We’re going back in time 100 years so we can see, just a bit, of what college looked like at my alma mater in 1924. Some of the great old buildings are there, so parts of the place feel familiar, but a century is a long time of course, especially in a college town. Before the growth that came with the G.I. Bill, before the Depression, and in already cash-strapped 1920s, it may as well have been a different world.

Let’s see what’s inside the first few pages.

The cover is a simple, yet elegant one. An old version of the seal in the center, the iconic Samford Hall is stamped into the cover.

I love these front page leafs. They’re all gorgeous, glorious art in their own way.

Generic, unique, symbolic or space-filling, they all look so handsome. I only share it here because we all ought to appreciate these pages.

“Eat ’em up Tiger!” was one of the expressions of the day. That one should come back.

The 1924 Glomerata is dedicated to Dr. John Hodges Drake, who would die in 1926, at the age of 80.

He’d been a drummer boy for the Confederate Army. Depending on the exact timing, he would have been 17-20, and serving in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. He’d been with the university since 1873, almost the very beginning.

Fifty-three years of medical practice of a college community! His obituary said he never missed a day of work, until in his final months of service.

Drake was the third. His grandfather was too young for the Revolutionary War, but John the elder told tales of watching the British and the Americans fighting hand-to-hand, and seeing his childhood home destroyed in North Carolina.

John Drake VI, a Korean War veteran, died in 2007. He had also lived a life of service. There’s a John VII out there, today. He’s old enough to have a VIII and IX out there, but I didn’t look that far.

In my day on campus, I was tasked with documenting the renovation of Drake Hall, the Medical Clinic, which was by then well past its prime. Longstanding, like the man, the building remained in service until 2005 or so.

In my mind, all of college should look like this.

Big coats, folded hats, high collars, neat ties and tall slender people wearing too many buttons.

Whatever all of that means.

Here’s a tip for all of you interested in illustrating the sub-tropics, though: If the trees have leaves, there is absolutely no need for a coat whatsoever.

This is Spright Dowell, the president of the university. If he looks impossibly young, this photo was at least three years old, so he’s in his early 40s. He started in the job in 1920, and it was a fraught administration.

In 1921 Dowell said the college was in debt, the faculty was underpaid, the buildings and equipment were falling apart. Calling it “a long period of undernourishment” and pleaded for more money from the state.

By 1923 he was jousting with his second governor over funding, and then the Extension and Farm Bureau dust ups came to the fore. It was power politics.

That December the alumni were screaming for his head. His critics said Dowell lacked experience in higher education. They said he lacked respect among the students, who hanged him in effigy, which isn’t reflected by the yearbook. The alumni said he failed to inspire the faculty, saw enrollment dip and hadn’t kept up with the competition.

The board of trustees supported him, but he left in 1927, for a long, successful career running Mercer University.

Remember what I said a moment ago about leaves and coats? That doesn’t always apply.

They got four inches of snow, and somehow the yearbook was able to resist the urge to run this until page 30. Snow is pretty rare there.

This snow fall earned these three photos to document March 14th. They canceled baseball because of the weather.

Samford Hall and the president’s mansion are both still there. No idea when they last saw that much snow.

And apparently the male students terrorized everyone with snowballs. Go figure.

This is Earle G. Lutz, Jr., the editor of this edition of The Glomerata. He was a senior, an architecture major from Montgomery.

He stayed in the area and designed the new municipal building for neighboring Opelika. It’s still standing, a clean, neat, three-story brick bastion of local governance.

He and his wife had a daughter, Ann, and she had two degrees from the University of Alabama, worked at Bell Labs and taught computer science at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Think about it. This man was born in 1902. His daughter helped develop email.

He died in 1971, and is buried in Montgomery.

I can never get over these beautiful section setters.

The table of contents calls them each books. We won’t spend a lot of time in athletics, because many of the pages are a tiny bit damaged and most of them are headshots, anyway.

But it’s just an excuse to share this.

But first, these three guys who are looking for a tenor to round out their trio. Or they’d like to tell you about a new lawn treatment system … or is it bowling shoes …

These are the cheerleaders. You can just see it in their faces, faces full of cheer.

Donald Cathcart was the world’s oldest junior. The middle-aged Montgomery boy would study medicine at Tulane and became a pediatrician, practicing in Georgia. He worked on the Polio vaccine, raised money to purchase iron lungs also researched an anti-itch drug used on Measles and Chicken Pox. He died in 1982, at 77.

