It is Friday, and, around here, we get in our time machine and we go home on Fridays. We return once more to a time now 80 years behind us. These are a few of the photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater.

In 1944, the war loomed over everything, and we’re seeing that in this yearbook. As we saw in the last installment, the local barbers had put an advertisement in the paper urging civilians to get their hair cuts during the week, allowing the service men in town to get in and out in their limited weekend free time. The war was everywhere, even in what we often think of as the carefree days of college.

Which isn’t to say that there was no fun. This guy was having fun. The girls seemed to be enjoying the conversation. It’s a filler photo, sitting around the class headshots. There’s no caption here, so we don’t know what they were discussing, or where this was or how uncomfortable he might have been. But, whatever it was, he didn’t mind.

This, we would say today, is so meta.

“The Rains Came” was a 1939 movie — it took a while for film canisters to move around back then. The summary, via IMDb, “In India, a married British aristocrat is reunited with an old flame, but she truly has her sights set on a handsome surgeon.” Starring Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power and George Brent, it was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning Best Special Effects. The movie features an earthquake and massive rains and floods. They used 33 million gallons of water to make the movie, roughly the same amount of rain you could see in a good spring rain just down the street from where this photo was taken.

Another no caption photo. Which is a shame, I want to know more about those socks and shoes.

One of the rules is that we have to feature every bicycle. This is a terrific composition. And if you look closely inside the background of the rear wheel you’ll see what I believe is the top of Hargis Hall. It’d be difficult to recreate this photo today because of newer buildings and tree growth.

In a just world, one of these women kept her book and dogeared the pages where she appeared. Some years later one of her granddaughters pulled that book off the shelf, where it had sat quietly down the hall for a good long while. She leafed through the book and then stopped when she got to page 101 and saw a familiar face.

Many giggles were had as the grandmother tried to remember the moment and told stories about her friend. Maybe they stayed in touch. Maybe she called over and they had a laugh they’d waited a few decades to share.

This isn’t a generational thing, but if we today say the youth have it rough, it’s worth pointing out that these people were surrounded by propaganda posters like this. That little bit of masonry on the right side tells us this was a blood drive sign up, or some such, right at the gates to campus.

Also on campus, as we’ve previously learned, was the ASTP. (Not to be confused with the ROTC.) The Army’s Specialized Training Program came about when General George C. Marshall realized that there were shortages throughout his army. Universities became part of the service chain for service men. In ASTP, men already in uniform, or people headed that way, were enrolled in professional and technical classes. ASTP students took up to two years of classes in foreign languages, engineering, medicine and more. More than 800 headshots filled this section of the yearbook, which was 20 pages in the Glomerata.

So it wasn’t just the posters or the news, but all of these men marching from building to building in formation.

The war was everywhere, even right outside the dorms. This is Broun Hall, which was built in 1938. Today it’s a co-ed dorm that houses 96 students. Back then … it probably wasn’t a co-ed dorm.

Not all of those ASTP guys were in the Army. Some just drifted up from the Gulf and marched around in their Navy dungarees until someone told them what to do.

I saved this one for last. The face jumped right out at me. The look is just about right, too, though here he is so obviously looking into the future. And the future was an impressive one. This is Pete Turnham, a senior from Abanda (which was just a place that a rail line ran to and little more). He was studying agriculture. His Wikipedia page says he was born in an equally small nowhere, nine miles south.

Turnham was in the ROTC and went into the Army right after graduation. He became a lieutenant and then a company commander in George Patton’s Third Army. After the fighting was over, he found himself in charge of protecting a castle with a lot of stolen art. If you read the book, or see the movie, “The Monuments Men,” you would see where Turnham found himself.

I’m not sure when Turnham came home, the Third Army stayed in Europe until 1947. When he did, he worked for a decade at Extension, and started his own business. He served on the local school board, and then ran for the state house in 1958, where he served for 40 years — longer than anyone. He served alongside nine governors. He kept his business up for the rest of his days. He called himself a workaholic. But he was a family man, too. He met his wife in college, in 1940. They had four children and were married for an amazing 73 years until she died in 2016. Together, they had four children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren when he passed away. He was widely celebrated in the news obituaries that announced his death in 2019. He was remembered as a man of true service, the kind of politician you wanted to have representing you.

