We are, today, wrapping up our look at selected photos from within an 80-year-old yearbook. In the last several I’ve posted about here I think I’m averaging about four installments per year, so this is a slight expansion. This is nowhere near complete, of course, and hardly efficient or scientific, but rather just a few of the things that caught my eye, or photos I wanted to giggle at, or interesting people I wanted to look up. And with record enrollment in 1944, I suppose this was a good year to see a little boost, even as the war was still underway. But because of that, as I realized in this final installment, it looks like the good times and the golden days might have been a little bit leaner. That could have been economics, too, or just the mood of the yearbook staff, who knows? Doesn’t matter. It’s a nice look back, at my alma mater, 80 years ago.

Why are all of these people running?

That looks like Cary Hall in the background, which is where I spent a few quarters taking biology classes. Here’s the map view.

The building closer to us, then, is Petrie Hall, named after the famed historian and bringer of football. At the time of this photograph it was the athletic field house, hence it’s off-scheme orientation on campus. The photographer was standing here, and it looks like this. Later, Petrie became a geology building. Today, it houses people that work in athletic finance.

I spent a bit of time in high school in Petrie because, back then, it was, I believe, the place they shifted people too during renovations, or the place they rented out for state-level work as people passed through.

So they are running. But why? They’re chasing this guy.

Fred Carley, of Mobile, Alabama, was a freshman, studying aeronautical engineering. And this young man has a story to tell.

In high school, Carley was on the track team, an outfielder on the baseball team, and a lightweight boxing champion. He also played in the band. And he’d do some of those things in college, too. He would become the lead trumpet in the orchestral band, the Auburn Knights. He was captain of the track team for two years, and the first track scholarship recipient in the history of the school. Sophomore year, he placed sixth at the NCAA championships, the only mile he lost in three years of college. He won four SEC championships, three in the mile and another in the 880. Only travel troubles kept him from the Olympic trials in 1948. He earned three degrees from Auburn. He did three active duty tours with the Air Force, eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He was an engineer and a track coach, and led his high school alma mater to 11 state championships. He started the track program at the University of South Alabama. He coached a bunch of other track stars in varying capacities while he was stationed at Eglin AFB, tallying 16 individual national championships and 17 national age group record. His athletes set six world records. And we haven’t even touched on his lifelong contributions to engineering, which led to his 1997 induction into something called the Military Packaging Hall of Fame. His wife was a prominent ballerina. They had two children. Their daughter held a U.S. record in race walking, and was a semifinalist in the Miss USA Pageant. Their son was a six-time World Record holder and twice a national champion in Track and Cross Country. He died in 2019, age 92.

Seems like a charmed life, no? This run was no exception. As a freshman, he was the winner of the ODK Cake Race. Back then it was a 2.7 mile run. The winner received a cake and a kiss from Miss Auburn. (I hope that part of the tradition has changed.) The Glom notes he got “exactly fourteen kisses.” That wasn’t the plan. Apparently there were camera problems. (No photos of the smooches were published here.)

Today, the ODK Cake Race lives on as a 5K. The top five men and women will each receive a cake. You see all of those long and heavy clothes the crowd is wearing, above? That won’t be the case when they have the 95th Cake Race this September.

This is where we remember there weren’t a lot of sports that year. The war, and all. There was no football in 1943, no basketball in 43-44, and no baseball in the spring of 44. So this yearbook moves dutifully on, and quickly. There’s no solid lead one the names here, but it’s an action shot of sorts, so …

If you’ll notice, in that first link above about Petrie Hall, you can see the building’s orientation to the modern football stadium. In 1939 it opened with 7,290 seats on the west side. The town was small, and there was a concern about bringing in that many people. There were apparently only two stores with public restrooms back then! Only a year later 4,800 wooden bleachers were added to the east side, and I think that’s what we’re seeing in the background of this shot.

While the stadium was dormant in 1943, the football Tigers returned in 1944. The first game in Auburn after the war was against the Fourth Infantry Raiders. Wikipedia tells me that 5,000 people gathered to see the Tigers win, 7-0, ending a 23-month layoff between varsity play.

There’s some other photos of guys tossing around football. One of women playing basketball, I think, some calisthenics and, for some reason, a three photo tennis spread. One of them introduces us to the powerful forehand game of Louis Shepard, a senior civil engineering major from Mobile, Alabama.

