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Pat Sullivan resigns as Samford coach

Pat Sullivan, Samford’s winningest football coach, the 1971 Heisman Trophy winner at Auburn, announced today he is stepping down and putting away his whistle. He played in the NFL, coached at Auburn and UAB and was the head man at TCU. He’s also a wonderfully kind and thoughtful Southern gentleman.

I wrote a little profile about him a few years ago for a now defunct magazine. We reprinted it at The War Eagle Reader:

Sullivan was relaxed in his office, which still feels new. There are framed portraits waiting to be put on the walls. He works out of the handsome new field house at Seibert Stadium on the Samford campus, not too far from where he attended high school. This is home. He looks upon the stops in his career with gratitude, but he’s happy to be here.

“It’s been very special to me. My father came to school here. He played on the first (then named Howard College) football team. He was struggling with cancer about the time I got the job. It was special to be able to come here,” Sullivan remembers.

Bringing in the Auburn-great was the start of a significant chapter in Samford sports history. The Bulldogs soon joined the Southern Conference and now lines up against schools like Chattanooga, The Citadel and Appalachian State.

“It’s where I wanted to come and try to do something that you could be proud of. We changed conferences. We’ve built up our facilities. We’ve really raised our level. We’re not there yet, but we’ve made tremendous strides. I’m excited about our future and where we’re headed. It’s just taken a little while to get there,” Sullivan said.

And in that space between here and there, Sullivan is content.

What didn’t make it into that profile is my second-favorite Pat Sullivan story. At the time we were about to sit down there was a mild controversy going on in college football and he felt adamantly about not discussing that issue. It wasn’t in the plans for my profile anyway, but I said “Coach, I’m not going to ask about that. I’m an Auburn man.”

And, to one of those men who personifies that concept, that answer was good enough.

My favorite Pat Sullivan story came later that fall. I had one of his football players, a starter, in a class I was teaching. One day I let them out a few minutes early and the football player stayed behind. I asked him if he needed anything and he said no.

“Coach said ‘If you’re class doesn’t end until 5, I don’t want to see you out here before 5.'”

The man is about so much more than football. Always has been. He’s been a great asset to Samford and he’s talked, since he signed on there at the end of 2006, how fortunate he was to be there, and how well treated he was by everyone. Pat Sullivan is a Southern gentleman, mentor to young people and, also, a football coach.

Here’s a video from his 2011 trip to coach Samford at Auburn:

Sullivan’s statue outside Jordan-Hare:

The second winningest coach at Samford? A guy who also coached at Auburn: Terry Bowden. And he looked impossibly young in 1988:

He’s about 31 there, ready to start his second year on the job and feeling good about what was ahead. He’d gone 9-1 in his first campaign, but he and his staff had a setback in 1988. The braintrust:

Tony Ierulli is on the Carson-Newman staff today. Both Engle and Armstrong share names with legendary coaches, so they are difficult to find today. Bob Stinchcomb is the athletics director at a Georgia prep school. Todd Stroud is back with Bowden today at Akron. Jack Hines has had stops at West Virginia, Florida State, Samford, Auburn and Clemson and is now a defensive coordinator for a Georgia high school team. Jeff Bowden’s career has followed his famous brother and his even more famous father. Jeff, these days, is also at Akron.

Mark Howard and Benny Fairbanks are in the wind. I found a Vic Colley, but I’m not sure if it is the right man. Colin Hutto, I think, is at a private high school in Tennessee these days. John Harper played receiver at Samford. No idea where he is today.

The last guy on the coaching staff you might have heard of:

Jimbo Fisher played one year at Samford, that 9-1 season from 1987. He had a cup of coffee in professional football — but said he was too small — and came back to be an assistant at Samford.

He’s spent a great deal of time following Bowdens too, of course. Jimbo and both Bowdens coached at Samford, not bad for the tiny school on the side of a hill. Things have changed a lot here, all over campus, as we’re learning through these quarter-century old newspaper clips. A lot has changed over in the football program, too, much for the better. A lot of it because of Pat Sullivan.

history / memories / Monday / music / Samford / video — Comments Off
1
Dec 14

The Rushton Carillon

Today’s installment from college newspapers past has to do with one of the iconic images — and sounds — on the Samford campus.

The carillon was donated by Col. William Rushton, Jr. in honor of his family, or his father, Franklin Rushton, depending on which version you read. The Rushtons came south with William Rushton, Sr., in 1881, just after the end of Reconstruction, when Birmingham was only 10 years old. Senior became an ice magnate, a city alderman and put the first cement paving on the ground. His son, Franklin, ran the family ice company, was a chamber president and was a big part of getting World War II vets jobs in the community. Birmingham Ice & Cold Storage Co., meanwhile, was in operation for 92 years before closing up in 1973. Anyway, Franklin’s son Col. William Rushton, Jr., fought in World War I as a young man and rose through the ranks as a reservist after the war. He, like many of the prominent Samford men, was an insurance executive. If it was a regionally prominent organization in the 20th century, Rushton had a role in it. He died in 1987, but he had several years of listening to the beautiful carillon he helped place on campus.

