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Productive, but not nearly enough

The grading continues. And it will continue later tonight. It will also continue tomorrow.

If it goes any longer than that I will begin to evaluate my grading. My self-assessment might not be a positive one in that eventuality.

But I should give myself some grace. I started this round of grading with some 70-plus items to grade. About 34 of them require real feedback. The assignment includes an element where they have to ask a question of something they’re reading, and some of the questions are pretty easy to answer based terms or something else the class has addressed. Some I’m fielding are of that pleasantly squishy almost-formed social science question that an undergrad can ask, the sort that actually opens the door to something quite important. I try not to revert to the grad school ways of getting to an almost-answer. Some of the questions are purely philosophical and then I think, this should be asked in a proper classroom, on a day when the halls are quiet and the sky is gloomy and you can make the snap decision that, no, this question is much more interesting than what I’d planned to talk about today, so we’re doing 40 minutes on the politics of art in a society of mass culture.

While not padding my feedback, I am averaging … a lot of words per response. Probably too much, but you know how it is when you get on a role explaining early 20th century media philosophy, or seminal sociologists or artificial intelligence. The words just flow, and soon you’re wondering, Will this particular student appreciate a newspaper column’s worth of thoughts on their assignment? Then you have to trim it. Getting back down to that 200- or 300-word range is the time intensive part.

The students were reading a paper that crossed Erving Goffman and Walter Benjamin, and by the end of it all, I find myself hoping I don’t come off a bit like the random guy in Good Will Hunting.

I’ve now read, and re-read this piece that I might actually understand it. And then not. And then truly grasp it.

So I went to campus. One part of my job is teaching. Another part is grading. Still a third part of my job is to receive training in this or that. I’ve had three rounds of ethics training in a calendar year. I’ve watched webinars of the privacy of this and the security of that. I have two more in the queue, because someone decided there wasn’t enough to be done. And today I had an in-person session, QPR training.

That’s Question, Persuade and Refer to you. And it was 90 minutes of talking about interacting with someone in a mental health crisis. There was also role playing. We had three minutes of role playing, which is not enough time to work your way through the scenario that was presented. I turned to the guy sitting next to me and invited him to pair up. He was in psychology.

Great, I said, a ringer!

“Experimental psychology,” he said. “If I never saw anyone at work I’d be happy.”

Or something like that, I was too busy trying to figure out how I would navigate through very specific hypothetical to take notes. In the end, we felt we’d done our part to help the troubled young man in the imagined scenario. And then we talked some more as a group, because this was 90 minutes.

It wasn’t that bad, but you could see where it might be a charged or otherwise difficult sort of conversation. At the end, the woman running the thing did something fun. She made everyone in the room say something they were looking forward to doing in the next 24 hours. A palate cleanser.

The thing of it was that everyone there had these interesting plans. Except for the guy who had to teach that night and all day tomorrow, so he was looking forward to sleeping tonight. When it came to me, I lamented that everyone else had these interesting plans. I was going to grade. Maybe ride my bike. Definitely pet the cats.

The woman who went after me was looking forward to hanging out with her chicken.

I went back to the office and did some grading, did some reading, and worked on the desk. It was a productive afternoon.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature which finds me riding my bike around the county, hunting for historical markers. This is the 50th installment, and the 82st marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.

Sadly, I’m not sure why this merited inclusion. No one really spells out the history for us. And what even is the historic part of a local courthouse, anyway? The signs give nothing away.

Just 702 feet away is the truly historic Old Salem County Courthouse (1735), ” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>which we saw previously. That is the nation’s second-oldest courthouse in continuous use.

And a block away is this building. A court which is still in its first century of existence, sitting in a dour building which looks like it is hoping will be its last century.

Municipal Court, what are you gonna do?

Next week, we’ll see a sturdy 19th century brick home. It, like all the previous installments, will be better than this one. If you have missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Auburn / Friday / history / photo — Comments Off
27
Sep 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part four

We get in our time machines and travel back 70 years, to a world strange, yet familiar. But perhaps mostly strange? Here are a few more photos from my alma mater’s yearbook, the Glomerata, which I collect. If my grandparents had gone to school there, they’d be somewhere in this book. They’re not, their peers are. I wonder if they knew any of the people inside.

