Fridays mean we return to the past, we go home and we pore over old books. Right now, we’re falling back 80 years on the Plains, there were classes, college life, and the war. Here’s the next batch of photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata. Let’s learn a little about the time, and maybe something interesting about what became of some of them.

This installment takes us into a new section of the yearbook. It’s called …

… and really it’s just a section of almost 20 pages of glamour shots. Up first is Miss Auburn. A tradition since 1934, Miss Auburn, is the official hostess of the university, a goodwill ambassador and so on. And in 1944, Miss Auburn was Margaret Rew.

Rew was a sophomore, an education major, and also a cheerleader. She met an Army officer stationed at Fort Benning (now named Fort Moore). Lewis Sponsler was from Missouri. He was at West Point, but enlisted for the war. The Sponslers ran a pharmacy in neighboring Opelika for 34 years and were together for six decades until she died in 2006. They had three daughters, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren when she passed away.

Marian Boyle was a freshman from Georgia, studying commercial art. Or maybe it’s Marion. Both names are used in different places.

She’s one of those people that drifts into the digital mists. I will assume she did so deliberately after she realized her faux fur faux pas.

Claire Marshall, was a sophomore education major from a small town in southwest Georgia. There were about 365 people living there when she was growing up.

Claire Marshall married a Dr. Clarence Sapp. Her obituary says she was a basketball player in high school, which would have been something to see in small town 1940s. She was a homemaker. When she passed away in 2009 she had one daughter, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

I like this one. It looks like picture day just happened to be taking place as she walked by.

And she is Jeanne Townsend, a local girl, a sophomore, studying pre-law. She and her family had moved up from Florida a few years before, but she became popular quite quickly. In the fall of 1944, her junior year, she married Lt. Lawson Robertson who had also been an Auburn student before he joined the Army. He became a B-17 co-pilot in the 350th Bombardment Squadron in Europe. He died in 1972 and is buried at Arlington. It seems they got divorced in the 1960s. (But I wouldn’t swear out an affidavit on it.) She died in 1979 at 55, and is buried in Florida, with her parents.

Sarah Burrows was a sophomore from Jacksonville, Florida. She studied science and literature, and she was an actress in campus productions.

After that, she becomes a mystery to us.

This is Sarah Evans Glenn, a junior education major from neighboring Opelika. She taught in Texas and met a man who had served in the Pacific during the war. She came back home for a time and was teaching at the university when they announced their engagement.

She had a son in 1948, but she’d already lost her husband, a lieutenant in the Navy. They’d only gotten married in January of 1947. The son, named after his father, is still with us. I’m not sure, from a handful of web searches, what became of his mother.

Marie Strong was a freshman from Anniston. She was studying secretarial training. And lipstick application. She was a socialite of east Alabama, a beauty queen in high school, an honors student in college and would become a class leader the next year.

She shows up in the society pages a lot as a young adult, vacationing here, visiting there, hosting teas for this and that. Then, 1947 was her year, the parties and the buffets were for her. She got married and they moved to Michigan, but quickly returned to Anniston. They had a daughter, in 1952. Marie died in 1953. Her mother died the next year. Her husband was also from Anniston. He went to Georgia Tech and served in the Navy. He got married again in 1957.

Her name is Ann Black, or Anne Black. This yearbook isn’t always consistent. She was a freshman from Auburn, studying science and literature. (Some catchall program, to be sure.)

Anne — it’s Anne — married a man named Leonard Pace, who attended Auburn a few years after she did. He earned a degree in agriculture after serving as a corporal in the Army. Her great-grandfather moved into the area from Georgia just before the Civil War. Leonard’s family had lived in the area for several generations, and they stayed close by, as well. Anne died in 1982, age 57. Leonard passed away at 76, in 2000.

Betty Ware was a freshman from Auburn, studying home economics. A few years later, she was studying education. Her father was a professor of horticulture and forestry. (It’s weird to me to see them grouped together as a discipline.) She got married in October of 1946 to a veterinarian, Edwin Goode. He died at 55, in 1979. They were living in Auburn, but he’s buried in Birmingham, which was his hometown. They had three children.

Sometime after she married another Auburn man, Murphy Armor, who served in the ETO during the war and studied agriculture education after. He taught for a while in nearby Smiths Station and then ran an oil company for three decades. It’s possible I met them in passing. He died in 2010, a man I know officiated his funeral. Betty survived her second husband as well.

This is Rebecca Fincher, a freshman from the tiny town of Wedowee, Alabama, population 505 or so back then.

She was named Miss Homecoming the following fall. She was getting married in December of 1946 to a man with a terribly common name, and then they both elude me.

