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More on the depot and on smoky smoke

I took extra pictures of the old train station, so I may as well use them. It is a neat old building:

Click the image to embiggen it in a new tab. The old Auburn Railroad Depot is one of those Places in Peril lists. In the old days, this was the center of everything, but the last person got off and on the train in Auburn in 1970 and things have just crumbled and suffered lately.

There was a real estate company operating out of there for two decades, but the depot has sat vacant for 10 years now. Here’s a look through the windows:

And the overly fancy door handle:

In addition to the official marker, found here, there is an older plaque mounted on a large stone just outside the depot.

The building is described as “A typical example of Victorian railroad architecture, the one-story Richardson Romanesque-styled station boasts long hip roofs, deep eaves, dormers, finials, rounded arches over the windows and flat lintels.”

It is owned by a Montgomery lawyer, who is asking a steep price on a building that needs a lot of work, in a historic district — which would make a new building on the property problematic. So there is a sad stasis to the whole place.

But I love this. This would have been the sign you saw getting off the train:

A little bit more of that font in life would never be a bad thing.

This is the third building, built after a 1904 fire. Eight trains a day once stopped there.

The Jolley principle: Where there is smoke there is smoke.

If you are still trying to figure out what a Roopstigo is, and you want to hear some poor arguments for journalism, and from an Auburn journalism grad of all things, you can listen to the interview the guys at 790 The Zone conducted with Selena Roberts. She’s been doing things like this for years, though, and nothing here is that surprising. It is amusing to hear the host’s exasperation with the entire thing. This a direct link to their mp3.

Oh, and now ESPN is stepping in it. They’re calling it a six-month investigation into Auburn, which is great. It took Jay Jacobs, Auburn’s long-suffering athletics director, about four hours to dismantle the entire thing:

The facts clearly demonstrate that the Auburn Athletics Department and the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics acted appropriately and aggressively in response to the growing threat of synthetic marijuana during the 2010-2011 academic year.

Auburn Athletics began testing its student-athletes for synthetic marijuana three days after a test became available. Since our drug testing policy was amended to include synthetic marijuana as a banned substance, there have been three positive tests for the drug out of more than 2,500 drug tests administered.

It becomes an item-by-item, blow-by-blow mitigation of everything ESPN thinks they have. It is thorough. It is just this side of terse. And it is just about the most thorough media pimp slap you’ll ever see from a group of people who’d prefer to take the high road.

Also, if you’re still wondering about the Roopstigo thing — who? — she named it after her dog. So, previously, we wondered why Selena couldn’t sell her creative writing to another outlet. (Then you read the creative writing which was, in a matter of hours, refuted by almost every source she pretends to quote.) Now we’re wondering “What did you name your dog after?”

Meanwhile, The War Eagle Reader found the first thing she wrote in college. It was … strange.

All you really need to know:

If you’re keeping score at home: Chizik called someone “short on logic,” & Jay Jacobs outplayed an ESPN senior writer. I’ll be in my bunker.

— Aubielicious (@Aubielicious) April 5, 2013

BREAKING: Selena Roberts just released her interview footage… twitter.com/Aubielicious/s…

— Aubielicious (@Aubielicious) April 4, 2013

Auburn / Glomerata / history / links / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
2
Apr 13

Stuck in 1898

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 “Our Co-Eds.”

Click to embiggen, and then read these scant little bios.

There is Miss Erin Black, who grew up in Lee County, home to Auburn University.

Miss Dabney Bondurant, who would ultimately marry Clifford L. Hare. Auburn people know him very well. ‘Fessor Hare was the longtime dean of Auburn’s chemistry program. He also played on Auburn’s first football team and would ultimately served the university for more than half a century, the football stadium is named after him. They are both buried in Pine Hill Cemetery, just off campus. Much of their personal correspondence is held in Special Collections at the University of Virginia.

Miss Mary Boyd, the daughter of Auburn’s fifth president David French Boyd, was the wife of Walter Lynwood Fleming. A professor at Vanderbilt, he was the recipient of the dedication in the book “I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.” David Boyd was pals, before the war, with William Tecumseh Sherman. After the war he started LSU. His daughter, Mary Boyd, pictured here, christened a Liberty Ship during World War II. All of that in the span of one generation of a family.

Ms. Lucile Burton would go on to be the secretary to the university’s board of trustees. She died in 1966. There’s a dormitory named after her today.