This is the fourth installment of our glance through 1954. Part one is here, and you can find part two here. We saw part three last week. 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 1954.

We left off last week with the Army ROTC. All able-bodied male students served a compulsory two-year stint. Some of them, of course, would stay on. Even in ’54, as we’ve been seeing, quite a few of these young men were changing from their civilian clothes to a cap and gown to a uniform, at least for a while. And it wasn’t just the Army ROTC. This is Col. James W. Townsend, professor of air science and tactics.

He graduated from Purdue in 1937. He joined up in 41, and during the war, Townsend was a captain in the 416th Bombardment Group, at least while they were stateside in Oklahoma. The 416th flew medium bombers for the Ninth Air Force in Western Europe. They were awarded a Distinguished Unit Citation in France, bombing out infrastructure that hampered the German retreat. In 1951 Townsend was high up the command chart at Continental Air Command at Mitchel Air Base in New York. After a brief stint in Germany, he was at Auburn from 1952 through 1956, and he and his family were a popular part of town. They packed up their two kids and shipped out to the Philippines. He finally retired from the service in 1961 and went to work in his native Indiana as the assistant chief for the division of land acquisition for the Indiana Highway Department, a job he held until he died in 1971, aged 63. He and his wife had a son and daughter.

The Air ROTC unit had a good pitch. Why sign up with the Army, when you can go over to the air base and pose up a storm with some of the bombers?

And spare a thought for that staff sergeant, who is probably three or four years into his Air Force career, and now he’s having to walk around these college kids.

Sometimes, you got to pose in the bomber.

Do we know anything about that plane? Yes, we do. That’s the serial number there and the world wide web still has plenty of wonders.

The B-25J-25-NC (serial number 44-30748) rolled off the line in Kansas City in February of 1945. It was listed as surplus right away and was finally put into service in 1948 as a trainer, bouncing around a few stops in those roles in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Illinois, later, Texas. Those cadets met the plane in Mobile, where it was getting some upgrades. In 1958 it went into storage and was later sold into civilian life. At least one owner used it as a crop sprayer. Then, in 1969 this plane was sold to a Hollywood company and the plane would appear in the classic, “Catch 22.”

Sometime in the next two decades it was restored and deemed airworthy again. On April 21, 1992, this plane was the first of two B-25s that launched off the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ranger to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid. (In 2011 I wrote about one of the Doolittle pilots.)

You can see some beautiful archival shots of this bomber. Or see it today! It’s still flying, out of Oregon. And yes, there’s video.

But we don’t know the name of the cadet in the bird, so I can’t look him up.

This is Col. George E. Bell, of Artesia, California, a professor of naval science and tactics, and a Marine.

He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1936, and earned a silver star with the 6th Marine Division on Okinawa as a lieutenant colonel, commanding the First Battalion, Fourth Marines, 6th Marine Division. It was June of 1945, and Bell realized his entire battalion was suddenly at risk when the left side of his assault stalled. So, he moved up, found the location of the enemy fire, got wounded and coordinated the attack until the Japanese threat was reduced, allowing his Marines to seize the ridge.

The First Battalion had fought at both Guam and Okinawa, some of the most bitter fighting in the Pacific. So that’s who the Midshipmen were learning from, before settling into their three-year hitches. It says here that 16 percent of the Middies were going into the Corps.

Bell married twice, but it looks like he was single here. And this was his last year on campus. What comes next for him is an open mystery, but it appears he might have also been assigned to the Philippines sometime soon after. If I have the right guy, he made it to the 21st century, and died at 90.

I wonder if that was an invasion of the beach at Lake Martin.

This is Arthur Moore Jr., from Pell City, and president of the student body.