The author of the above article is today a pediatric disease physician in Kentucky.

The campus official he references, Evan Zeiger, Sr., was an Auburn man. He came to Samford in 1956 and retired in 1984. He died just a few years ago. His son, a local neurosurgeon, died in a plane crash in the Gulf the next year.

I actually have a copy of the original notes for this next piece. The editor submitted a list of questions to the university president and he answered from on high, via an assistant’s typewriter. (This being a few years after he shut the journalism program down, a long and interesting tale for another day, which led to pieces like this proto-listicle.)

Bells about to be installed …

This was a standalone photo and, just to the right, you get a sense of the varying sizes of the bells, which allows for the different notes. The first 49 were cast in Holland and, together, weighed five tons. They were originally above one of the chapels. When Rushton came along they added 11 more bells and it all moved to the library, which is what is going on here:

Breaking news! Here are the library steeples, old and new! (Being located in the center of campus, no one ever had an opportunity to see them … )

Finally, the bells were put in above the library, the weather cooperated and the steeple work was completed, the clavier arrived and was put into place and Mr. Knight was ready to play.

Steve Knight, who has been doing this here for almost 40 years, has long been one of the most interesting people on campus:

I recorded a snippet in April of 2012. Here’s what it sounds like when you stand just under the bells:

Curiously, if you are in the library, you hardly here them at all. That’s by design.

I’ve never been up the ship’s ladder, as Knight called it, so I’ve never seen him perform. Seeing Knight actually play is a marvel, check out this feature piece one of our students produced:

The carillon is a wonderful feature on this beautiful campus. We’ll call it a day right there. Plenty to go around for tomorrow, be sure to stop back by when you can.

books / family / history / Wednesday — 1 Comment
26
Nov 14

My family is now convinced I am a picker

Which is funny, because when I first saw American Pickers, which introduced me to that entire group of people, I immediately thought “That’s the job I should have.”

It’s like they invented it for me. You get to prowl and learn things? And there’s money to be made doing those two things?

I’m pretty sure I developed my prowling and curiosity at my grandparents’ place. So many things you didn’t see all of the time, so many things that were different than what little you knew about anything. So many things that spanned ages of time — to a child at least. A lot of stuff got kept by my grandparents — and yet my grandmother also had a clean house.

But the storage building out back … well, I spent all afternoon in there today. We spent time in there as children, probably hide-and-seek and trying to figure out the boxes and stacks of things. I’m sure some of this stuff hasn’t been touched in years, or more. And today I glanced around a few rooms, but concentrated on the books.

Here’s something that belonged to my uncle as a boy. You can buy My Name is Pablo for pennies on Amazon or a few bucks on ebay. But that cover art is great:

This is on the inside cover of the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia aimed at elementary and middle school students. My mom told me she would sit and read these for hours. It was one of three encyclopedia sets I found, but it obviously has the best illustrations:

This car art just jumps out:

This is the cover to another book you can buy online for pennies, Fifty Famous Americans. The dust jacket is gone, which is a shame, because it apparently featured a great Wright Brothers illustration.

That book was written in the 1940s and so, happily, there isn’t a single reality TV star listed. Here’s the inside cover:

My grandfather was a ham radio operator and owned an electronics store and was apparently a varied reader. This isn’t a book I’d ever read, but you could see he might have a reason to consult it, also, the cover is terrific:

My grandfather was so cool, he had things like this:

And this just scratches the surface. I learned a fair amount about my grandfather today, just digging through dusty stacks of wonderful old pulp. I’m glad to have the opportunity to see and hold and laugh over some of the things he read and wrote. Inside those many pages there will be plenty more to share. Clearly I’m going to have to revitalize his section of my site.

Alabama / Auburn / football / history / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
25
Nov 14

Students were doing what with email?

There is this giant filing cabinet drawer sitting in one corner of my office. I rescued it some time back from a nearby room. That office space was once the home of Entre Nous, the Samford yearbook. When they moved elsewhere it seemed to become a storage space, mostly forgotten. Finally someone came along and made plans to use it for another department and we were kindly asked to move all of our old stuff out of that room.

So I moved all of our old journalism department things and all of our old newspaper things out of there. It was a multi-day process and helped proved where my time goes.