This smiling face belongs to Lilibel Carlovitz, who is our first proof that the hairstyles of the 1980s really came from the 40s, they just had more hair spray the second time around. She was a sophomore studying secretarial training. She was in the dance club and on the yearbook staff. She was from Auburn.

In the fall of her junior year, which is to say the fall of 1944, she got married to Morris Spearman, of Birmingham. He graduated from Auburn in 1943 with an aeronautical engineering degree. She worked as a stenographer for a few years after school, in Virginia. He worked at NASA. In an amazing six-decade career there he became an authority in aerodynamics, stability and control, aircraft, spacecraft, and missile performance, publishing over 300 technical papers and presentations in the field of aeronautics. She sang in the church choir all her life and helped found a bunch of different community organizations.

She died in 2011, 86; he passed away in 2015 at 93. They had three children, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Julia LeSueur was a freshman from Roanoke, Alabama, studying aeronautical engineering.

Roanoke is a border town in east Alabama. At the time, just over 4,000 people lived there. I’ve no idea if she went home, or went elsewhere. Rather fits that mischievous expression on her face, though, doesn’t it?

We’ve already met Margaret Rew. I’m not sure why she’s included here, but I assume it has something to do with the lipstick, or the excellent fill light in this photograph.

Maxine Tatum was a sophomore from Opelika. She became a high school history teacher and librarian in Union Springs, about 40 miles to the south, where she also coached students in speech contests.

She got married in 1946 to a man from south Alabama who attended The Citadel before being commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. The union didn’t last. She got remarried in 1953 to Joe Gholston, a man who flew with the 8th Air Force, before spending a year in a POW camp in Poland. They had 14 years together. She died in 1967, just 41 years old.

And, finally, meet Betty Peeples, a sophomore interior decoration major all the way from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. She really looks like she’s going places, doesn’t she?

I’ve just no idea where that was. The web, for once, is silent. Which is probably a big hint to me.

So that’s enough for now. Next week we’ll take a glance at the campus life section 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.

It is Friday, and, around here, we get in our time machine and we go home on Fridays. We return once more to a time now 80 years behind us. These are a few of the photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater.

In 1944, the war loomed over everything, and we’re seeing that in this yearbook. As we saw in the last installment, the local barbers had put an advertisement in the paper urging civilians to get their hair cuts during the week, allowing the service men in town to get in and out in their limited weekend free time. The war was everywhere, even in what we often think of as the carefree days of college.

Which isn’t to say that there was no fun. This guy was having fun. The girls seemed to be enjoying the conversation. It’s a filler photo, sitting around the class headshots. There’s no caption here, so we don’t know what they were discussing, or where this was or how uncomfortable he might have been. But, whatever it was, he didn’t mind.

This, we would say today, is so meta.

“The Rains Came” was a 1939 movie — it took a while for film canisters to move around back then. The summary, via IMDb, “In India, a married British aristocrat is reunited with an old flame, but she truly has her sights set on a handsome surgeon.” Starring Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power and George Brent, it was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning Best Special Effects. The movie features an earthquake and massive rains and floods. They used 33 million gallons of water to make the movie, roughly the same amount of rain you could see in a good spring rain just down the street from where this photo was taken.

Another no caption photo. Which is a shame, I want to know more about those socks and shoes.

One of the rules is that we have to feature every bicycle. This is a terrific composition. And if you look closely inside the background of the rear wheel you’ll see what I believe is the top of Hargis Hall. It’d be difficult to recreate this photo today because of newer buildings and tree growth.

In a just world, one of these women kept her book and dogeared the pages where she appeared. Some years later one of her granddaughters pulled that book off the shelf, where it had sat quietly down the hall for a good long while. She leafed through the book and then stopped when she got to page 101 and saw a familiar face.

Many giggles were had as the grandmother tried to remember the moment and told stories about her friend. Maybe they stayed in touch. Maybe she called over and they had a laugh they’d waited a few decades to share.

This isn’t a generational thing, but if we today say the youth have it rough, it’s worth pointing out that these people were surrounded by propaganda posters like this. That little bit of masonry on the right side tells us this was a blood drive sign up, or some such, right at the gates to campus.

Also on campus, as we’ve previously learned, was the ASTP. (Not to be confused with the ROTC.) The Army’s Specialized Training Program came about when General George C. Marshall realized that there were shortages throughout his army. Universities became part of the service chain for service men. In ASTP, men already in uniform, or people headed that way, were enrolled in professional and technical classes. ASTP students took up to two years of classes in foreign languages, engineering, medicine and more. More than 800 headshots filled this section of the yearbook, which was 20 pages in the Glomerata.

So it wasn’t just the posters or the news, but all of these men marching from building to building in formation.

The war was everywhere, even right outside the dorms. This is Broun Hall, which was built in 1938. Today it’s a co-ed dorm that houses 96 first-year honors students. Back then … it probably wasn’t a co-ed dorm.

