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Today is the day for it.
Here is, perhaps, my favorite interpretation of it. The grail of Van Morrison collectibles — back when the physical media and other realities made it difficult to acquire — this is actually an outtake His Band and the Street Choir sessions in 1970. Amazing stuff.
Do you believe in ghosts? That is the weirdest dateline I’ve seen for a story in a while, particularly since it isn’t specific, and the story is hardly comprehensive. Also it is … lacking. It refers to video and audio and all manner of things the ghost hunters — believers and skeptics alike — use to search for ghosts. But it doesn’t share any of them.
I suppose my first personal ghost story — that didn’t have to do with the great Kathryn Tucker Windam’s 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey which were amazing reads that haunted every child that cracked the spine of the text — were stories from some family member. It seems they had friends who lived in a civil war officer’s home. They’d go over to play cards and every so often the spirit, according to their story, wanted a little recognition. So he’d make noise upstairs somewhere. They’d acknowledge him aloud and all would be well.
We had a neighbor once who said her house was haunted, but that was the sort of thing that kids would tell to other kids. I probably said our house was haunted too. She said that her ghost would open doors and things. So one day we opened every cabinet and drawer in her kitchen. Before she went into the kitchen and noticed it her dad came home. He was not pleased.
My high school, which was a 1930s WPA project, had a restroom light that liked to be on. No one could explain that. The school doubled as something of a community center, so it never shut down promptly at 3 p.m., which meant someone had to always be on hand. This poor math teacher somehow managed to have that job and that light drove him crazy. (It was a short trip.) So we decided there was a ghost in the boys restroom in the junior high wing.
Every now and then we’d try to trick people into thinking there were floating orbs in an old cemetery in our neighborhood. This was before, as far as I know, we knew that people talked about floating orbs, so at least we had good details. I noticed years later there was a Revolutionary War veteran buried there, which is still one of my favorite things about the place:
A geneaology site says about John Lawley, who moved there in the 18-teens:
The land was productive and required but little labor to produce the necessaries of life. The woods were a hunters paradise a paradise abounding in deer, turkey, with some panther and bear. The winters were not so cold then as now. Cattle and horses were raised in the woods and afforded all the butter beef and milk that was needed. Not with- the glowing description given to prospective settlers, these early men and women and children knew the meaning of hard work and sacrifice, but knew, too, the delight of living in a new land.
He lived as a royal subject and then as an American under Washington through Andrew Jackson. He died an old man, in 1832. But he’s probably not a ghost.
We have a lot of those tales in the South, which is the foundation of the story initially linked above. There’s supposed to be a ghost of a soldier in the chapel at Auburn. The Roundhouse at the University of Alabama has a similar story. Here’s a Georgia one that landed in my inbox today, in fact, with supposed photographic proof. In Savannah the dead are an industry unto themselves, and the ghost tours are an important tourist activity:
I’ve never seen any ghosts. But I have been to a few battlefields.
Stuff from Twitter: because why not?
Week begins w/Obama scoffing at notion tyranny is a threat, ends with IRS admitting it intentionally targeted Obama’s opponents.
— Bill Hobbs (@billhobbs) May 10, 2013
And so here we are. RT @rshibley Fed Govt MANDATES speech codes on college campuses. bit.ly/13KX3ol
— kennysmith (@kennysmith) May 10, 2013
I have this feeling that it all get worse before it gets better.
I looked at the drought monitor today and saw something unusual:
That chart is updated weekly. Last week the two southernmost counties, Mobile and Baldwin, still had a good deal of yellow covering them. And then it rained about eight inches in one night down there. This is the first time since 2010 that no county in the state has not reported dry or drought conditions.