That’s enough for now. All of these photos from 1944 photos live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.

Since it is Friday, we go home, and we go back in time, courtesy of the old pages of ancient books. Eighty years ago on the Plains, there were classes, college life, and the war. Here’s the next batch of photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata. Let’s learn a little about the time, and maybe something interesting about what became of some of them.

We’ll start with a two-fer. This is Bob Sharman on the left and Gene Griffiths on the right. Sharman was the managing editor of The Plainsman, the campus newspaper. (Generations later, I worked there, too.) Griffiths was the advertising manager.

In my time it was a weekly, the largest weekly in the state.

Kids those days were living history, too. There was an editorial message in that first paper about the things that students were losing — joy rides, lost desserts and so on. It went from twice-a-week to a weekly at the beginning of the 1943-44 school year, which they said was a wartime concession.

They were reporting, as I have learned from the first issue of the year, for an enrollment that was larger than expected. Despite the war, there were about 3,000 people in classes, split quite evenly between men and women. The upperclass had been thinned out for the war effort, as we’ll soon see.

And this was a joint advertisement in that first issue of The Plainsman.

Anyway, back to the people. Bob Sharman becomes Dr. Robert S. Sharman, who by 1958 was the assistant to the director, Animal Disease Eradication Division, Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Then, in 1970, acting director of that USDA unit. Later in his career he co-authored two books, “Principles of Health Maintenance” and “Attacking Animal Diseases: Concepts and Strategies for Control and EradicationAttacking Animal Diseases: Concepts and Strategies for Control and Eradication.”

He died at just 68, in 1992. His brother, three or four years his junior, would also become a veterinarian. I can find out more about him than Bob.

Gene Griffiths was a junior from Pensacola, Florida. He was studying mechanical engineering. He was an Eagle Scout. He went into the Army, and Officer Candidate School, right after graduation. He served as 1st Amphibious Engineers in the Pacific Theater in the last phase of the war. (Timing-wise, I think he would have missed out on any heavy action, but he also served in some unknown-to-me capacity during the Korea Conflict.) He got married, they had two children. He worked as an insurance executive in Atlanta until he retired in 1981. He died after a long fight with cancer, on his 84th birthday.

Back to the campus paper, which, 60+ years on, Griffith’s obituary notes with pride, this is “that rugged ‘Plainsman’ staff.”

There was a local weekly in town, and I believe this was during the years that the pros at the Lee County Bulletin, (founded by Neil O. Davis, a graduate of the class of 1935) shared some space with the student publication. The address was Tichenor Avenue, which was named for Isaac T. Tichenor, the turn-of-the century university president … unless the road was named for Reynolds Tichenor, his son, who was a quarterback of one of the first football teams, and later coached a bit, was a referee, a sportswriter and an attorney. So probably his dad.

This is Buck Taylor and Shirley Smith. They were the editors in 1943 and 1944. Taylor won a national prize for his paper — believed to be the first at the paper, the first of many, many (we won two in my day). His time as editor was cut short, though, because of his Army obligations.

Can we find the paper they’re reading here? Sure can, and you can read it today, January 14, 1944.

Taylor was a senior from Mobile, and he was studying business. More on him in a bit.

Smith was the first female editor of The Plainsman. Her first paper was June 8th, 1943. The top three stories were freshman orientation, 65 students enrolling in an Army veterinary program and the death of a local boy, and university graduate, who died in a Japanese prison camp. (He was in Bataan in 1941. He was wounded. And it only got worse from there for him. The story says he reportedly died of malaria in an unknown camp. His father was a police chief.)

Smith, no relation, was from tiny Springville, Alabama. When she was growing up there, less than 400 people lived there. She was studying science and literature. She was also on the publicity committee for the local War Chest Appeal. There, she was rubbing elbows with publishers of the two local papers and the radio station. Just as The Plainsman won All-American honors the previous year under Buck Taylor, the American College Press gave them a second honor under Smith’s tenure.

And then, she quickly drifts away from what the web can tell us. I blame the last name.