Shepard graduated in 1944 and went into the Navy, serving on the USS Sanborn in the Pacific. He was there for the assault on Iwo Jima, the invasion of Ryukyus and a feint on Okinawa. At the end of the war, the Sanborn transported occupation forces to Japan. Later, Shepard returned to the Naval Reserve during Korea.

When he wasn’t in uniform, he was an engineer, working for Texaco in El Paso, Texas, before settling in his beloved Gautier, Mississippi for Standard Oil. (The modern Chevron.) He fished, caught crab and shrimp, and he did it until Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home. The family rebuilt, and he stayed there until he died in 2012, survived by his wife, three children and two grandchildren.

This two-page spread was titled “C’est le guerre” and it features three photos and it’s all tongue in cheek.

Later we come to a page in the organizations section that is for students called into service before they could finish their education, curtailing the various roles they played on campus. These shots all look like campus photos, but they could be a bit more expansive. One of the names really pops out.

The last guy, Frank Wyatt, fought in Europe. He was a captain, attended the Nuremberg Trials, stayed on for part of the German reconstruction. Came home to law school, which he finished in two years. He worked in the Office of Chief Counsel of the IRS, and then went into the private sector as a corporate VP of finance and treasurer.

We don’t have a caption here, it’s a photo meant to point out the fraternities and sororities are coming up. It’s a strange, collegiate artistic layout. I don’t know who they are, but if any of these beautiful young people are still with us, I’d pay good money to ask them if this was staged.

And, finally, just one advertisement from the slim ad section in the back. Just the one because the rest were text only. But the theater went all out. I’m sure this cost extra. I do wonder who wrote that cutline though … and if the theater liked that.

They had one screen. It was the first theater in town, opening in September of 1926. It stuck around until April of 1984. Two other small theaters closed the next year. And though theaters come and age and go quickly, that marquee, would have kept a lot of cool character downtown if they’d maintained it. But they didn’t think like that in the 1980s. College towns seldom do these days, either.

As of this writing, there’s a nail salon, a beignet joint, and a dumpy pita restaurant in that spot today. There are also two other little spaces there that they can’t keep businesses in, and this in the heart of town. But, maybe, if that marquee had somehow stayed in place …

And that’s it. Thanks for following along with this casual glance of the 1944 Glomerata. 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 book covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.

Coming soon, we’ll check out the 1954 Glom. A few things will have changed in between!

Fridays mean we return to the past, we go home and we pore over old books. Right now, we’re falling back 80 years 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.

This installment takes us into a new section of the yearbook. It’s called …

… and really it’s just a section of almost 20 pages of glamour shots. Up first is Miss Auburn. A tradition since 1934, Miss Auburn, is the official hostess of the university, a goodwill ambassador and so on. And in 1944, Miss Auburn was Margaret Rew.

Rew was a sophomore, an education major, and also a cheerleader. She met an Army officer stationed at Fort Benning (now named Fort Moore). Lewis Sponsler was from Missouri. He was at West Point, but enlisted for the war. The Sponslers ran a pharmacy in neighboring Opelika for 34 years and were together for six decades until she died in 2006. They had three daughters, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren when she passed away.

Marian Boyle was a freshman from Georgia, studying commercial art. Or maybe it’s Marion. Both names are used in different places.

She’s one of those people that drifts into the digital mists. I will assume she did so deliberately after she realized her faux fur faux pas.

Claire Marshall, was a sophomore education major from a small town in southwest Georgia. There were about 365 people living there when she was growing up.

Claire Marshall married a Dr. Clarence Sapp. Her obituary says she was a basketball player in high school, which would have been something to see in small town 1940s. She was a homemaker. When she passed away in 2009 she had one daughter, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

I like this one. It looks like picture day just happened to be taking place as she walked by.

And she is Jeanne Townsend, a local girl, a sophomore, studying pre-law. She and her family had moved up from Florida a few years before, but she became popular quite quickly. In the fall of 1944, her junior year, she married Lt. Lawson Robertson who had also been an Auburn student before he joined the Army. He became a B-17 co-pilot in the 350th Bombardment Squadron in Europe. He died in 1972 and is buried at Arlington. It seems they got divorced in the 1960s. (But I wouldn’t swear out an affidavit on it.) She died in 1979 at 55, and is buried in Florida, with her parents.

Sarah Burrows was a sophomore from Jacksonville, Florida. She studied science and literature, and she was an actress in campus productions.

After that, she becomes a mystery to us.

