I’m back to putting my new desktop document camera through its testing phases. The workflow will improve. Presumably the quality of the photos will, as well. For now, though, I’m extremely pleased. Not the least of which because this is a better, easier, way to show you some ancient photographs.

What follows are a few more selected shots from the 1946 Glomerata. (The first few shots can be found, in the blog, here. The full collection lives in the Glomerata section, of course.

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

The cutline here simply says “electrical engineering students.” This is one of those photos that sits alongside the headshots, the sophomore class, in this case.

They look pretty old for sophomores, don’t they? (I spent some time looking for the guy in the middle in the faculty photographs … ) I suppose the age could be the post-war enrollment effect. If it isn’t that, we’ll surely see that soon enough.

At the beginning of the freshman class photos, we see this next photo. Even back then there were great efforts made to make sure the new students felt involved. Mostly by making the rats and ratlets, as they were still called, to learn their place and the rules.

These were the rules. Don’t walk through the main gate. Carry matches for upperclassmen. Learn the “Rat’s Excuse For Living.” Speak to absolutely everyone you meet. Attend all mass meetings. Learn and sing the alma mater. Know the landmarks. Wear your rat cap at all times. Learn the Creed.

This was the excuse for living: Insasmuch as any living creature, no matter how small or insignificant, has a right to strive for its existence, so I, a lowly rate of Auburn, lowest scum of the earth except those of Georgia and Tech, do hereby strive for mine. Thank you very kindly, sir!

It sounds like hazing, and probably it kind of was, but it was also an important part of the social experience.

You can see the guy’s rat cap on his knee. The way it worked was, freshmen had to wear this in the fall. If Auburn beat Bama, the rat caps could be put away. If the Tigers lost, the freshmen had to wear these until June. If you were caught without your cap, you were thrown in the hog pond. This whole tradition died out a decade or so after this guy wore his.

Including that photograph first in the freshman section probably says more about the editorial choices of the upperclassmen doing the layout. But they have let us down here. Don’t you want to know who this guy is? Surely he went on to a successful career. And that young woman, well, she’d probably rather we didn’t wind up here.

The two of them, after all, are the winners of the freshman “Tacky” Party.

You wouldn’t have to change much of his outfit to make him fit into a fraternity party today, I bet. Remarkable, really.

There’s a famous photo from a few years before where students had gathered to learn about the attack of Pearl Harbor. But now, on a sticky night in the middle of August, the students gathered to listen not to radio reports from speakers bolted on the roof of a car, but to university president Luther Duncan.

Duncan was the director of the Extension Service and became university president in 1935, a position he held until his death in 1947. He was a political animal, not universally respected in the office, but he sat there during a critical time for the university.

You’d like to think that there was some record of what was said on this night, when peace was coming at last. But the university has never been good at keeping those records. They aren’t listed among the library’s databases. Maybe there was less thought given then to memorializing such a somber, joyous moment.

This photo was apparently also from that night. You wonder what brothers, neighbors, boyfriends they were thinking of in some far off part of the world. You couldn’t fault them for wondering How long until we see them again?

This one is also said to be from the V-J announcement. You just know some of these kids told this story for decades. Where they were, what it felt like, who they were with, what it meant for tomorrow.

More of these things should be remembered and shared. It’d be lost on later generations of students, perhaps, but later generations of alumni would come around to marveling at it. Things have a way of persisting. Some of the things Duncan was fighting about, some of the things that he was appreciated for and hated for, still resonated a half century later when I was in school. Some of these more personal recollections would be worth noting, too.

One of the pageant winners, Yvonne Wallace. She was Miss Auburn that year. She’d been an education major according to earlier runs of the campus paper, but the yearbook says that, in her junior year, she was studying science and literature. Perhaps the courses of study weren’t dissimilar at the time.

Wallace was from Panama City and her name appears in a lot of these pageants. There was a woman with her married name who died, in Missouri, in 2021. Her husband, according to his obituary, also attended AU, sometime after the war. He was raised not too far from the campus. He’s not in this Glom. But, if it’s the right pair, he ran in some important professional circles. Board of this, board of that, vice president here and there and so on. His wife, was a socialite, also active in her community. I think that might be her. But it’s just a guess.

A few more slice of life photos. The cutline here is “All the mail has been put up.”

So go check your Instagram and TikTok, young ladies.

You know that shot is posed. Everything is just so and perfect, though it’d be nice to see some more of the guy back there handling the letters and care packages. Even still.