He was an Eagle Scout, he served as an Air Force navigator for three years after graduation. He married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth, and went to work with Alcoa Aluminum for 41 years. He became a masterful horticulturist, and president of the American Orchid Society. He worked closely with his church’s missions and was a big supporter of the arts. All the local kids got to see The Nutcracker, and whether they understood it or not, or knew it or not, Moore was the man behind it. When he died in 2017 at 84, he and his wife of 61 years had two daughters, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

This is Suzanne Morgan, president of the women’s student government association, because there was one of those back then. She was a popular classmate in high school in Wetumpka, Alabama. And she was popular in college, too. She was voted a campus favorite, which is a yearbook photo honor, worked with the WSGA, and was also on the homecoming court. Somewhere along the way her parents moved to Texas, while she was studying education.

Right after graduation she married Ensign Albert Dilthey, who was working on his MBA degree at AU. He sailed on submarines for the U.S. Navy, became an exec at the Miami Herald worked with his local chamber of commerce, and various other civic groups. He died in 2011. She’s still with us, in North Carolina.

George Uthlaut was a senior from Orlando in this photograph, taking time from his studies as a chemical engineering major and being one of those people who are somehow involved in nine different busy body things on campus. But his life has been full of activity. So much so that in 2011 the Ginn School of Engineering inducted him into their Hall of Fame.

Uthlaut went into the gas game, and he got good at oil and gas exploration and production over three decades with Exxon, working from Florida to Alaska. When he left there, as managing director, he went over to Enron Oil and Gas and basically had a second career. Along the way, he and his wife, Dot, have been heavily involved in many philanthropic adventures.

Maybe my favorite is this, Prayers Of the People, from which Dot retired in 2016. These people volunteered for so long and so hard they had to retire from it. They visited patients in hospitals, weekly, for 35 years. And somehow baked into that they set up a parking program for families visiting various hospitals.

They’ve also given donated generously to the engineering school and have a computer lab there named after them. They still live happily in Texas.

This is Royce Jones, and Royce Jones’ reflection. He’s from the small south Georgia town of Tifton, which counted fewer than 7,000 people when this photo was artfully taken. Jones left to go to college, and then did a brief stint in the military, but after that, he went right back home, and right back to the family business. Over his career, he took over Jones Construction, and also owned concrete and paint companies.

The best part of the 2007 news copy I’m reading here is that it was written by someone who understood him. An old friend got in a great quote, and the reporter at the local paper knew that was the one, “He worked hard behind the scenes to make this a better community and asked for no credit. He was a man of character and integrity …”

Jones Construction did, and does, a lot of big business, he built stuff for the University of Georgia, prominent local farms, banks, and the local hospital. He not only added on to that hospital, but he made some significant donations to it. too. The man was the proverbial pillar.

Two of his sons are running the construction firm today, so it’s at least a three-generation company. And those two guys also followed their dad to Auburn. They were there just a few years before I was, in fact.

All of these photos will wind up in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all of the covers. The university hosts their collection here.

cycling / history / markers / Rowan / swimming / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
25
Sep 24

Just needs more

I’ve neglected to mention this here, I think, but I have the good fortune to work with a group taking an active role in cycling safety. It’s exciting watching these signs, and their message, pop up around town. It’s just one element of a long, long term project, but awareness and education are critically important.

The people doing this work are motivated for their own safety and their mindfulness of other cyclists. They’ve got the ear of the community, and the local state lawmakers.It’s impressive, and I hope the group can keep their momentum going.

Here, the state law requires motorists to move over a lane, or to allow for at least four feet to safely pass cyclists (and other non-motorists). Four whole feet!

Do you know the laws about safely passing cyclists in your state? You can look them up right here, and I’ll thank you for saving lives every time you drive.

We went to campus today and it’s a miracle we made it at all because I kept slowing us down, somehow. It got to that not-quite-comedy-of-errors level, culminating in finding zero parking in several consecutive walks. But we made it. And then we went for a swim.

