This is the 12th and final installment of our glance through the 1954 Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part 10 and part 11.) 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.

These are a couple of quick shots with a lot of substance behind them, so let’s get to the good stuff.

This was a play or a skit and we have no idea what was going on here. There’s nothing written to support this one moment in their lives. Hopefully it bubbled to the surface for them from time-to-time, and they thought of it fondly.

Dig that fancy flash the guy is holding. And is this really hazing? You could get in a lot of trouble for that today, of course. But things were different, one supposes. Or maybe it was just in fun.

“Fun.”

I’m beginning to think the impression I’ve been given of the morally upright 1950s might not have been a complete … picture.

What do you suppose this guy was working on? Note the ink jar, too.

This feature has a “post every bike” policy, and now that extends to unicycles. This could come back to haunt us later.

That guy is riding at the gates at Toomer’s Corner. The brick column and the Class of 1917 sign are the clues. This it what it looks like today (in 2015).

You’ll note those globes have been replaced by eagles. Those are 19th century eagles They were brought to campus in the 1960s.

I find I’m over the dodging and burning they were doing in the darkroom to cut out these images. What was going on behind the uni-cyclist could have been interesting to us, too.

From the advertisements in the back … This is obviously a sporting goods store, one I’ve never heard of. A quick search tells me they existed at least until the 1960s. They had a great spot, right next to Toomer’s Drugs.

Businesses come and go. The one in Atlanta is gone, too. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the model’s choice of footwear for this photograph.

J&M is still going strong, though. I bought my first Auburn t-shirt in that store. Shopped there a lot over the years.

It does look a bit different today. The building is bigger, and they sell more apparel and souvenirs than books. The business keeps changing, but the Johnstons are still standing there.

Trey, a kind-hearted guy, still owns the place, and it’s still a family concern. Trey was a football walk-on. He grew up in town, and around that store, which his father opened the year before this book was published. It’s a part of everyone’s lives and has always been a part of his. It’s one of the last things downtown that feels old and familiar and I hope it goes on for forever. (Another bookstore I shopped in closed in 2022.) Trey’s lifetime devotion to the place and the people deserve that.

Hawkins is gone.

Has been gone for decades. Hawkins, over time, became Johnston & Malone. So this book is at the beginning of the crossover period. (J&M traces their roots, indirectly, back to the 19th century.) And Burton’s were the headwaters.

Robert Wilton Burton opened the first bookstore in Auburn. They offered “Something New Everyday” for 90 years.

Born in 1848 in Georgia, he enlisted in the Confederate cavalry at the end of the war. At the ripe old age of 17 he spent two days in the saddle before he was captured and spent the last three months of the war in captivity. Burton spent most of his adult years in Auburn, first as a teacher, and then a business man. In 1878 he opened his bookstore became the literary center for the town. Himself a poet, Burton was published in newspapers and magazines around the country, and had a successful series of children’s stories, too. He died in 1917, and his daughters took over the store, until it closed in 1968 when his last surviving daughter was 77.

Burton, his wife and his two daughters are all buried in Pine Hill, an old cemetery steeped in the area’s history, a place I enjoy as much as one can say they enjoy a cemetery, and, oddly, the last place I visited on the weepy, dreadful day we moved away.

And that’s the end of the 1954 Glomerata. These are the editors. And I bet those tires and candles made for a good joke.

I wonder how many people were in on it.

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.

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.