We turn our attention, one last time, to a time 90 years behind us. We’ve spent the last three Fridays looking at my alma mater via the 1934 yearbook. (Part one is here. You can find part two here and, from last week, part three is right here.) This is about the people living their young lives during the Great Depression.

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.

These are but a few of the photos and the very abbreviated stories that jump out to me, not a complete look at the book. There’s 300 pages and more than 1,400 photographs here, most of them the traditional headshots, which we generally avoid. It was, at that time, the largest yearbook the students had produced, and it’s an interesting glimpse of a familiar world in a different time.

There’s one last engraving, this one is titled features, and the buildings in the lower part of the art have nothing to do with the campus. But I did figure out who the artist, Davis, was.

And it was a real “Of course!” moment. This was Charles F. Davis, Jr. who was in the class of 1932 and still in town. His wife, Helen, was also an architect, the first licensed female architect in Alabama. (She’s a senior in this yearbook!) They would eventually join an architectural firm in Birmingham that would eventually come to be known as Davis Architects. Helen eventually started her own firm. They had three children, who all also went into architecture, and one of them runs Davis today. Charles was also the principal designer of a campus in Birmingham that I knew well.

This is Julia Pace of Anniston, Alabama. She studied business administration and was elected Miss Auburn in her freshman year and then named Miss Anniston. She married John William Mallory Jr. in 1937.

They had three children. He ran a big appliance store, she worked in a bank. Apparently they played golf together well into their golden years. She died in 2002, at 88.

This is Mary Barr Prince, and we know very little about her. She was descendant of an important Carolina family, and was apparently a socialite in her day.

She doesn’t appear elsewhere in this edition of the Glomerata. In her marriage announcement, we learn she went to Converse College, in Spartanburg. Her husband, a man named Henry, also of South Carolina, graduated from UNC. They married in 1937. They had three children — one of them became a prominent attorney and local judge. She died at 79, in 1993. She is buried in her native South Carolina.

Some times you run across a photo that just doesn’t seem to belong in their time frame. I’m not sure if she was mod, or this was as fancy as she could get, but this is Alice O’Donnell of Mobile.

There’s virtually nothing available to us about her, but I presume that’s because she was a time traveler, and has come to our time and is now making making TikTok videos.

My thinking is that not all of this studio portraiture came from the same studio. And that, I figure, is why Theresa Hamby is in such a soft focus. The campus paper, The Plainsman, tells me she’s from Smyrna, Georgia. But that’s the only thing I know about her. She doesn’t seem to appear elsewhere in this yearbook.

And, to show the extent of my searching, I’m using a newspaper database, general searches, looking through the next two editions of the yearbook, and an archive of The Plainsman. And to show that I’m not just including the successful searches, I give you Elizabeth Cryer.

We don’t know anything about her, not even where she was from. I did find a contemporaneous mention of an Elizabeth Cryer who was destined for the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art. No idea if it is the same student.

This is Jessie Lee Raines, she was from tiny Fyffe, Alabama, which wasn’t even a town in the northeast corner of the state when she was a child. There’s less than 1,000 people there today. She was a senior, but she was at Alabama College, the modern day University of Montevallo. She was the vice president of her class, in an honor society and a speech major.

All of this makes me think they only found themselves in this yearbook because they were someone special to someone on campus. But who else she was, and what she would become, is a mystery.

And with those mysterious still being mysterious, we’ll move to something else we know a tiny bit more about.

Homer Wright was a longtime merchant, and he had one of the first phone numbers in town. Why he never ran an ad that said, “If you’re feeling less than fine, call nine,” escapes me.

All of the intricacies of installing the phone system are beyond me, but I assume the number means he had one of the first phones in town, making him quite the innovator. (Indeed, the first gas pump in town was installed in front of his store, in 1909.) He was also the postmaster general in his later years. He and his wife raised three children, two of which survived well into the 20-teens. Wright lived here. He died in 1943, age 57.

The industry that will be “the feature of tomorrow.” Be familiar with it!

I wonder if any of those engineering majors, or people studying architecture or business read this and then stormed into their professors’ stuffy offices. “You’ve never told us about this!” Let’s assume they were all at least passingly familiar with the concept, even if they had no idea of the ubiquity that was coming.

Unassuming advertisement aside, students of 1934 who got in early could probably do well for themselves.