It was my first indoor swim in a long time. There were lane ropes and lifeguards and chlorine and everything. Also, there was the mystery of when I would slip into the rhythm of swimming back and forth, back and forth. It finally happened, I’m not sure where I was in the swim. But I know where I was when I got pulled from the pool. The lap swim was over, some other people were wandering in and doing some organized looking stretching and warming up.

I said, “Do I have enough time to do 50 more?” But I was told I did not. And so I finished with a slow version of my 1,700 yards.

But, man, you never really know how useful that extra 50 could have been. It could have really made the difference!

After that we meant to a meeting in our department. There was food, and there was work. A handful of the faculty members were working on some important department-type language. On the third or fourth run through someone tossed a joke my way, being the newbie and all. I said, “Hey, you want to get all caught up in details, you’ve invited the right guy.”

Ultimately, the work got done. Everyone seemed pleased by it. I got a phrase or two into the finished product, phrases I may forget, so I’ll just point to all of them. I was just happy to be there.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature which finds me riding my bike around the county, hunting for historical markers. This is the 49th installment, and the 81st marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. (Assuming I have faithfully and accurately kept count.) And this time, we have to try to figure out why a post office has a historic marker.

This installment features the fabled form letter of plaques.

I love the National Registry markers, but I appreciate, even more, the local ones with some information on them. And it will never not disappoint me that the Registry doesn’t contain an extant explanation of all of the places they acknowledge. In this case, however, you can’t even find this post office on the list! Anyway, here’s the building.

The first post office opened there, or around there, in November of 1903. But the first post office in these parts, I read elsewhere, was created by legislation in 1792. Either way, 18th or early 20th century, they served very rural routes, I would imagine. Also, the first airmail flew out of the county in 1938, it was a gimmick marking the 20th anniversary of airmail. It possessed all of the 1930s pomp and circumstance a small town could muster. There were special envelopes and handlers. The mail bag was taken to the airfield by a fire truck, where other special handlers took part. The Boy Scouts turned out to witness the occasion, and so on. The mail flew to a town about 30 miles away.

And not related to this, but interestingly, I also read an anecdote of an airmail pilot who crashed his plane in 1918 one county away. He was trying to land, but some livestock got in the way. He made another pass, had engine trouble and wound up crash landing. Broke his machine up, but he lived. The mail got delivered. It was the second day of airmail in the U.S. On the same day as the first local airmail, commemorating 20 years of airmail, that pilot had a nationwide conversation on this thing called radio …

Also, historically speaking, a lot of mail has been delivered over the many years. Too much of it bills.

Next week, I’ll probably have similarly limited success on our next marker, but we’re here to try. If you have missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

adventures / family / history / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
Sep 24

Keens

My in-laws had this steakhouse in Manhattan that they went to for years and years. It was quite the classy old New York charm. One of those places that was hard to get into. But the in-laws knew a guy, and so they could walk in like stars. They took me there once or twice, and I was glad for it. But the place closed — landlords, man — and then re-opened in some form elsewhere for a few years, but it wasn’t the same, so my father-in-law found himself a new place.

It was two years ago, as far as I know, that they found a new place to call their steakhouse in the city. I’m not sure how they came upon it, but my lovely bride took her parents in for a show and they went to this place. They raved about it. Insisted I had to come with them into the city to go to this place. Full of history, and also the food.

Keens traces its roots back to the 19th century, when the owner’s first joint, a theater man, turned it into a hot spot for the players who trod the boards, and the people who made the plays happen. Many of the walls in the old rambling building are filled with quirky headshots of actors and actresses, most of them forgotten by all but the true connoisseurs. The real item, though, is this.

(Click to embiggen in a new tab.)

That’s supposedly Abraham Lincoln’s playbill. Ford’s Theatre, 1865, the night he was assassinated. The story goes that someone found it after he was shot and picked it up. It passed through a few hands and when Keens took on what is essentially its current form just after the turn of the century, someone found it on the property.

So the second floor has the Lincoln room, and this wall has been devoted to the theme. Here’s an undated article that most likely over-romanticizes the story.

