huge, renowned ranch in Colorado, Greystone. He died in 1986, at 85.
Here’s the campus paper. I’d work there decades later, and didn’t give the first thought to the existence of any of these people, because I was 19 or 20 at the time, just like some of these people. They turned a post-game extra 15 minutes after the game was over using 1920s technology. That’s impressive in any era.
Jasper F. Thompson was another electrical engineering major from Birmingham. “Fritz,” it says here, “is a likeable cuss — always jolly, never worries and has a good word for everyone. The best ‘ain’t’ too good for him.” He worked as an executive with the Red Cross, pretty much running things across the southeast. He’d lived in Georgia for almost two decades, while his brother and his father were judges in Alabama. When he died, of a heart attack, in 1960 he and his wife had two adult children, a daughter and son.
Edward Donald Ball was the managing editor. Apparently he dosed off in classes. He caught on at the old Birmingham Age-Herald after school. He worked around the southeast, and in New York before the war. E.D., as he was known, would become a significant European war correspondent. Back home, he ran the Tennessee bureau of the Associated Press office. He worked for the AP for 31 years. He lost a young son, aged 18, in 1951. In 1959 he became editor of the Nashville Tennessean. He died in Georgia, at 88, in 1992. He was survived by his wife and a daughter.
William Horton was an engineering major from Virginia. He played football for three years, and was the sports editor of the paper. He was also an editor of a specialty engineering publication. They called him “the preacher, the philosopher, and the journalist of the Civil Engineers.” He’s difficult to trace definitively after college, however.
I’m assuming this was just yearbook art, but it also looks like a great poster. Illustrators could make some lovely work given the styles of the day.
Here’s the radio club, which is part of a fascinating little history at Auburn. I’ve written about it several times in a few places over the years. It was the early days of the technology, and these were days of important transitions with the technology on campus. By this point they had a handful of radio telegraph sets, and a radio phone. They could send a signal a good distance at night, but it was especially limited during the daytime. The hand-me-down gear was still serving the farmers who could hear the signal. The university had been a pioneer in the field in 1912 and 1913, but decisions had to be made about the future. And these guys were watching.
In 1925 WMAV would close its doors. This was a part of necessary upgrades. They built a 200-foot transmitter tower just south of campus. There were actually two stations working from campus after that. In February of 1926, probably just before this yearbook was released, WAPI took to the air for the first time. Many decades later, I broadcast on WAPI early in my professional broadcasting career.
One of these 1926 guys, as we learned last week, went to work for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. He was a natural. Louis Howle was sending messages to stations in California so rapidly they couldn’t decipher his dots and dashes. J.M. Wilder ran the old WMAV when it came back to the students, from Birmingham, in the year prior.
John McCaa had a great live broadcast moment earlier this year.
(O)ne night we had a request for a popular number. Everyone could play it, but no one knew the words . I was selected to sing the words, so 1 propped the music up in a chair where I could read the words while playing. Everything was going fine till, when about half through, a strong breeze came through the windows and blew the music across the room. I just broke out laughing as did the others. The confusion lasted for about five minutes before we got back to playing again. Our mail from that program was more than usual, and of all things, people asked us to repeat that program as they had enjoyed our “skit.”
A few years after this someone conducted a a survey of land-grant schools that had gotten into broadcasting. A lot of them got out — poor financing, poor gear, low power, programming and technical difficulties. Auburn was one of those that stuck with it, though the people working in this area would do it with some miseries. By the end of the decades the second boom period of broadcasting at Auburn was waning. Sports were proving to be the only thing that could keep and captivate listeners. There were also all sorts of problems with frequency hopping. And then came the rise of the networks.
I’m glad they stuck with it. The radio that I knew, which would be all but unrecognizable to all of those men in the photo above, was one important part of my student experience.
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.