Not all of those ASTP guys were in the Army. Some just drifted up from the Gulf and marched around in their Navy dungarees until someone told them what to do.

I saved this one for last. The face jumped right out at me. The look is just about right, too, though here he is so obviously looking into the future. And the future was an impressive one. This is Pete Turnham, a senior from Abanda (which was just a place that a rail line ran to and little more). He was studying agriculture. His Wikipedia page says he was born in an equally small nowhere, nine miles south.

Turnham was in the ROTC and went into the Army right after graduation. He became a lieutenant and then a company commander in George Patton’s Third Army. After the fighting was over, he found himself in charge of protecting a castle with a lot of stolen art. If you read the book, or saw the movie, “The Monuments Men,” you would see where Turnham found himself.

I’m not sure when Turnham came home, the Third Army stayed in Europe until 1947. When he did, he worked for a decade at Extension, and started his own business. He served on the local school board, and then ran for the state house in 1958, where he served for 40 years — longer than anyone. He served alongside nine governors. He kept his business up for the rest of his days. He called himself a workaholic. But he was a family man, too. He met his wife in college, in 1940. They had four children and were married for an amazing 73 years until she died in 2016. Together, they had four children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren when he passed away. He was widely celebrated in the news obituaries that announced his death in 2019. He was remembered as a man of true service, the kind of politician you wanted to have representing you.

That’s enough for now. 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 covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.

Since it is Friday, we go home, and we go back in time, courtesy of the old pages of ancient books. Eighty years ago on the Plains, there were classes, college life, and the war. Here’s the next batch of photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata. Let’s learn a little about the time, and maybe something interesting about what became of some of them.

We’ll start with a two-fer. This is Bob Sharman on the left and Gene Griffiths on the right. Sharman was the managing editor of The Plainsman, the campus newspaper. (Generations later, I worked there, too.) Griffiths was the advertising manager.

In my time it was a weekly, the largest weekly in the state.

Kids those days were living history, too. There was an editorial message in that first paper about the things that students were losing — joy rides, lost desserts and so on. It went from twice-a-week to a weekly at the beginning of the 1943-44 school year, which they said was a wartime concession.

They were reporting, as I have learned from the first issue of the year, for an enrollment that was larger than expected. Despite the war, there were about 3,000 people in classes, split quite evenly between men and women. The upperclass had been thinned out for the war effort, as we’ll soon see.

And this was a joint advertisement in that first issue of The Plainsman.

Anyway, back to the people. Bob Sharman becomes Dr. Robert S. Sharman, who by 1958 was the assistant to the director, Animal Disease Eradication Division, Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Then, in 1970, acting director of that USDA unit. Later in his career he co-authored two books, “Principles of Health Maintenance” and “Attacking Animal Diseases: Concepts and Strategies for Control and EradicationAttacking Animal Diseases: Concepts and Strategies for Control and Eradication.”

He died at just 68, in 1992. His brother, three or four years his junior, would also become a veterinarian. I can find out more about him than Bob.

Gene Griffiths was a junior from Pensacola, Florida. He was studying mechanical engineering. He was an Eagle Scout. He went into the Army, and Officer Candidate School, right after graduation. He served as 1st Amphibious Engineers in the Pacific Theater in the last phase of the war. (Timing-wise, I think he would have missed out on any heavy action, but he also served in some unknown-to-me capacity during the Korea Conflict.) He got married, they had two children. He worked as an insurance executive in Atlanta until he retired in 1981. He died after a long fight with cancer, on his 84th birthday.

Back to the campus paper, which, 60+ years on, Griffith’s obituary notes with pride, this is “that rugged ‘Plainsman’ staff.”

There was a local weekly in town, and I believe this was during the years that the pros at the Lee County Bulletin, (founded by Neil O. Davis, a graduate of the class of 1935) shared some space with the student publication. The address was Tichenor Avenue, which was named for Isaac T. Tichenor, the turn-of-the century university president … unless the road was named for Reynolds Tichenor, his son, who was a quarterback of one of the first football teams, and later coached a bit, was a referee, a sportswriter and an attorney. So probably his dad.

This is Buck Taylor and Shirley Smith. They were the editors in 1943 and 1944. Taylor won a national prize for his paper — believed to be the first at the paper, the first of many, many (we won two in my day). His time as editor was cut short, though, because of his Army obligations.

Can we find the paper they’re reading here? Sure can, and you can read it today, January 14, 1944.

Taylor was a senior from Mobile, and he was studying business. More on him in a bit.