Miss Toccoa Cozart was born in Atlanta, and moved with her widowed mother to Montgomery just before the Civil War. She grew up on Perry Street, right in here. She became a school teacher, and attended State Normal College in Florence, Ala. (The modern University of North Alabama) and API, studying English and history, under the great George Petrie. She wrote a biography on Congressman and Ambassador Henry W. Hilliard. Her uncle was Confederate colonel William Howell, who took a famous photograph of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis.

Miss Marian Dawson might shows up in the society pages of The Atlanta Constitution in 1905. Seems she was moving elsewhere. The Internet doesn’t give us much more, however.

Miss Eula Belle Hale was the eighth and Miss Zadie Hale was the fourth of 11 children. They probably often heard the tale: their mother, Josephine, was previously courted by their father Samuel’s brother. But the brother was killed at Chancellorsville. They could trace her family back to early settlers in Massachusetts in 1637 and many fighters of the American Revolution. Eula Belle died in the early 1970s.

Miss Pearl Hanson was only 15 in this picture. She’d live only seven more years. Her brother, Charles, would move to Memphis and become a very successful business man. They’re both buried near their parents in Opelika. Pearl’s husband was Ira Champion, the secretary to Gov. Thomas Kilby. Pearl died just five months after they were married. Ira would stay single, worked as a journalist and finally caught on with the governor. He died in 1942.

Miss Fanny Holstun was born just up the road, one county over in sleepy little Waverly. And that’s all we know of her for now.

Miss Kate Lane stayed in town. She buried her sister in 1942. Her brother-in-law was Dean George Petrie and Kate donated his papers to the university in 1948, the largest donation they’d ever received at that time. She also gave her scrapbooks to the university, where they are held in Special Collections. Here is a picture of both Lane and Petrie. Her father was Gen. James Henry Lane, who was a part of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and a hero of the Battle of Bloody Angle (Spotsylvania). She died in 1968, and was buried just off campus. (Update: The General James Henry Lane House, where Kate lived, also appears in the Markers section of the site.)

Miss Lottie Lane was Kate’s sister. While Kate stayed single, Lottie married Matthew Scott Sloan of Birmingham, who also attended API and played football there at the turn of the 20th century. Matthew was a successful railroad man, managing the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Lines in the 1930s, tripling their revenues, and that during the Depression. Before that he worked at General Electric, Birmingam Railway, Light & Power, the New Orleans Railway & Light Company and was president of the Brooklyn Edison Company. Harvard Business School apparently called him one of the 20th century’s great American business leaders.

Miss Jessie Lockhart escapes us entirely. But I did find that she had a younger sister, Katherine, born in 1900. She died, in Auburn, in my lifetime.

Miss Julia Moore married Marion Roby Buckalew. Together they had seven children, including an accountant, two Naval Academy students, an Army officer who retired to become a high-ranking official at Veterans Affairs (who died just a few years ago) and more. She died in 1938.

Miss Hattie Phelps may have become part of a prominent family in Athens, Ala. She could have also lived and died a preacher’s wife in Citronelle, Ala. Now that we’ve covered both ends of the state, via a newspaper and a headstone, the point should also be made that she could have become anything.

Miss Annye Purifoy remains an open mystery.

Miss Mary Robinson was one of the first six young women enrolled at API. (Presumably the rest are also on this list.) She was the second of 10 children, and also from Waverly. She started college with just three years of formal education. She’d go on to be a teacher, and teach all over the state, including just down the road from where I grew up. She attended Howard College (now Samford University, where I teach) for post-graduate work. Her father rode with Gen. Joe Wheeler during the Civil War, and she traced her lineage back to John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A remarkable lady, she died in 1955. I found all of this, and more, on a page dedicated to her that was written by Mary Helen Stitzel Benford.

Miss Berta Summers, one of eight children, stayed at home in nearby Opelika. She lost a brother in France in the Great War. A National Register of Historic Places document shows her selling Summers Plantation, a carpenter gothic, to family members in 1954. These days that property is home to the Little Halawakee Wildlife Reserve. The trail for Berta goes cold there.

Not bad for a little Internet searching of people who’ve been gone for decades. It seems they lived full lives of various scope. You’d love to know more details. How many of these young women grew into the suffrage movement, for example?

Next week we’ll check out the 1897-1898 track team.

Hint: They ran fast — for their era.