This is Sarah Evans Glenn, a junior education major from neighboring Opelika. She taught in Texas and met a man who had served in the Pacific during the war. She came back home for a time and was teaching at the university when they announced their engagement.

She had a son in 1948, but she’d already lost her husband, a lieutenant in the Navy. They’d only gotten married in January of 1947. The son, named after his father, is still with us. I’m not sure, from a handful of web searches, what became of his mother.

Marie Strong was a freshman from Anniston. She was studying secretarial training. And lipstick application. She was a socialite of east Alabama, a beauty queen in high school, an honors student in college and would become a class leader the next year.

She shows up in the society pages a lot as a young adult, vacationing here, visiting there, hosting teas for this and that. Then, 1947 was her year, the parties and the buffets were for her. She got married and they moved to Michigan, but quickly returned to Anniston. They had a daughter, in 1952. Marie died in 1953. Her mother died the next year. Her husband was also from Anniston. He went to Georgia Tech and served in the Navy. He got married again in 1957.

Her name is Ann Black, or Anne Black. This yearbook isn’t always consistent. She was a freshman from Auburn, studying science and literature. (Some catchall program, to be sure.)

Anne — it’s Anne — married a man named Leonard Pace, who attended Auburn a few years after she did. He earned a degree in agriculture after serving as a corporal in the Army. Her great-grandfather moved into the area from Georgia just before the Civil War. Leonard’s family had lived in the area for several generations, and they stayed close by, as well. Anne died in 1982, age 57. Leonard passed away at 76, in 2000.

Betty Ware was a freshman from Auburn, studying home economics. A few years later, she was studying education. Her father was a professor of horticulture and forestry. (It’s weird to me to see them grouped together as a discipline.) She got married in October of 1946 to a veterinarian, Edwin Goode. He died at 55, in 1979. They were living in Auburn, but he’s buried in Birmingham, which was his hometown. They had three children.

Sometime after she married another Auburn man, Murphy Armor, who served in the ETO during the war and studied agriculture education after. He taught for a while in nearby Smiths Station and then ran an oil company for three decades. It’s possible I met them in passing. He died in 2010, a man I know officiated his funeral. Betty survived her second husband as well.

This is Rebecca Fincher, a freshman from the tiny town of Wedowee, Alabama, population 505 or so back then.

She was named Miss Homecoming the following fall. She was getting married in December of 1946 to a man with a terribly common name, and then they both elude me.

This smiling face belongs to Lilibel Carlovitz, who is our first proof that the hairstyles of the 1980s really came from the 40s, they just had more hair spray the second time around. She was a sophomore studying secretarial training. She was in the dance club and on the yearbook staff. She was from Auburn.

In the fall of her junior year, which is to say the fall of 1944, she got married to Morris Spearman, of Birmingham. He graduated from Auburn in 1943 with an aeronautical engineering degree. She worked as a stenographer for a few years after school, in Virginia. He worked at NASA. In an amazing six-decade career there he became an authority in aerodynamics, stability and control, aircraft, spacecraft, and missile performance, publishing over 300 technical papers and presentations in the field of aeronautics. She sang in the church choir all her life and helped found a bunch of different community organizations.

She died in 2011, 86; he passed away in 2015 at 93. They had three children, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Julia LeSueur was a freshman from Roanoke, Alabama, studying aeronautical engineering.

Roanoke is a border town in east Alabama. At the time, just over 4,000 people lived there. I’ve no idea if she went home, or went elsewhere. Rather fits that mischievous expression on her face, though, doesn’t it?

We’ve already met Margaret Rew. I’m not sure why she’s included here, but I assume it has something to do with the lipstick, or the excellent fill light in this photograph.

Maxine Tatum was a sophomore from Opelika. She became a high school history teacher and librarian in Union Springs, about 40 miles to the south, where she also coached students in speech contests.

She got married in 1946 to a man from south Alabama who attended The Citadel before being commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. The union didn’t last. She got remarried in 1953 to Joe Gholston, a man who flew with the 8th Air Force, before spending a year in a POW camp in Poland. They had 14 years together. She died in 1967, just 41 years old.

And, finally, meet Betty Peeples, a sophomore interior decoration major all the way from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. She really looks like she’s going places, doesn’t she?

I’ve just no idea where that was. The web, for once, is silent. Which is probably a big hint to me.

So that’s enough for now. Next week we’ll take a glance at the campus life section of the 1944 Glomerata. 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 book covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.

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 first-year honors 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 saw 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.