There are framed photos of Lincoln, an image of John Wilkes Booth, a quality reproduction of Booth’s mother that he kept, an 1862 playbill of a show Booth was headlining in Boston. And then there’s this poster, dated six days after Lincoln’s murder and six days before Boston Corbett killed Booth.

Another feature are these pipes. Keens says they have the largest collection of churchwarden pipes in the world. The story in the menu says they once were ordering 50,000 of them every three years. Apparently there was a sort of coat-check style system, and some people left their pipes there. And here are some of the famous ones.

Ted Turner, Stephen King, John Kennedy, Michael Jackson, Jackie Mason, Joseph Heller, Redd Foxx, Arthur Ashe and more have pipes in that case. That one sits right by the door. This one is by the host stand, it’s obviously from a different era.

Please excuse the glare, but in that case the pipe warden placed the spit covered clay pipes of people like Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Albert Einsten, J.P. Morgan, and many others.

A closer look at Teddy Roosevelt’s pipe. The tradition here started in the early 20th century, so that’s presidential spit on a hard clay pipe that was imported from the Netherlands.

Once upon a time pipe smoking was considered beneficial for dissipating “evil homourse of the brain,” so naturally this was a big thing. The pipes have these thin stems, so they were too fragile to carry, hence the storage and, presumably, the regular big orders the place put in.

I’m guessing MacArthur might have brought and left his own. Looks a bit more ornate, and fits the personality.

Keens’ site says the membership roster of the Pipe Club contained more than 90,000 names. That’s a lot of smoke! And here’s another presidential pipe.

I assume this is the former vice president Adlai Stevenson, not Stevenson II, who was a senator and UN ambassador.

There’s a display case with some signed pipes just thrown in it. No mounts, no labels, just chaotic. This is for a lesser tier of Pipe Club members, I guess. Regular folks pipes?

Just stored on the ceiling. In every possible space.

It’s a steakhouse, but the menu says “legendary mutton.” And when the first woman won the legal right to go into this place in 1905, she sat down and ordered the mutton. She’d been waiting on that. It’s also the first item on the menu. I got that. I was not disappointed.

I was, in fact, too full for the giant desserts, which were giant and delicious.

I’d visit Keens again — that meal was delicious! — but you’re buying.

Auburn / Friday / Glomerata / history / photo — Comments Off
20
Sep 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part three

Seventy years ago was just around the corner, and almost a different world. You can see it in the old photos. It’s obvious, too, in the photos from my alma mater’s yearbook, the Glomerata, which I collect. My grandparents aren’t in this book, but their peers are. Maybe some people they knew, or would know later, are in here, though we’ll never know.

This is the third installment of our glance through 1954. Part one is here, and you can find part two here. I’ll put them all in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all of the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

This is Walter Everidge, a senior from Columbus, Georgia, (or Decatur, the old pubs disagree) studying industrial management, which is a sufficiently vague sounding major. He was also the editor of The Plainsman, and the next several people we’ll see worked for the campus paper. I spend a lot of time on them because, a few decades later, I was writing under their masthead.

The problem right now is, I can’t find anything else, at all, about Everidge. But he’s got that posed candid shot down pat, doesn’t he?

Josephine Newsom had a grand life. She got a masters in history at UGA and became a teacher. She got married, they had three kids, was at the vanguard of Head Start in her hometown, and would teach art, literature, science and history until she retired in 1993. She became a preservationist, working to revitalize historic buildings, and the president of her county’s historical society. When she died, in 2015, she was survived by her husband of 57 years, two sons, six grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

Carmer Robinson is the guy in the multicolored shirt. He was a junior from Georgia, studying textile engineering. He was in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Korean War. He traveled the world, lived in Hong Kong for a few years and eventually went back home, working his way into a job as the international sales director for a textile concern. He helped develop pre-washed and stretched denim. He was heavily involved in his community, and did a lot of local theater, too. He was 89 when he passed away in 2019, having raised three children, 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Judy Long grew up in Birmingham. She married another student, Jim, and they had three daughters and nine grandchildren. If I’m reading this correctly, one of her daughters had three sets of twins. Judy became a high school guidance counselor. Jim died in their 52nd year of marriage. A dozen years later, she would remarry a lifelong friend. She volunteered at hospitals and attended her church for 60 years. She died in 2021 and her family wrote her a lovely obituary.