The page before the class headshots simply, somberly, reads …

Our next few shots are the supplements that are mixed in with the class portraits. Here’s another shot of Buck Taylor, as promised. He was the editor of the paper, a senior. His name is William Buck Taylor, and he was in everything. He was a member of several leadership organizations. He was in a handful of different social and professional fraternities, and the president of one of them. How he ever went to class is a mystery, but he was also in the National Honor Society. Buck was also class president in high school. He must have been some kind of guy.

He was a company commander in the Army, and spent two years in Okinawa as part of the occupation force after the war. When he came home, he started a contracting company, and worked for 61 years. He headed his local library board in Mobile, was on the board of the carnival association, was a deacon in his church and was involved in just about everything. He married a Bama grad, she was a Master Forester. They had four children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren and what sounds like a lovely life. Buck died in 2015. She passed away just a few months ago.

Do we know what issue he’s reading? Yes we do, of course, January 7, 1944.

Here’s Merrill Girardeau, another BMOC. He was a senior, from Montgomery, a mechanical engineering major. He was in a lot of the leadership organizations, and was on the football team, but it doesn’t look like he ever played. After graduation, he served in World War 2 and during the Korean war, in some sort of capacities.

He went to work for an ironworks concern in Birmingham. He died in 2007, at the age of 85. He and his wife were married for 63 years. (She passed away just last year.) Together, they had three sons, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

This is our friend, Billy Maples. He was a senior from Huntsville, studying mechanical engineering, and he was another big shot. But he’s our friend because no one liked him. Or they just weren’t on campus the day this shot was taken. Else they would have stopped him from posing with a pipe.

Billy was a captain in the war. It seems he got married, and he and his wife had at least one child, a daughter. He died in 1999, at 77.

Shannon Raphael Hollinger was a senior, a vet student. He looks like he was friendly to everyone, doesn’t he?

He graduated in August of 1944 and went home to Camden, population 900 back then. He worked in private practice. For the next 10 years he appears in the papers as a part of dances, balls and other people’s weddings. In 1955, he married a social worker. The parties, apparently, went on for weeks and weeks. They bought a big spread and had a daughter the next year. They had a son, Junior, in 1959. Hollinger died in 1987, at just 64.

Then we met Roy Brakeman, he was the president of two social groups on campus and, the cutline here says, a member of everything else. He was a junior mechanical engineering major from Gadsden.

Brakeman was born in Ohio, but was raised in Alabama. He took a commission in the Navy after graduation, and served until the war ended. Then he went to grad school at MIT. In 1948 he took a job at Chevron in San Francisco and worked there for almost 40 decades. He met a woman out there and they got married and raised a family of three children and eight grandchildren. He lived to see 96, dying in 2021.

Hey, look, there’s our old friend Bob Sharman, from earlier in the post. He works for his Uncle Sam.

Sharman, you’ll recall, was a veterinarian and high ranking member of the USDA.

And, of course, in this feature we’re sharing every picture with a bicycle in it. This was one is ridden by Tutter Thrasher. I can’t get enough of the nicknames.

That’s Annie Catherine Thrasher, a junior studying business administration, it says here. She was a local girl. A member of society, it seems. She was quiet the student all through high school and college. Honors this, cheerleader that. And when this yearbook went to press, they already knew that she was going to be the president of the senior class, and the first woman to have such a position, for whatever that’s worth.

Also in 1944 she got engaged to, and married a Florida boy, an Auburn Man, William Wallace Allen, of Jacksonville. He graduated the year before. He was working at the Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington D.C., and so they set up house there. At some point they moved back to William’s hometown, and he started a sheet metal fabrications business in 1964. Still going strong today. He died in 2013, and she passed away in 2002. They had two kids, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. There was a lot of orange and blue in those kids lives.

That’s plenty for now, in next week’s installment we’ll meet one of the most impressive members of the class of 1943, see a lot of candid photos, another bicycle and learn about the Army’s Specialized Training Program that was on campus in the mid-40s. It’ll be a lot of fun, and not quite this long!

The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.

After several weeks away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Pretty pictures from the Plains, incoming.

That’s the 1944 edition of The Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater. I collect the yearbooks. For one, they look great. For another, it’s a unique, and contained, hobby. I like that it was a finite thing. The first Glom was published in 1897. (I don’t have that one, so if you run across it … ) and the last one I’ll collect was the 2016 book. There are 120 in between. (One year they published two books.) I now have 112 of them.