Bill Wood was a senior, from Montgomery, and he was one of those fellows that did a bit of everything on campus. He even wrote the alma mater in his senior year, making this the centennial. Auburn is pretty lousy at recalling it’s own history (half the time they say he wrote it in 1946, for example) so no one has likely noticed. Wood taught history and English at the university for two years, and then left to go in the insurance business. He died in 1933, at just 31.

Blucher Cooper worked for Dixieco Company, which could have been anything back then, frankly. He was in Chicago on business when he died, in 1947. He was just 44 years old, and had one son.

“A man who will always live in Tiger traditions.”

I’ve never heard of him. Which is my problem, not his. Being someone that lives on forever is the goal of everyone who devotes so much of themselves to something so earnestly.

Young Rip here was a jock’s jock on campus. He was involved with all of the sports in some kind of way, but football was his natural fit. He’d only played two games in high school, and he’s listed here as weighing 178 pounds, radically undersized even back then.

He studied veterinary medicine in the College of Agriculture, got married in 1926 and then went back home to northeast Alabama and became a school superintendent.

They were still calling him Rip when they swore him into office. He died in 1971.

One more of our new friend Rip, who played on the varsity team all four years. And this year was a pretty bad one. New coach, young team, the punter had the best success.

This is from the Georgia Tech game. Auburn was 3-3-2, Tech was 3-2-3 and it was a cold and rainy Thanksgiving day, but 27,000 people came in to watch the game in Atlanta. The yearbook says Fox Howe had a punt sail 82 yards in the cold, wet weather.

Shaking hands with Rip here is Tech’s John McIntyre. He lived to see most of the 1990s.

This game finished as a crowd-pleasing 0-0 tie.

More from 1924 next week. 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.

More photos, via the new desktop camera, with which I am, so far, pleased. Eventually I’ll grow more proficient with it, but, already, like a better way to transcode the ancient photos.

So here are a few more selected shots from the 1946 Glomerata. Today we’ll wrap up this volume, having shared 40 photos and just a few of the interesting stories we find therein. The first 30 shots are on the blog, as a regular Friday feature. You can find all 40 shots in the Glomerata section, of course.

Let’s see a bit more of what was worth memorializing 78 years ago, shall we?

These are the officers of the Women’s Athletic Association in a not-at-all posed photograph. The WAA was aptly named. They offered a yearly cup to the winningest teams, sororities, it seems. They also ran the campus blood drive.

Anne Grant is second from the left. She graduated and went home, became a preacher’s wife. She studied home economics, and stayed active in the Methodist church for six decades. When she died in 2012 she was survived by three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The one on the right is Constance Graves. Her father, Eugene Hamiter Graves, attended API in the 19th century, and was on the first football team in 1892. He served during the Spanish American War and World War I. He became a colonel and, later, the mayor of Eufaula, Alabama. She went back home after school, and lived there all her life. She died in 2004, survived by three children and six grandchildren.

The other women have very common names, making the quick web search too challenging and pure guesswork.

These are the Auburn Collegiates, directed by Byron N. Lauderdale Jr., himself a student, a senior studying veterinary medicine. He served in the Army during World War II and in the Air Force during the Korean War. He would run a veterinary practice, a family business, in Illinois for 40 years. Byron died, at 77, in 2000. He was survived by his wife, his brother Harry (a WW2 sailor and Auburn man who passed away at 85 in 2011), two sons, four daughter and 10 grandchildren. On the face of it, that sounds like some kind of life.

I cropped her out of the photo because she wasn’t in focus, and I have this lovely headshot anyway, but her’s was the voice that people heard when the band played. This is LaHolme McClendon, a senior from Attalla, Alabama, studying science and literature.

I photograph these because they are interesting or, perhaps, because I think the person will lead us on to glimpses of a full career and life — such as we can get from a few obvious Internet resources. And I thought, for certain, we’d get just that here. A singer, an attractive young woman and, most importantly from our great distance, a distinctive name. But the Internet doesn’t tell us much about her. She appeared in her local paper when her father retired from the postal service — a front page, above-the-fold story, mind you — and I know she died at 53, in 1979, but that’s it.

These don’t always pan out.

But sometimes there’s gold. And while I didn’t want to do a lot of headshots and posed photographs, this is the ag club and the FFA, which is important for me. But it’s important for you, too. Look how the farmers were dressing in the 1940s.