Auburn / books / history / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
12
Mar 13

Things I’ve read recently

Tuesdays sometimes get away from me. Of all the days of the week, Tuesday is the one I’d rather keep in order, but that doesn’t always work out. And yet it was a mostly productive day. Students are putting together the newspaper. I did a lot of grading and reading and writing of emails and so forth. Of its own accord it probably wasn’t much, but it is cumulative. It adds up.

So instead of reading all about that, read all about this!

I finished First Man, by Auburn professor James Hansen a few weeks ago. This is the authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, the often misunderstood engineer-pilot-astronaut … why am I explaining who Neil Armstrong was?

This is a fine biography, immensely detailed and well sourced. All but one of Armstrong’s sons took part in in-depth interviews and, of course, the biggest part of the tale leads up to one of the most widely observed accomplishments of all of humankind, so, you know, there are notes for the author to consult.

And despite his analytical, engineering approach to pretty much everything Hansen hints at an engaging Armstrong. He even tells jokes! Which might sound odd of a man considered by so many of his contemporaries considered aloof. He sounds more private, unassuming, and unsure of why you need to know so much about him. Armstrong, after all, only considered himself “a white socks, pocket-protector nerdy engineer,” (pg. 602).

One of the best anecdotes, perhaps, actually involved his wife, Janet:

For the terrors of the landing, Janet again needed to be alone, so she retired to the privacy of her bedroom. Bill Anders decided to join her. Bill and Janet together had given Pat White the bad news that awful night in January 1967 when her husband Ed died in the Apollo fire, and Bill felt he should stay with Janet right through the touchdown. Rick, a very intelligent and sensitive boy, also wanted to be with his mother. She and Rick and been following the NASA flight map step by step, now with Anders’s help. Rick settled on the floor near the squawk box, while Janet and Bill sat on the foot of the bed. (Long after the Moon landing, this led to one of Bill Bill Anders’s favorite quips. “Where was I when the first Moon landing occurred? I was in bed with Janet Armstrong!”) (pg. 480)

Last week I also read No Time for Sergeants which famously became both a Broadway play and movie. I find aww shucks hokum and dialectic reading to wear me out, but this was tolerable enough to get through in a day or two. It wasn’t as funny as the dust jacket implied, but the movie is great, and this scene in both formats is terrific:

It always helps to imagine Griffith in this role:

Mac Hyman attended Auburn for a short while before the war. He lived here. I looked for Hyman in the Glomeratas, but he didn’t seem to make an appearance.

Speaking of Glomeratas, stick around. There’ll be an update to that section later this evening.

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / history / memories / things to read / video — Comments Off
8
Mar 13

An altogether lovely Friday evening

Shelby County, Ala. made The Daily Show earlier this week:

And then Shelby County made the Colbert Report:

So there’s that.

Here’s some stupid:

A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.

Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

The principal chimes in and, as you might expect, does not acquit herself especially well of the situation.

Here’s another one, some 100 students have been suspended for taking part in Harlem Shake videos:

According to the National Coalition against Censorship, about 100 students across the country have been suspended for making and posting their own version of the viral video on the Web. School districts have offered a variety of reasons for the suspensions, said NCAC Director Joan Bertin, with most saying that the videos, which feature suggestive dancing, are inappropriate. However, Bertin said, she believes that regardless of how the videos could be interpreted, decisions to suspend students and keep them out of class cross the line. The NCAC has compared the schools’ actions to the plot of the 1984 film “Footloose,” in which a town outlaws dancing and rock music.

“It seems a rather disproportionate response by educators to something that, at most, I would characterize as teenage hijinks,” Bertin said.

[…]

“We are very strongly in the camp of telling schools that this is protected speech. Even if it’s unpleasant, we do protect that kind of speech in this country and should, as much for students as adults,” she said.

Disproportionate response seems the right words to use there.

When I was a little tot my mother used to tell me about how dirty Birmingham was. It was an industrial center back then, the Pittsburgh of the South, right up until the 1970s. Bio-tech, medical service, UAB and banking changed much of the economic landscape. Between those shifts and more strict ecological rules it changed things in the air too.

The air, my mother said, used to be brown.

Never sure if I’ve ever seen a picture of that, until today. That was the summer of ’72, when there probably was no such thing as air quality reports and ozone alerts. Your emphysema will kick in just looking at it.