I’m sharing some of the interesting images here as I digitize them, you can find them all here.

While war was raging abroad, at home, on the college campuses, a different battle was being played out. Funding was always the question, always the fight. The University of Alabama was in a near-blood feud with Auburn, and the University of Montevallo. The legislature created the Alabama Educational Survey Commission to prepare recommendations for the 1945 legislative session. The people running the campus in Tuscaloosa sent a contemptuous report to that commission, which got Auburn president Luther N. Duncan’s attention. He said he’d never seen “a bolder, more deliberate, more vicious, or more deceptive document.” Duncan turned to his alumni base and said that if supporters of Auburn and Montevallo did not rise up to combat “this evil monster,” it would consume them “just like the doctrine of Hitler.”

It would be a mistake to think the tension between the two schools was about football.

And if the war rhetoric was overcooked between state-level officials, war was almost omnipresent for the people.

Just before school started, a young John Kennedy had his PT boat rammed and destroyed in the Pacific, the Allies conquered Sicily. In September, Dwight Eisenhower announced the surrender of Italy. That fall, Americans were looking for places like Bougainville, Tawara and the Gilbert Islands on maps. Stalin, Churchill and FDR met in Tehran that November. The following month, listeners heard Edward R. Murrow’s classic report, “Orchestrated Hell.”

At the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944, The Great Depression ended, the Allied slog up against dug-in Germans through Italy dragged on. The Marshall Islands, Monte Cassino, Leipzig, the Mariana Islands began to enter into the newspapers in February. By mid-March, the war talk was about the bombing of Vienna, the Russian army reaching Romania and Germany occupying Hungary. In the spring of 1944, everything was still uncertain, and this is how some young people got up and went to school each day.

In 1944, the war shadowed everything, and its all over this yearbook, too, as we’ll see.

The book I have is signed Mrs. Joe H. Page. She, or someone else, helpfully told me where to find Joe’s photo. It’s in the Army’s Specialized Training Program. We’ll talk more about that program in a week or two, but the ASTP was prompted by General George C. Marshall’s recognizing that the U.S. Army had to overcome a shortage of soldiers trained in a variety of professional and technical capacities. Most of the people that went into ASTP were active duty soldiers, and they were enrolling for up to two years of engineering, languages, dentistry and more.

It took up 20 pages of this Glom, and there are 800 headshots of the people who made up this special category of the student body. Joe Page was one of those men.

Joe was born in 1924. At least one branch of his family could trace its lineage in Alabama back to territorial days. He died in 1980. His wife, Betty, lived until 2009. I looked in a few of the other books and I don’t see evidence that she attended Auburn. Her sister did. We’ll meet her in three or four weeks. But this is Joe, and this was his Glom. He and Betty had four children, all still living in Alabama.

The first full page sets the tone. It’s bright, and also subdued. It has playful graphics. And the future they saw was in science.

Then there are a handful of well done, double-truck photos, wide shots, atmospherics, silhouettes of people walking, and buildings. It comes with a ribbon of text that runs across the four pages. Here’s one half, just because the composition was promising.

The non-poem says:

Morning’s mists disappear into the early sun and day is launched in lonely splendor ….. to ripen, then, into a brazen noon — holding its bated breath under a heated sky … and chills into the long limpid shades of evening — to remain as a memory of our loveliest village.

I never know what these passages are meant to mean, or how they come to pass, and time has forgotten the unimportant conversations that came before them. Who supported the prose, and who groaned about it? Doesn’t matter. It’s surely meant to set a tone, that earnest tone we all had at 21.

Part of that passage, the brazen noon part, is over this photo. It’s another nice two-page spread of Ross Hall. It housed chemistry and became home to mechanical, chemical and aerospace engineering in the 1970s. I was always ambivalent about the building, but it’s a lovely composition. There are nine cars in the shot. And though the modern view has lovely landscaping, there are a lot more cars in view if you stand in that exact same spot today.

I wish we knew who these people were. Or where this was. We’ll have some open questions going forward. The 1944 Glomerata, at least in the early pages, is a bit spare in terms of cutlines. I also wonder if that hat was his. I wonder which of the two was more interested in this chat. And what was their relationship? And what did it become? and could either of them imagine we’d be contemplating this one moment, 80 years later?