Anyway, one of the things I discovered in there was this giant drawer of newspaper clippings. Instead of moving it to another storage space I just put it in my space because the clips would be fun and because this joker was heavy.

And now I am going through some of the clips. This was in a folder titled “Computers.” I’ll just leave this here for you to note the dates yourself.

From November of 1979:

From September of 1987:

From December of 1987:

Also from December 1987:

And you could apparently check your email in March of 1988:

I love two tidbits in that last story:

“Students often find creative ways to send messages to friends. Charles Dunlap, a pharmacy major from Tullahoma, Tenn., sometimes sends graphics and computer art through the system.

[…]

Although most students feel positive about the use of E-mail, some have expressed complaints that communicating electronically causes some people to avoid one-on-one communication.

So some things are the same, no matter your connection speeds, eh?

The people writing those stories, or pictured in the photographs, are ministers, educators and work in the software industry. Our alumni turn up in all manner of interesting places.

Things to read … because reading takes you to interesting places.

There is this football game this weekend, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Here are three stories looking back on last year’s game. Each has their own merit. One of them is mine. I present them to you in order of importance:

Jon Solomon’s Remembering “Kick Six”

My piece, The Iron Bowl

Thomas Lake’s Looking back at historic Iron Bowl a year later

Solomon’s piece is the one I’d excerpt, but it defies excerpting. If you read one sports piece today, that should be it. It is simply one of the best non-sports-masquerading-as-sports stories you’re likely to read this year. Superb copy. High marks, Jon Solomon, high marks.

Here are a few quick journalism and PR links:

Will be sharing this in class next week, 7 ways to ensure your press release won’t get covered

I wish I had more places to share this, Visual journalism: Virtual reality graphics technology

A one-page photo essay from 2013, still worth seeing, if only for shots 23 and 36, On the Border

One to make you mad, Social worker charged with smoking crack while driving on I-65 with child in car

And three really nice stories to end on. The first one has an aww, an oops and a neighbors-helping-neighbors theme. The second one is a superbly touching kindness of strangers tale and the last one is part of the great Gabby Giffords comeback.

Sheriff’s dive team recovers engagement ring dropped in Noccalula Falls

Former newspaper vendor Charles Graham receives the birthday surprise of a lifetime

Gabby Giffords completes 11-mile bike ride

That sounds like a great ride to me.

Have a nice one today and come back for more tomorrow.

history / journalism / links / Monday / music / Samford / things to read / video — Comments Off
24
Nov 14

Bono in history

I found this clip last week and was waiting for the right time to use it. Turns out today is the right time, which is to say I didn’t want to wait any more. Bono walked around on Samford’s campus one night. I’m not gushing about Bono, but enjoying the perceived incongruity of that. Bono taking an impromptu tour, doing who knows what:

The band was in Birmingham that November, 1988, touring in support of Rattle and Hum. Desire had topped the charts in the UK and Australia and had peaked at number three in the U.S. A few days after their stop in Birmingham Angel of Harlem was released as a single. They made the video the year before, in Memphis:

Wikipedia suggests that Bono has forgotten a lot of the lyrics to the song.

But imagine it, walking around on your small private college campus and there suddenly is one of the biggest young musicians in the world standing in front of you. Crazy.

Not everything in 1988 was good news. Here’s an example from earlier in that year where a writer does a pretty nice job of localizing a compelling slice of one of the biggest stories of the decade.

It is always interesting to see how stories like these evolve over time.

Both of those reporters are still in town. One of them is now a consultant, the other is in corporate communications. We always tell students where their peers intern or their first jobs — because a lot of those are great jobs. But knowledge like this makes me want to say to students, “Yes, when you work your way through that first job or two, there are some even cooler roles in your future.”

Things to read … because reading will be important in the future, too.

I’ve interviewed Pat Sullivan. He is a modest man, a gentleman, and he likes to understate things and put the spotlight on others. Q&A with Auburn great Pat Sullivan as he brings Samford to Jordan-Hare

Since we’re coming up on that time of year, I’ll link to this, but you have to click over and read the very end yourself. It is worth the click. Behind College Football’s Most Amazing Play:

Davis was an offensive dynamo in high school, but Auburn’s coaches pitched him on two other roles: playing cornerback and returning kicks. After Davis committed in Dec. 2009, he said: “They think I can make history down there.”

[…]

“Touchdown, Auburn—an answered prayer!” shouted veteran CBS broadcaster Verne Lundquist, who was calling the game. After the 109-yard touchdown return, Lundquist allowed for 65 seconds of silence so viewers could drink in the fan celebration as the TV audience swelled to 21 million people. Above the field, in the coaches’ box, Johnson and his fellow assistants were high-fiving. “We had never worked on it,” Johnson said of the play. “It was the most amazing thing.”