And so it was that I enjoyed a much more clear evening outdoors tonight. There’s a lot to be grateful for, if you like, and being breathless under blooming pear trees because your bicycle has your heart rate up is one of those things. Better than the heavy industrial alternative, at least. I got in 21 quick miles this evening, my first time on the bike in several weeks because of travel and sickness. That’s the way of it: build up a bit of form and a few miles, something else always comes along to distract me.

At the baseball game, Auburn led off with a triple, one of Jackson Burgreen’s two hits of the night. He’d also score later in the inning, before sending in a run in the second:

We moved from behind the plate to over third base, so we could enjoy the heckling. Brown had four errors in the seventh (they’d make another later) when I had what was roundly considered the line of the night. The Brown shortstop was standing on third, and he was just about the only guy in his entire infield that hadn’t erred. So I asked him “J.J., do you know what you can make with four Es?”

The professional hecklers in Section 111 made the sound, so I simply said “A Taylor Swift song.”

Turned around to see them bowing to me. It was a bit awkward.

Brown’s left fielder, Will Marcal, had a nice night. He gathered two hits and demonstrated a cannon in the field. I bet no one runs on him more than once:

Auburn won 9-4 and we caught the Brown head coach enjoying all of the playful little jokes the hecklers were sharing with his team. Guess we’ll work on him more tomorrow.

history / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
30
Jan 13

Emergence — seemingly coordinated movement

Big storms, bad weather overnight and this morning. Campus delayed opening for a few hours. The most destructive elements of the storm were elsewhere, thankfully, not nearly as severe or widespread as it could have been.

There was a leak in my office.

My desk faces a wall. On the other side of that wall is a part of the campus radio station studio. Behind the wall to my desk’s right is part of the newspaper’s newsroom. The wall to my left opens to the exterior of the University Center. There’s a large, long window that looks out onto a green hill, a parking lot and a tree line in front of the next building up the hill.

From the top of that window there was a long, slow dripdripdrip. Under loud booms of thunder I called the facilities department to see about this leak. Our building is about 60 years old, so there are leaks from time to time. Offices across the hall had a good scare in the last year or so. The radio station had a leak, too, but managed to avoid damage. An office on the floor directly below the newspaper had a leak a few weeks ago. The folks that did the repair work surmised it must have gotten there from the newspaper, but we showed no damage. There are a few ceiling tiles in the hallway that have seen better days.

But now the gutter outside my window is threatening neatly stacked piles of paper filled with lecture notes and classroom exercises.

I met a man today who started his career at Samford years ago as a member of the campus safety department. He told me a story about working a late shift in the guard shack at the entrance in his first few weeks on the job.

A car pulled up, he asked to see some identification. The driver couldn’t produce any. He’d left his wallet and license at home.

The man, citing state law, said “I should make you park your car and call you a cab since you have no license with you.”

The driver said he’d turn around, head home and fetch his ID.

The next day the new guard was talking to his boss, who’d just had a conversation with his boss. They talked about the man he’d encountered last night. Older gentleman. Tall. Well dressed. Turns out the car was driven by Dr. Thomas Corts, the president of the university. The new employee didn’t recognize him.

The president said the man at the guard shack had behaved appropriately. And he should never do that to the president again.

We all had a nice laugh. Corts stepped down as the university president in 2006 and died four years ago. People still tell great stories about him. They all have some lesson in them, which is probably one of those marks of a good man. This one was pretty clear: You never know when you’ll meet someone important to you.

We talked about those kinds of first impressions in class a bit today. We talked career expos, first impressions and so on. It was resume day for the intro class. The Career Development Center led a great discussion on the Dos and Don’ts.

Rule Number One: Don’t use your mother as a reference.

Things to read: 4 TED Talks every journalist should watch.

For 40 years, this Russian family was cut off from all human contact, unaware of World War II:

Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer hysterical and, though still obviously frightened, “frankly curious.” Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, “We are not allowed that!” When Pismenskaya asked, “Have you ever eaten bread?” the old man answered: “I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.”

Birds dancing in the sky, beautiful and hypnotic:

I remember discussing this phenomenon in a leadership class once, discussing birds flying in formation. Emergence:

A school of fish or a flock of birds is not controlled by any leader. Instead, it emerges naturally as each individual follows a few simple rules, such as go in the same direction as the other guy, don’t get too close, and flee any predators.

Surely someone made some sort of Aristotelian reference. Of course Aristotle also thought it was transmutation … But Aristotle had a lot to say about rain.