That page was titled “diversion,” for some reason. The next page was “aversion.” I guess we disliked shop assignments and studying and what not.

All of that comes before the foreword, which reads:

We give you this Glomerata of 1944 as a record of some of your days at Auburn, with the hope that in future years you may open it to recapture in memory the spirit of the fun and the work you knew, and the friends you made and kept here in the “loveliest village.” In a warring world some things wave and fall, succumbing to the tide of change, but those days at Auburn will remain in your mind as a brilliant ray when the dull fog of strife is long forgotten. May this book serve to help keep that memory bright. This, then, is your Glomerata for nineteen hundred and forty-four.

There was always the war. This is Lawrence Cottle and Gibbs Ashley, the presidents of the executive cabinet. This was an undergrad organization that programmed campus activities. They also assisted in the community drives for war bonds, the Red Cross and more.

Cottle was a senior, from Montgomery, studying veterinary medicine. He married a woman who, I think, was a sophomore in 1944. He would live to 86, having run a small animal clinic in Mobile. His wife, a teacher and a tapestry artist, died just a few months before he did, in 2010. They had three children, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Ashley was also a senior, from a small town in Florida that had less than 2,000 people in it when he went to school. He was also studying veterinary medicine. His wife died in 1975,they had two children and four grandchildren. His wife passed away in 1975. He remarried at some point, then retired from his own clinic. He volunteered with the Humane Society and kept playing golf. He passed away in 1991, just 67.

Do you ever see photos of people you don’t know and see people you do know in them? This is Audrey Wilson, president of the women’s student government association in 1944. She was a senior. She also wrote for the campus paper. She was studying home economics, and from Evergreen, a small town in south Alabama that had about 3,000 people living in it back then, and not many more in it today. But I see someone entirely more familiar. It’s startling.

Sometimes we just wind up with mysteries. I haven’t yet found anything else about her.

This is Fred Duggar, the editor of the Glomerata. The page he’s working on here is the first one we saw today. John Frederick Duggar, III, was a senior, an architecture major from the impossibly small Hope Hull, Alabama. Fred’s parents are both buried at Pine Hill, in Auburn, at my favorite cemetery. His grandfather, the namesake, is also buried there. That man was a professor of agriculture and director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service. All told, the original John spent almost 50 years on campus.

Our guy, Fred, lived in Atlanta. He published an architectural book in the 1980s that is still a prominent seller in the genre, according to Amazon. He died in 2008 and is also buried at Pine Hill.

The Glomerata lists 16 people as staff, but says the book was produced in a continual “state of flux due to the war. The guy sitting in the left foreground is Frank Benning, a freshman from Atlanta, who was studying architecture. I assume their common studies will show their influence in some of the layout choices going forward. I believe he designed a movie theater outside of Atlanta. Not sure what else he did.

That guy, standing in the background? We’ll meet him next week.

That’s enough for now. The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.

We turn our attention, one last time, to a time 90 years behind us. We’ve spent the last three Fridays looking at my alma mater via the 1934 yearbook. (Part one is here. You can find part two here and, from last week, part three is right here.) This is about the people living their young lives during the Great Depression.

The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.

These are but a few of the photos and the very abbreviated stories that jump out to me, not a complete look at the book. There’s 300 pages and more than 1,400 photographs here, most of them the traditional headshots, which we generally avoid. It was, at that time, the largest yearbook the students had produced, and it’s an interesting glimpse of a familiar world in a different time.

There’s one last engraving, this one is titled features, and the buildings in the lower part of the art have nothing to do with the campus. But I did figure out who the artist, Davis, was.

And it was a real “Of course!” moment. This was Charles F. Davis, Jr. who was in the class of 1932 and still in town. His wife, Helen, was also an architect, the first licensed female architect in Alabama. (She’s a senior in this yearbook!) They would eventually join an architectural firm in Birmingham that would eventually come to be known as Davis Architects. Helen eventually started her own firm. They had three children, who all also went into architecture, and one of them runs Davis today. Charles was also the principal designer of a campus in Birmingham that I knew well.

This is Julia Pace of Anniston, Alabama. She studied business administration and was elected Miss Auburn in her freshman year and then named Miss Anniston. She married John William Mallory Jr. in 1937.

