After a month away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Prepare for pretty pictures from the Plains.

That’s the 1954 edition of The Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater. To refresh the memory, I collect the yearbooks. It’s an almost unique thing, and they look great. 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.

In 1954 the world was changing quickly, and so was the old alma mater. Ralph B. Draughon was the president. On the faculty since 1931, he moved into the president’s mansion in 1948. There was, of course, political tumult between the university, the Alabama Extension Service and the governor. (All of this went on for decades.)

The day-to-day campus issues centered around a population explosion. The GI Bill doubled enrollment in the late 1940s and it was obvious they needed more faculty, more space, more books for the library, more everything. Draughon’s almost two decades as president concentrated a great deal on growth and modernity.

Money, as ever, was the sticking point, but Draughon hit on a unique idea. He convinced the presidents of the other schools in the state — the white ones, anyway, because segregation was still everywhere — to present unified budgets to the state legislature. It made for an uneasy alliance, but sometimes it worked. Other times that, too, was contentious. You get the sense the state might have preferred it that way. Much of the legislature didn’t care for Draughon’s emphasis on education and modernism. Alabama isn’t a hard place to understand when you come to understand that the people with votes don’t always want to understand how to improve things. And change, improvement, was coming.

During his tenure, he put up 50 new buildings, doubled the on-campus housing options, opened 16 doctoral programs, landed an important series of accreditations and boosted the faculty numbers.

Civil rights and segregation were as much a part of the era as the university’s growth. It was the spring of 1954 when Brown vs Board of Education was handed down, but it would be another decade before Harold Franklin enrolled at Auburn, overcoming the board and state government’s intransigence, ending segregation on the campus. Draughon spent years trying to thread a non-confrontational needle while walking slowly along the fine line of progress.

We’re looking at the 1954 Glomerata here, but it’s important to note that in just a few more years, in 1960, the name would finally change from Alabama Polytechnic Institute to Auburn University. (It had been a topic of conversation since at least 1948.) Also in 1960, they started work on a new library. In 1965 the university named it for Ralph B. Draughon. Several decades later, when I was in school, state budget cuts were so severe that the RBD had to cut back on book, periodical and journal acquisitions. Draughon, buried just two blocks away from his library, would have had a fit.

Let’s look inside the book!

The first photo is in big, bright, beautiful color. It’s a signal to you and I, dear reader, that the future, grounded in wonder, inspiration and science, was here.

On the opposite leaf was this lovely little photo.

He’s wearing an Auburn button, and there’s a little football hooked to it. You can occasionally see those on e-bay. Here’s one now. Her corsage suggests that was a homecoming photo, but there’s no caption with it.

I don’t know what building this is, which annoys me. You think you know everything, but then there’s this marble staircase and that’s certainly something that should stand out in the memory.

The marble stands out, but so do those outfits. That shirt the guy is wearing. His shoes. No way that’s not a staged photograph. That getup couldn’t catch a woman’s eye, could it?

Students playing cards on the shore at Chewacla.

If you look at this Google Maps image, this is where they would have been. Seven decades ago.

The Tektronix Type 511-D Cathode Ray Oscilloscope was a wide range, portable instrument. It allows scientists to observe a wide variety of electrical waveshapes and was primarily intended for laboratory and shop use, in the development and testing of all types of electronic equipment. And while I’ve been reading about this, I’ve wondered, how long did this instrument stay on campus?

It was sold through 1955 or so, but it would be a hard-to-part item today. And that over-engineered press in the smaller photo? What even is that thing?

We can see now how sports culture is starting to become a more prevalent part of campus life. There’s already a crowd shot here in this front matter.

I think that’s from the Ole Miss game, but we don’t know for certain. It is a pretty educated guess, though, and I’m sure it’ll come up again later.

Look at that dress! I wonder what event this charming woman is heading to.

And those wire fish on the wall! How have those not come around in fashion at least twice in the years since.

Here’s the classic arch shot from Samford Hall. That’s the administration building. In the background is Smith Hall, no relation. (This is basically the same view today.)

I love how the stone is almost glowing. Wouldn’t that have been a neat trick back then, architecturally speaking? It’d be a wonder today, too.

I imagine it’s hard to spend a whole career on a campus and have everyone love you, but that was the case for James Foy, who generations of students knew and loved as Dean Foy. The 1954 Glomerata was dedicated to “one whose influence, leadership, guidance, and loveable personal qualities are known and felt by all.”

He was the dean of student affairs. Probably that job is different, and harder, today. Back then, his duties included being a hype man and a vibe guy. There are photos, decades after this, of students tossing him high into the air. He loved every bit of it.

Foy learned Auburn’s alma mater as a boy from his brother, Simpson, who attended API in the 1920s. (We learned about him a few months ago.) Simpson was a contemporary of the guy that wrote that song. James went to Alabama, where he was a part of the group that helped rekindle the Auburn-Alabama football rivalry. (Indeed, the trophy Auburn and Alabama share around the Iron Bowl is named after him.) After his military service as a naval aviator, he spent 28 years working at Auburn. When he retired, he worked there as a volunteer for another three decades, almost up to his death in 2010, at 93. He was beloved, then, for a lifetime, and he loved the university and its people in kind. The yearbook picked this one well.

A building on campus, Foy Hall, is named after him today. When I was in school it was the student union, which was apt. Nowadays the university names buildings after other important historical figures, and do a thoughtful job of it, or anyone who gives them a lot of money.

As ever, this is not a complete examination of the yearbook, just the images that jump out at me as I flip through it. There will be more next week. This collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here. The university hosts their complete collection here.

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!