Smith was the first female editor of The Plainsman. Her first paper was June 8th, 1943. The top three stories were freshman orientation, 65 students enrolling in an Army veterinary program and the death of a local boy, and university graduate, who died in a Japanese prison camp. (He was in Bataan in 1941. He was wounded. And it only got worse from there for him. The story says he reportedly died of malaria in an unknown camp. His father was a police chief.)

Smith, no relation, was from tiny Springville, Alabama. When she was growing up there, less than 400 people lived there. She was studying science and literature. She was also on the publicity committee for the local War Chest Appeal. There, she was rubbing elbows with publishers of the two local papers and the radio station. Just as The Plainsman won All-American honors the previous year under Buck Taylor, the American College Press gave them a second honor under Smith’s tenure.

And then, she quickly drifts away from what the web can tell us. I blame the last name.

The page before the class headshots simply, somberly, reads …

Our next few shots are the supplements that are mixed in with the class portraits. Here’s another shot of Buck Taylor, as promised. He was the editor of the paper, a senior. His name is William Buck Taylor, and he was in everything. He was a member of several leadership organizations. He was in a handful of different social and professional fraternities, and the president of one of them. How he ever went to class is a mystery, but he was also in the National Honor Society. Buck was also class president in high school. He must have been some kind of guy.

He was a company commander in the Army, and spent two years in Okinawa as part of the occupation force after the war. When he came home, he started a contracting company, and worked for 61 years. He headed his local library board in Mobile, was on the board of the carnival association, was a deacon in his church and was involved in just about everything. He married a Bama grad, she was a Master Forester. They had four children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren and what sounds like a lovely life. Buck died in 2015. She passed away just a few months ago.

Do we know what issue he’s reading? Yes we do, of course, January 7, 1944.

Here’s Merrill Girardeau, another BMOC. He was a senior, from Montgomery, a mechanical engineering major. He was in a lot of the leadership organizations, and was on the football team, but it doesn’t look like he ever played. After graduation, he served in World War 2 and during the Korean war, in some sort of capacities.

He went to work for an ironworks concern in Birmingham. He died in 2007, at the age of 85. He and his wife were married for 63 years. (She passed away just last year.) Together, they had three sons, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

This is our friend, Billy Maples. He was a senior from Huntsville, studying mechanical engineering, and he was another big shot. But he’s our friend because no one liked him. Or they just weren’t on campus the day this shot was taken. Else they would have stopped him from posing with a pipe.

Billy was a captain in the war. It seems he got married, and he and his wife had at least one child, a daughter. He died in 1999, at 77.

Shannon Raphael Hollinger was a senior, a vet student. He looks like he was friendly to everyone, doesn’t he?

He graduated in August of 1944 and went home to Camden, population 900 back then. He worked in private practice. For the next 10 years he appears in the papers as a part of dances, balls and other people’s weddings. In 1955, he married a social worker. The parties, apparently, went on for weeks and weeks. They bought a big spread and had a daughter the next year. They had a son, Junior, in 1959. Hollinger died in 1987, at just 64.

Then we met Roy Brakeman, he was the president of two social groups on campus and, the cutline here says, a member of everything else. He was a junior mechanical engineering major from Gadsden.

Brakeman was born in Ohio, but was raised in Alabama. He took a commission in the Navy after graduation, and served until the war ended. Then he went to grad school at MIT. In 1948 he took a job at Chevron in San Francisco and worked there for almost 40 decades. He met a woman out there and they got married and raised a family of three children and eight grandchildren. He lived to see 96, dying in 2021.

Hey, look, there’s our old friend Bob Sharman, from earlier in the post. He works for his Uncle Sam.

Sharman, you’ll recall, was a veterinarian and high ranking member of the USDA.

And, of course, in this feature we’re sharing every picture with a bicycle in it. This was one is ridden by Tutter Thrasher. I can’t get enough of the nicknames.

That’s Annie Catherine Thrasher, a junior studying business administration, it says here. She was a local girl. A member of society, it seems. She was quiet the student all through high school and college. Honors this, cheerleader that. And when this yearbook went to press, they already knew that she was going to be the president of the senior class, and the first woman to have such a position, for whatever that’s worth.

Also in 1944 she got engaged to, and married a Florida boy, an Auburn Man, William Wallace Allen, of Jacksonville. He graduated the year before. He was working at the Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington D.C., and so they set up house there. At some point they moved back to William’s hometown, and he started a sheet metal fabrications business in 1964. Still going strong today. He died in 2013, and she passed away in 2002. They had two kids, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. There was a lot of orange and blue in those kids lives.

That’s plenty for now, in next week’s installment we’ll meet one of the most impressive members of the class of 1943, see a lot of candid photos, another bicycle and learn about the Army’s Specialized Training Program that was on campus in the mid-40s. It’ll be a lot of fun, and not quite this long!

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.