They had three children. He ran a big appliance store, she worked in a bank. Apparently they played golf together well into their golden years. She died in 2002, at 88.

This is Mary Barr Prince, and we know very little about her. She was descendant of an important Carolina family, and was apparently a socialite in her day.

She doesn’t appear elsewhere in this edition of the Glomerata. In her marriage announcement, we learn she went to Converse College, in Spartanburg. Her husband, a man named Henry, also of South Carolina, graduated from UNC. They married in 1937. They had three children — one of them became a prominent attorney and local judge. She died at 79, in 1993. She is buried in her native South Carolina.

Some times you run across a photo that just doesn’t seem to belong in their time frame. I’m not sure if she was mod, or this was as fancy as she could get, but this is Alice O’Donnell of Mobile.

There’s virtually nothing available to us about her, but I presume that’s because she was a time traveler, and has come to our time and is now making making TikTok videos.

My thinking is that not all of this studio portraiture came from the same studio. And that, I figure, is why Theresa Hamby is in such a soft focus. The campus paper, The Plainsman, tells me she’s from Smyrna, Georgia. But that’s the only thing I know about her. She doesn’t seem to appear elsewhere in this yearbook.

And, to show the extent of my searching, I’m using a newspaper database, general searches, looking through the next two editions of the yearbook, and an archive of The Plainsman. And to show that I’m not just including the successful searches, I give you Elizabeth Cryer.

We don’t know anything about her, not even where she was from. I did find a contemporaneous mention of an Elizabeth Cryer who was destined for the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art. No idea if it is the same student.

This is Jessie Lee Raines, she was from tiny Fyffe, Alabama, which wasn’t even a town in the northeast corner of the state when she was a child. There’s less than 1,000 people there today. She was a senior, but she was at Alabama College, the modern day University of Montevallo. She was the vice president of her class, in an honor society and a speech major.

All of this makes me think they only found themselves in this yearbook because they were someone special to someone on campus. But who else she was, and what she would become, is a mystery.

And with those mysterious still being mysterious, we’ll move to something else we know a tiny bit more about.

Homer Wright was a longtime merchant, and he had one of the first phone numbers in town. Why he never ran an ad that said, “If you’re feeling less than fine, call nine,” escapes me.

All of the intricacies of installing the phone system are beyond me, but I assume the number means he had one of the first phones in town, making him quite the innovator. (Indeed, the first gas pump in town was installed in front of his store, in 1909.) He was also the postmaster general in his later years. He and his wife raised three children, two of which survived well into the 20-teens. Wright lived here. He died in 1943, age 57.

The industry that will be “the feature of tomorrow.” Be familiar with it!

I wonder if any of those engineering majors, or people studying architecture or business read this and then stormed into their professors’ stuffy offices. “You’ve never told us about this!” Let’s assume they were all at least passingly familiar with the concept, even if they had no idea of the ubiquity that was coming.

Unassuming advertisement aside, students of 1934 who got in early could probably do well for themselves.

Birmingham, by then, was easily the largest city in the state. (Strictly by a city’s population, that’s no longer the case.) The Birmingham Electric Company was organized in 1921. (Not to be confused with the 1890 Birmingham Railway Electrical Company, which would become Birmingham Electric Company in 1940.) Both had similar purposes, streetcars, with some electrical distribution on the side. The second one, the 1921 concern, was able to use that electricity side hustle to survive the Depression. Maybe that’s one reason they saw great things in conditioned air. Both companies suffered similar fates.

The 1890 version saw their rider numbers decline after World War II. Cars and buses took the demand away, and the streetcars were sold to Toronto in 1952. Around that time they changed their name to the Birmingham Transit Company. Two decades later, the local transit authority took over. Today, they run 109 buses on 38 routes and see about 6,800 customers per day.

Economics got the 1921 company, too. Alabama Power bought them when it got lean. Their vehicles were sold for scrap.

There must be reasons!

And I want to know why, if they are so popular, the photographer stopped by on the slowest day of the year. Today, the university records 1,510 students were enrolled in 1934. That’d mean everyone was in and out of Benson’s, every day, and this strains credulity.