One last sports story, where the New York Times apparently wants FSU fans to do their job for them, F.S.U. Coach’s Call-In Show Is a No-Sin Zone.

And now a few drone links … Gorgeous Drone Video of the Tallest Church Tower in the Netherlands Bursting Through a Sea of Fog:

To get the perfect aerial drone shots of the Dom Tower of Utrecht, Dutch filmmakers Jelte Keur and Reinout van Schie had to wait a full 10 months for the perfect weather conditions to arrive. But once they did, the minute forty-five of footage they captured made it all worthwhile.

Penn State crop educator explores drone-driven crop management

Drone Flights Face FAA Hit

A few local stories … Birmingham dropped from list of 2016 DNC contenders

Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits against businesses on the upswing in Alabama

Man, I hate clickbait headlines. So here’s the part the author really wants you to read, This guy is fixing the U.S. Capitol dome, but what he says about Alabama workers is the real wonder:

He tells of the way guys who learned to work with metal as mechanics and automakers – regular guys with problems and pasts and views that didn’t extend much beyond their own homes – “can challenge and perform the task before them” in a way that lives up to the expectations of the very architect of the Capitol.

“They are typical Alabamians who work with their hands, and I’m proud of them,” he said. “I tell them you will have a job in this country as long as you can work with your hands. And you will.”

And, now, how a bill becomes a law:

Some tech links … How 3-D printing is revolutionizing medicine:

The researchers began by taking a CT scan of the baby’s chest, which they converted into a highly detailed, three-dimensional virtual map of his altered airways. From this model, they designed and printed a splint—a small tube, made of the same biocompatible material that goes into sutures—that would fit snugly over the weakened section of airway and hold it open. It was strong but flexible, and would expand as the boy grew—the researchers likened it to “the hose of a vacuum cleaner.” The splint would last for three years or so, long enough for the boy’s cells to grow over it, and then would dissolve harmlessly. Three weeks after the splint was implanted, the baby was disconnected from the ventilator and sent home. In May of 2013, in The New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers reported that the boy was thriving and that “no unforeseen problems related to the splint have arisen.”

This sort of procedure is becoming more and more common among doctors and medical researchers. Almost every day, I receive an e-mail from my hospital’s press office describing how yet another colleague is using a 3-D printer to create an intricately realistic surgical model—of a particular patient’s mitral valve, or finger, or optic nerve—to practice on before the actual operation.

Medical science development is amazing stuff.

And so much of it started right here, The First STAR TREK Scene Shot 50 Years Ago This Week

Introducing Charted A new way to share data:

Charted is a tool that automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data.

[…]

Charted is open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co. The publicly-hosted charted.co works with files that are already publicly accessible to anyone with the link (e.g., Dropbox share links). For protected or sensitive data, you can serve your own instance of Charted on your secure network, which is what we do at Medium.

A few journalism links … This will be interesting, Vine shifts from comedy clips to a valid journalistic tool

This is a fine idea, but I always wonder about the efficacy. Not everyone sees the top-down organizational plea. But some is better than none, and that some will, in time, influence others, making it more efficient. So, then, it is worth the try, Establishing Social Media Hashtag Standards For Disaster Response

Hard Comparison: Legacy Media vs. Digital Native

And, finally, for you history buffs and forensic fiends, New mystery arises from
iconic Iwo Jima image:

You have seen this photo because on Feb. 23, 1945, in the middle of one of the fiercest battles of World War II, a group of U.S. Marines carried a flag up the highest peak on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. As six men struggled to plant the flagpole into the ground, an Associated Press photographer, who was worried he would miss the shot, clicked his shutter without even looking through his viewfinder. You have seen this photo because it’s one of the most famous photos in American history.

Eric has stared at this photo for hours. He has zoomed in on the black-and-white image until he can see the creases in the men’s helmet covers and can study the unique shapes of their noses. He has combed through dozens of other photos taken that day atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. He has watched a film clip of the famous flag raising so many times he has each frame memorized.

[…]

He has stared at the photo for the better part of a year, and he’s convinced that he and another amateur history buff have discovered something that has apparently eluded military leaders, World War II experts and historians for nearly seven decades.

Ultimately, I think I agree with Professor Sherrard. Compelling, but perhaps not necessarily to the level, yet, of proof.

I love everything about this story. People with passion and attention to detail, an explanation for that thin strap, the dismissal by their “betters,” the source material for us to make up our own minds. I love all of it.

It is perfect. Perhaps not in the sense of IDing the specific Marines (I wasn’t there, after all) but it is a lovely dash of storytelling.

Now, to write my way back to the beginning, I’ll humbly suggest a new meme where Bono is inserted into historic photographs. Doesn’t that sound like fun?