Bea Dominick was a freshman from Prattville, Alabama. She graduated in 1957 and married an Emory grad in 1958. They lived in Georgia, where he had a private practice until he retired in 1999, and then joined the faculty at Emory. Bea and her husband traveled the world. She has three daughters, a son, and several grandchildren.

Helen Hackett’s life took her from Jasper, Alabama, to Auburn — the Glom said she studied journalism. She ventured on to Connecticut, and then Fort Lauderdale and Indian River Shores, Florida. It was there that she published the diary of her grandfather, who’d been a country doctor. She died in 2011, age 75. She’d been married for 42 years.

Frances Walthall was a sophomore education major from tiny Newbern, Alabama — population 350 or so back then and about half that size today. She married an Auburn man who became a manager at Alabama Power. They had four children and 14 grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007, but she’s still living in the state.

Les Ford was the managing editor of The Plainsman. The enormous headline tells us he’s reading a paper from the week of October 12th. You can read it here.

Ford was from Greenville, Mississippi, born just a few years after the flood. I hope he was the sort of fellow who held on to those socks until they became fashionable again.

JoAnne Lucci was a senior from Montgomery, Alabama. She was studying journalism, and after receiving two degrees from Auburn she went into the business.

But she realized that she wanted her summers off, so she could be in the outdoors. She loved the outdoors. She was always on her boat, fishing or skiing. And if she wasn’t on the water her hands were in the soil. She wound up teaching English and journalism at her high school alma mater for a quarter of a century. She had a lake house on Lake Martin. She had season tickets to Auburn games for almost five decades. So the odds are good that, at least once, I was on the water, or in the stadium, at the same time she was. She died last December, at 91.

To the right of her is Charles, “Red” Provost. A decade or so after this photo was taken, that clean cut young man would become a hippie. And then he discovered flamenco music. And he lived a fascinating life. He taught English in Italy, studied music in Spain, worked as a paralegal back home in the States. He’d also been a secretary, bill collector and a milkman. He died in 2000, but had been a musical fixture in Atlanta for more than 30 years.

That’s Ronald Owen, on the right, holding the piece of paper that was going to be a headline or a newsroom punchline. Owen went into the U.S. Army after school, and later went to work for General Dynamics, IBM, and the department store, Rich’s in Atlanta. He moved to Jacksonville, Florida, working as the IT Director for National Merchandise Company for more than 20 years. Well into his retirement he freelanced for newspapers around Florida.

And the answer to the question was, yes, the Tigers would go a-bowling. They headed to the Gator Bowl at the end of the 1953 season, and losing to Texas Tech.

Bill Neville, of Eufaula, Alabama, is seated in this photo. The basketball arena is currently named after the Nevilles, who have donated millions over the years.

Col. Walter J. Klepinger was a professor of military science and tactics, and headed the ROTC program. This was to be Klepinger’s last year on the Plains. And, for some reason, the yearbook had this photograph flipped, so I’ve taken the liberty of correcting that error here.

The university’s library records say he was there for 20 years. His family genealogy says he served in the Pacific, apparently on New Guinea from soon after Pearl Harbor until 1944 or thereabouts. He also had some NATO based duty stations after the war. The colonel was awarded the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star medal. He is buried at Arlington.

In 1954, service in the ROTC was a compulsory two-year program for all male students (who weren’t already veterans). It might not have been all bad, you got to wear all the smelly old green uniforms you wanted, and played with a bunch of hand-me-down gear.

Also, the ROTC cadets got to ride around in tanks. Can you imagine? This was probably at Fort Benning — which is now named Fort Moore — in Columbus.

That’s enough for now. In our next installment, we’ll take a quick look at the rest of the ROTC, and some of the always-fun space filler photographs.