I would have enjoyed watching an orchestra you could just stroll in and listen to for hours at a time, while meeting friends, getting food and candy and so on. It was probably a small band, but that would have been fine, too.

Benson’s was, primarily, a drug store. (There were three, all clumped together on the same block.) These storefronts are long, narrow shops, and so you see pretty much the whole place in that photo, if you squint. They stayed open late on the weekends to serve students coming and going from dances. A few years later, in 1940, milkshakes cost a dime. Regular sandwiches were 15 cents. A ham and cheese was twenty, or you could splurge for a club sandwich for a quarter.

And here’s our last page of ads, and the last entry for the 1934 collection. I’ve searched all of the names on this page and with the exception of the directors names from the bank, I’ve come up empty.

Now, to a man, all of those bank names are important local people. Most of them are affiliated with the university, the rest are pillars of the local community. It was a big deal putting these names in the ad. You knew these folks, and your money always felt safe with the people you saw every day. And if you can’t trust your neighbors with your money in 1934, there’s always a jar you can bury in the backyard.

Even as you were urged to look to air conditioning, you were still buying the black rock and the frozen water for all your domestic needs. Looking back, the 1930s sometimes seem like a time between times. It didn’t feel that way to them, of course. No one thinks like that in their moment. Apparently Homer Wright, the druggist from above, was also involved in Auburn Ice & Coal. The web tells me it was a company that registered with the state in 1925. Ads a few years later list the Ice & Coal phone number as 118. I wish I knew more about the Auburn Ice & Coal Co. Perhaps I’ll find out more about it in other places.

The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.

We once again turn our attention 90 years into the past, because we’ve been spending the last few Fridays looking at my alma mater via the 1934 yearbook. (Part one is here. You can find part two here.) This is about the people living their young lives during the Great Depression.

This is not a complete study, of course, but just the interesting images and names that jump out. And what starts to jump out, at least a bit in 1934, is that there’s was a different, but familiar world.

Let’s take a quick look at just a few more photos about what is inside.

We’re just wrapping up the sports section today, and so we’ll start with this quick look at the 1934 basketball team. They were only 2-11.

It seems that the one interesting note is that the coach of the freshman football team was named the head coach. Sam McAllister had been the coach of the basketball and baseball teams for three years. It was his second job. He was 24-18 on the court, which the yearbook considers a success. “Silent Sam” left the plains, and turned up in Florida a few years later, spending 15 years with the Gators. But that wasn’t immediately useful to this team.

Just two returning players came to the first practice, so the squad was filled out with reserves and newcomers. One of the returning stars was David Ariail, first on the left on the back row. He was from Birmingham, was an All-Southern end on the football team, and was voted an All-American by his peers in that sport. Here, we learn he functioned nobly in every game.

He was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds, the NFL Reds, and played one game for them, and two for the Brooklyn Dodgers, also the football version. He also played a game for the AFL’s Louisville Bourbons, which is a team all but forgotten by everyone. Ariail became a colonel in the army, serving as a company commander in the 846th and the 656th tank destroyer battalions.

Tank Destroyer tells me:

David entered the Army sometime in the mid 30’s and after serving in various units, was assigned to the 846th Tank Destroyer Battalion. The unit was made up of black servicemen with most officers being white. He held the rank of 1st Lieutenant and served as Company C Commander. On December 9, 1942, documents identify that he was now a Captain and became the unit’s Adjutant.

When the 656th Tank Destroyer Battalion was activated on April 3, 1943, Cpt. Ariail was assigned to Headquarters Company, functioning as the unit’s S-4 or Logistics Officer. By February of 1944, he had been promoted to the rank of Major and served as the Executive Officer of the unit, occasionally leading the unit when the Commander was absent.

The 656th shipped out from the New York port on December 16, 1944, and arrived in England on the 28th. After a month of additional training and preparations they boarded ships and sailed for Le Havre, France, disembarking on February 6, 1945. They were equipped with M18 tank destroyers and entered the line near Friesenrath, Germany, on the 28th.

Pushing toward the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany, they crossed into the bridgehead beginning on March 7th. The unit converted to the M36 tank destroyer late that month and supported the 9th Armored Division’s sweep to help encircle the Ruhr River in early April. They then dashed eastward to the Mulde River and turned south, entering Czechoslovakia near St. Sedlo on May 6th.