One of these young men is Buris Boshell, president of the ag club, and a future medical superstar from tiny Bear Creek, Alabama, population 240. I believe that’s him on the front row, fourth from the left, standing next to the older gentleman. Boshell studied veterinary medicine at Auburn, went to med school at Alabama, but finished his studies at Harvard. He would become an endocrinologist and eventually came back home, where he built an absolutely world class diabetes research and treatment program at UAB. The Diabetes Hospital would become a reality with an outpatient clinic, a specialized inpatient unit for diabetics, and several floors devoted to diabetes related research projects. He has a building named after him at UAB, and a program in vet medicine at his alma mater takes his name as well. There are also scholarships, endowed research chairs and something called Boshell Diabetes Research Day. He died, aged 69, in 1995.

There’s a Bob Scofield in that photo, too. He was a north Alabama farmer and business man. He owned a radio station for a time. Everyone in town knew him as the owner of the Ford dealership. He made it to 90, and died in 2016.

Ralph Hartzog started out as a teacher, went back to school and studied agriculture and became a county extension agent. He worked in a handful of counties until he retired in 1978. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in 2006, just shy of 87, and his name is now on a memorial plaque at the state’s 4H Center. When they remember you as fondly as they did that man, who’d retired 28 years earlier, you must have been living right.

There’s another guy in that group photo who I met, a lifetime later. Dr. Claude Moore graduated from the College of Agriculture, did his graduate work at Kansas State and Purdue, where he became the assistant director of regional poultry breeding, until he returned to Auburn in 1956 (almost everyone goes home again). He became head of the poultry department in 1959, and stayed in that seat until he moved over to the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station in 1986. He retired from there a few years later. And after another decade or so, I would intern there. He was president of the national Poultry Science Association, a fellow in the National Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the New York Academy of Science. He was a deacon at a church we attended, and a Sunday School teacher. When he passed away, in 2008, he was survived by his wife, five children and 13 grandchildren. He was a good man.

His headstone, naturally, has a rooster on it. It also says “A steady man.” He was an Auburn man.

Which brings us, quite logically, to the debate council’s not-at-all posed photo. Didn’t we all sit around discussing the finer points of rebuilding Europe or trade relations with South America or whatever they were discussing here? Or was that just me and my friends?

Anyway, the guy on the right is Bill Ivey, a local boy, and a sophomore, who was the council president. He was listed as studying business administration. His is a good story.

Bill met his wife, Julia, while she was working as a librarian at Auburn. He was a grade student at UNC. They were married in 1954 at her family home; she was the fourth generation of her family to wed there in the front parlor. (And don’t you hope that tradition has persisted?) They moved to Chapel Hill, and then to Arizona in 1969, before heading to South Carolina in 1975. Bill became the president of a hospital there. He died, and was buried in, South Carolina in 1998, age 70. His wife passed away in 2013. They had three children and nine grandchildren.

This is a simple little highlight placeholder in the Greek section of the yearbook. The cutline simply says “Alpha Gam affair.”

Alpha Gam, where the women were charming and the candles seemed unnecessarily long.

No one wanted you to linger at their parties long enough to watch those giant stacks of wax disappear … but the blurb about their sorority tells us they held an event called the Sunrise Dance … so, maybe?

There’s nothing with this photo, but it’s obviously a fraternity house mother fulfilling the other duties as assigned part of her job. I don’t know anything about either of these two people, but it’s a charming shot.

Cosplay has gone on for longer than you thought. These are the women of Delta Zeta guarding … something.

Just a few pages later, mixed among the ads, there’s another shot of these same women showing off their combat boots. Or their knees. Who can say what the photographer’s risque intention was there.

Most of the ads are all text, just a few with clip art. The interesting ones are the few ads for businesses that existed until my time on campus, or a few famous local names.

WJHO was, back then, a station in neighboring Opelika. It is the ancestor of the modern WANI, which is one of the five stations five stations I was on in my time. This advertisement likely misses the legendary Smilin’ Jack Smollon by just a year or two. He’d come along and work there and run it for the next 40 years, definitely a character.

At some point the call letters went to a station just to the north. In 2022 it became a classic rock station, but it looks to be off the air these days. Shame, too. WJHO took it’s calls from the station founder, a radio and magnetic tape pioneer, John Herbert Orr. He taught college students Morse code while he was in high school. He helped maintain the original campus station, and then dismantled it, which I’ve written about here before. He attended school for one term in the 1920s, and then went out into the working world. The man was a real genius of his age. But his was a different age.

And that’s where we will end this look at the 1946 Glomerata. Forty photos in four installments (parts one, two and three) was a pretty good start, and I thank you for skimming along with me.

The idea, now, is to look back on the obvious anniversary years. So 100 years ago, the 1924 Glomerata, is where we’ll turn, starting next Friday. Should be a lot of fun, and there will so much to enjoy before then, starting with the weekend!