Pretty tough times in the plains states, though. James Lileks, last week on the drought breaking in Minnesota:
well, well, what do you know: the drought lifts. The dryness of the last few years is forgotten as the mean reasserts itself over the long run of the decade, which itself will be a wink, a blip, an inhalation to the next decades exhalation, just as the universe itself is a bang at the start and a great collapse at the end, like two flaps of a heart valve. Assuming there’s enough matter to cause the universe to contract, that is. I hope so. I hate the idea that it begins with a great gust of matter, spreads and cools and ends in silence. Because that would make the universe, in essence, a sneeze.
Swam 1,200 meters today. When I went down the pool to start that last lap The Yankee — who is a champion swimmer, mind you — said “If you do 16 it’ll be a mile.”
Don’t tell me that.
But I did get in three-quarters of a mile. And then I rode 15 miles on my bicycle, just because it was a longer way home.
I do not know what is happening.
Grading, reading, writing. Preparing for a class.
We held the last critique meeting of the school year for the newspaper. The newsroom closes down for the summer. Some people graduate, others take a deep breath. I thanked them for their hard work. I bragged on them, despite the huge error in the headline of the lead story.
Class was held. Things were discussed. Everyone’s mind is outside because the beautiful spring weather has shown up and it all feels very real and, finally, incontrovertibly here.
The newsroom folks gave me two doughnuts. That’s how you end a Wednesday:
Made it home in time to see the last half of the baseball game. Auburn hosted Samford. Everyone wanted to know who I would cheer for. Samford pays me so …
Auburn won 9-3, in yet another comeback. Both teams are in their respective conference post-season hunts. The two teams have almost identical conference records. Samford hits for power, Auburn has lately been looking for any hits that drive in runs. They’ve spent their conference schedule getting beaten up by the baseball teams in the country. Auburn has won both of the two mid-week games this season.
The last time Samford beat Auburn was March of last year, at Samford, and it was dramatic:
Here’s a mystery: After tonight’s game The Yankee, Adam and I caught dinner at Mellow Mushroom. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this on the ground next to the door. I’ve boosted the contrast so we can see it a bit more clearly:
It says “Heard & Swope 1905.” A quick search of the genealogy sites tells me there was a Sylvester McDaniel Swope (1852-1923). He was a preacher in Talladega, which is about 90 minutes away today. It was a little different in his day. But Sylvester had a son in 1877, Arthur, who married Addie Lee Heard. Arthur is buried here in Auburn, so maybe these are the right people. (There were 31,000 people in the county and about 1,600 in the town at the time. How many different Heards and Swopes could there have been?)
The first gas pump was four years away and the year before there a total of 37 party line phones in town. Those tidbits, and this picture, come from Logue and Simms’ (1981) incomparable pictorial history.
That map is from 1903, when College Street was still Main. See that empty spot at lot 34? I think that’s where this Heard & Swope marker would go in in 1905. You can count the front doors today and it makes sense, for the most part. But I’m not sure what Heard and Swope were building. Yet.
I am very interested in some of the pictures from my oldest Glomerata, the 1898, the second one they ever published. Here are a few notes about one of the pictures.
On page 86-87 you find this image and the heading “Best Auburn Records,” which we’ll get to eventually below.
These guys were a bit hard to dig up, but meet F. W. Van Ness, H. E. Harvey and W. B. Stokes. This is what we know about them after a few hasty minutes of online searching.
Franklin Waters Van Ness, was born in Pensacola. The 1870 census said there were 7,817 people in Escambia County. Ten years later there were more than 12,000 there. He studied at The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., before enrolling at Auburn for mechanical engineering. In the first track meet in the South, held at Vanderbilt, he ran the half-mile in 2:06.
He’d go into automobiles and had a mention in Motor Age in 1916. He designed cars, vacuum cleaners, and more.
He’d later return to the south to run a cotton mill in North Carolina. He died in 1955, but the Internet doesn’t know where he (or his wife) is buried. They had three daughters. One worked in hotels and is buried in North Carolina. The second daughter died in South Carolina, but is buried in Kansas. Her first husband was an ambassador. Her second was an admiral in the navy. The youngest died in North Carolina. She apparently had a lifetime of health problems.