Some things we have long since forgotten about appreciating. Taken for granted isn’t even the right expression. Maybe it’s just … expected, these modern conveniences. A quick snack from a vending machine had to start somewhere. And from humble beginnings. Take a look at these candy machines that used to be in the dorms.

When people show off this particular version of the yearbook, they tend to show this photo. There are no names to accompany it.

Sometimes, her left foot seems awfully close to the water. You wonder if they stayed together.

This is part of a photo collage, which is what those white lines are about. I count 12 people in this car. That’s a dozen bad decisions in one photograph.

We’ll continue working our way through the 1946 Glomerata next week. (The photos I’m digitizing will all wind up in the Glomerata section, of course.) As soon as I add these there will be 20 on display, with many more to come.

I recently purchased a new desktop document camera. It arrived and, today, I began playing around with it. There is a lot to learn, namely consistency of production values and efficiency. But, even in this learning curve part of this new toy’s workflow is already better. When I take a photo, it is already on my computer. Struggling with this camera, then, is already better than struggling with the phone.

Anyway, the first project is taking pictures of some of the photos in this beautiful book.

That’s the 1946 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, latest 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 these images here as I digitize them, but just in case anyone else is interested, you can find them all here.

In the 1990s I ate at The Grille, the same restaurant where the English staff, are eating. I may have eaten in this same booth.

We ate there weekly. Spaghetti, with a free second plate. Every week. It wasn’t enough. The restaurant closed while I was in school, and it is one of those things you can’t not be sad about.

But that’s not what we’re about. We’re going to see how students lived in the 1940s.

Kirtley Brown was the director of student affairs. He’d been in PR. Sometime soon after this he and his wife, the now-famed author Mary Ward Brown moved back to the family farm. He died in 1970, and she passed away in 2013. Their son became a criminal justice instructor at the nearby Marion Military Institute. Kirtley Brown, the son, retired in 2023.

And we’ll probably share every photograph of people on bikes.

Mildred Woodham was the editor of The Glomerata. From Geneva, Alabama, she studied art, graduated in 1946 and moved to New York to become a fabulously successful sculptor.

Known professionally as Jean Woodham, she had prominent shows and won prestigious awards for almost 70 years.

Her last show was at the art museum at her alma mater, in 2013. She passed away in 2021.

I don’t plan on including a lot of the posed posed shots in this collection, but she was the editor of The Glom and all of this was worth mentioning.

This is a scene from the campus newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman. I worked there in school, of course.

I’ve no idea where this room is or was. The paper was in a different building when I was in school, a building that wasn’t even on blueprints when this photo was taken. It is housed in still another building today.

Here’s another surely staged scene from The Plainsman. The careful viewer will note it is the same room, with a slightly wider angle, panned to the right, with all new people.

It was a twice-a-week publication until the late 1940s. It was a weekly, the largest weekly in the state, when I was in school. They went primarily online in 2011.

In between, they’ve won 25 National Pacemaker Awards — basically the collegiate Pulitzer — including two when I was on the staff.

Yes, I have plaques.

Mimi Simms was the editor of The Plainsman. She was the second woman to sit in the big chair. She comes from Auburn royalty.

One of her brothers played football for the university, and was recorded as the best tennis player on campus. That many became a veterinarian, much like their father did. Their young brother is Jack Simms, the legendary founding faculty member of the journalism department.

Mimi did her graduate work at the University of Alabama, but we don’t hold that sort of thing against people. It seems she never married. She died in 2000, and is buried in Tennessee with her parents.

This handsome fellow is Greg Allen, president of the veterans’ organization, and yes, there are a lot of coat and tie photos in this yearbook.

Maria Duchac’s nickname was Skippy and that’s the best possible name. Also, this was apparently a family nickname, she’s heard it her whole life. She studied chemical engineering.

I love everything about this. Her major, her nickname and that door.

And as of this writing she is apparently still with us. War Eagle, Skippy.

The cutline simply says “Folk dancing class.”

I’m assuming there’s some rule that there’s a reason they were all women. But look how some of them were so intently having fun!

But there was plenty of dancing, elsewhere, of course.

The caption here reads “Winners of Jitterbug Contest.”

White leather shoes are about due a comeback, right?

And that’s 10 photos, and 800 words on the subject. That seems like a good stopping point for now.

More from the 1946 Glom next Friday. You can see all of the book covers I’ve collected, here. And if you just like old photographs, I’ve digitized selections from a few of the other old books here.

And just so where we remember where they are, all of the 1946 photos are landing right here.