David was awarded the Bronze Star and also received the EAME ribbon with two campaign stars signifying the unit’s two campaigns of Rhineland and Central Europe. He also received the American Defense, the American Campaign, and WWII Victory Medal.

David stayed in the military for 30 years before his retirement. David Sr. served during the Korean War and at a number of posts including Frankfurt, Germany, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

He and his wife and two daughters and a son. He died in North Carolina, in 2001.

The other returning player was Frank Sindler, a junior architecture major, from Islip, New York. He’s second from the right on the back row, and was considered “an excellent floor man.” I’m not sure what becomes of him, so we’ll leave that alone for now.

Oh, the new basketball coach? Some guy named Ralph Jordan.

There was a new sport on campus in the mid-1930s. Some 37 people turned out to learn and practice the sport of kings. Most of their opponents weren’t schools, because not a lot of schools ran polo programs, I guess. And it was an open question, into the springtime, if the scheduled contests with LSU, Georgia and Florida would take place — if those institutions could find enough students who knew how to sit a horse. With all of that in mind, bright things were expected for Auburn polo, which had apparently earned some sort of championship the year before.

Polo first came to Auburn in 1932, via the the ROTC program and, specifically, Major G. H. Franke, mounted on the left, who led the ROTC program and was a star on the West Point team in his day. Also, the War Department thought polo promoted “skill in horsemanship and daring.” It stayed on campus until 1939. Tanks and war were presumably the reasons it disappeared, despite being a fan favorite.

Gustav Henry Franke was a lifer, an artillery man. Previously, Franke commanded the first US unit to fire on German forces in World War I. When World War II came he found himself commanding the Field Artillery Replacement Center at Fort Bragg in 1941, and then Artillery for the whole 6th Infantry Division. He also led the 81st Infantry Division at Fort Rucker (the modern Fort Novosel) and was largely responsible for the buildup of that installation. He would retire a major general in 1944. Both his son and grandson would later serve as army officers.

Sadly, the book doesn’t tell us who the rest of the ramblers are. Ramblers was never an official name for anything, but it feels like it should have been.

Speaking of names, I included this mostly for the title.

This was just the second year of swimming and diving on campus. They swam in a basement pool and wired their times to other schools, since the facilities were too small for competitions. From humble beginnings. Men’s swimming and diving have eight national championships, women’s swimming and diving counts five. There are 23 conference championships and 30 Olympians among the list of achievements as well, and to think, it all started with tank teams like these.

Marcus McGriff, a junior industrial engineer major from Livingston, Alabama, was captain of the team. He would later serve in the army, as an officer in Africa, where he received a legion of merit award.

It seems he left the army a lieutenant colonel. He died in 1972, just shy of 60.

Senior Lynwood Poole, a commercial art major from Montgomery, was the alternate captain. Probably just because of his name, and he brought his own swim trunks.

Poole, a diver, had to leave the team, a contemporary news account tells us, because of eye trouble. Whatever the problem was must have been minor, or solved, because Poole would also join the army. There’s nothing online about his service, but I know he also retired a lieutenant colonel. He died in 1979, at 68, in Florida, survived by his wife and two children. He and his wife are buried in Hawai’i. Their children are now in their 70s and 80s.

But the real star of the tank men was Howard Morris, a Montgomery junior studying electrical engineering. He was the captain, and the coach. Here, they list him as a conference champion, and I won’t even try to guess how they arrived at that. But was fast at the 440-free. He won all but one of his races that year. He was apparently a diver, as well.

He went into business, banking specifically. He got married in 1943, was showing horses a few years later. By 1950 he was a civic leader, a lieutenant colonel and nationally regarded as a dressage rider and horse trainer.

He became an official in the state banker’s association. At one point he was teaching artillery to Chiang Kai-Shek’s army. (So you can never say nothing interesting happened in the 1950s.) Tall, smiling, balding, he was also a long serving member of a prominent insurance firm. But all of those newspaper mentions about the banking organization end in 1963. He started Pinchona, a horse farm, near Montgomery in 1969. It’s still active today. Also in the 1960s, he served as president of The United States Pony Clubs, which teaches riding and the proper care of horses to children. If I have the right man, he died in 2002, at the age of 89.

The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.