Henry Everett Harvey died on Oct. 14, 1942. He’s buried just two blocks off campus, at Pine Hill. As a young man he ran the mile in 4:48. That’s all I can find out about him so far.
William Bee Stokes was born in Mississippi, but his family moved to Marion County when he was 14. There were about 11,000 people in Marion at the time. When he moved to Auburn he found himself in a county of almost 30,000.
He was captain on the football team. He played in the first game held on campus, against Georgia Tech in 1896 and scored the first offensive touchdown on campus, a 7-yard run as Auburn was on the way to a 45-0 win. He stayed on at the university for at least two decades, teaching as an instructor and ultimately an associate professor of mathematics. He was making $750 in 1905, about $18,000 today.
In 1920 he took a job running the math department at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in LaFayette. During WWII he worked in the Navy’s V-12 program and taught thermonuclear physics, atomic arithmetic and aerial navigation.
He knew Gen. George Washington Goethals, who was the chief engineer when the Panama Canal was finally completed. He worked with former President Herbert Hoover. He retired to Guin, Ala., which was his wife’s hometown and near his own. He was buried there in 1960. His wife died in 1971.
The records: Auburn, which has boasted 38 Olympians and 35 national champions and a few hundred All-Americans over the years, has a fairly strong program, and it really dates back to these guys. Let’s compare their stats to the current school records. People ran a bit slower in the 19th century, but you really see the difference in the field events. Remember, the modern races are measured in meters, which are a bit longer, and the timers are more precise these days:
| 1898 | Women | Men | |
| 100-yard dash | 10.2 sec | 11.03 sec (100m) (2006) | 9.98 sec (2000) |
| 100-yard hurdles | 17.8 sec | 12.93 sec (100m) (2000) | 13.25 sec (110m) (2008) |
| 440-yard dash | 55.2 | 50.11 (400m) (1993) | 44.45 (400m) (2000) |
| High jump | 5′-3″ | 6′-1.5″ (2007) | 7′-8″ (2007) |
| Shot put | 32′-10″ | 53′-9.25″ (2004) | 68′-6″ (2005) |
| Hammer throw | 82′-7.4″ | 196′-11″ (2008) | 243′-2″ (2008) |
| Pole vault | 9′-5.1″ | 12′-6″ (2005) | 18′-4.5″ (1997) |
Better equipment, dedicated training, diets, and so on. Anyone that’s watched any Olympics appreciates the progression of athleticism when they see old records fall. But consider that first number. The old 100-yard-dash number, if legitimate, is internationally impressive. The world record was set at 10.0 in 1877, 1878, 1880 and again in 1886. It wouldn’t fall to 9.8 until 1890.
We left later than we wanted to. We did exactly as many miles as we’d like to do on the day. We had a burger on the road, stopped in Birmingham to pick up some banana pudding and managed to get stuck in only one city’s rush hour. It was a day full of travel. Here, then, are some simple pictures.
Just south of the Alabama-Tennessee state line. There is a rocket at the rest area, because this part of the state is full of super smart people, because SPACE.
That is the Saturn 1B, 141 feet of muscle, angry loud power and mid-century sexiness. Team America! Previously you could walk under the engine nozzles, but now that is fenced off. Team Lawsuits, I guess. The 1B was the predecessor of the Saturn V, which took people to the moon. Anyone remember that?
Nashville was the place where we started and stopped in traffic for no discernible reasons whatsoever. Nashville does that to people.
We stopped in Kentucky, because apparently I still need to take breaks to stretch my back and shoulder. Saw this marker. The good people of the great state of Kentucky have too many numbers on this plaque on this rock at a rest stop. I did not see the 2009-present numbers:
Had dinner and spent the evening with the step-dad. We’re up for a conference close by and he let us spend the night. This is my too-tired-to-go-get-my-real-camera shot.
We stayed up too late. That’s going to hurt at the conference tomorrow.