Birmingham, by then, was easily the largest city in the state. (Strictly by a city’s population, that’s no longer the case.) The Birmingham Electric Company was organized in 1921. (Not to be confused with the 1890 Birmingham Railway Electrical Company, which would become Birmingham Electric Company in 1940.) Both had similar purposes, streetcars, with some electrical distribution on the side. The second one, the 1921 concern, was able to use that electricity side hustle to survive the Depression. Maybe that’s one reason they saw great things in conditioned air. Both companies suffered similar fates.

The 1890 version saw their rider numbers decline after World War II. Cars and buses took the demand away, and the streetcars were sold to Toronto in 1952. Around that time they changed their name to the Birmingham Transit Company. Two decades later, the local transit authority took over. Today, they run 109 buses on 38 routes and see about 6,800 customers per day.

Economics got the 1921 company, too. Alabama Power bought them when it got lean. Their vehicles were sold for scrap.

There must be reasons!

And I want to know why, if they are so popular, the photographer stopped by on the slowest day of the year. Today, the university records 1,510 students were enrolled in 1934. That’d mean everyone was in and out of Benson’s, every day, and this strains credulity.

I would have enjoyed watching an orchestra you could just stroll in and listen to for hours at a time, while meeting friends, getting food and candy and so on. It was probably a small band, but that would have been fine, too.

Benson’s was, primarily, a drug store. (There were three, all clumped together on the same block.) These storefronts are long, narrow shops, and so you see pretty much the whole place in that photo, if you squint. They stayed open late on the weekends to serve students coming and going from dances. A few years later, in 1940, milkshakes cost a dime. Regular sandwiches were 15 cents. A ham and cheese was twenty, or you could splurge for a club sandwich for a quarter.

And here’s our last page of ads, and the last entry for the 1934 collection. I’ve searched all of the names on this page and with the exception of the directors names from the bank, I’ve come up empty.

Now, to a man, all of those bank names are important local people. Most of them are affiliated with the university, the rest are pillars of the local community. It was a big deal putting these names in the ad. You knew these folks, and your money always felt safe with the people you saw every day. And if you can’t trust your neighbors with your money in 1934, there’s always a jar you can bury in the backyard.

Even as you were urged to look to air conditioning, you were still buying the black rock and the frozen water for all your domestic needs. Looking back, the 1930s sometimes seem like a time between times. It didn’t feel that way to them, of course. No one thinks like that in their moment. Apparently Homer Wright, the druggist from above, was also involved in Auburn Ice & Coal. The web tells me it was a company that registered with the state in 1925. Ads a few years later list the Ice & Coal phone number as 118. I wish I knew more about the Auburn Ice & Coal Co. Perhaps I’ll find out more about it in other places.

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.

We once again turn our attention 90 years into the past, because we’ve been spending the last few Fridays looking at my alma mater via the 1934 yearbook. (Part one is here. You can find part two here.) This is about the people living their young lives during the Great Depression.

This is not a complete study, of course, but just the interesting images and names that jump out. And what starts to jump out, at least a bit in 1934, is that there’s was a different, but familiar world.

Let’s take a quick look at just a few more photos about what is inside.

We’re just wrapping up the sports section today, and so we’ll start with this quick look at the 1934 basketball team. They were only 2-11.

It seems that the one interesting note is that the coach of the freshman football team was named the head coach. Sam McAllister had been the coach of the basketball and baseball teams for three years. It was his second job. He was 24-18 on the court, which the yearbook considers a success. “Silent Sam” left the plains, and turned up in Florida a few years later, spending 15 years with the Gators. But that wasn’t immediately useful to this team.

Just two returning players came to the first practice, so the squad was filled out with reserves and newcomers. One of the returning stars was David Ariail, first on the left on the back row. He was from Birmingham, was an All-Southern end on the football team, and was voted an All-American by his peers in that sport. Here, we learn he functioned nobly in every game.

He was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds, the NFL Reds, and played one game for them, and two for the Brooklyn Dodgers, also the football version. He also played a game for the AFL’s Louisville Bourbons, which is a team all but forgotten by everyone. Ariail became a colonel in the army, serving as a company commander in the 846th and the 656th tank destroyer battalions.

Tank Destroyer tells me:

David entered the Army sometime in the mid 30’s and after serving in various units, was assigned to the 846th Tank Destroyer Battalion. The unit was made up of black servicemen with most officers being white. He held the rank of 1st Lieutenant and served as Company C Commander. On December 9, 1942, documents identify that he was now a Captain and became the unit’s Adjutant.

When the 656th Tank Destroyer Battalion was activated on April 3, 1943, Cpt. Ariail was assigned to Headquarters Company, functioning as the unit’s S-4 or Logistics Officer. By February of 1944, he had been promoted to the rank of Major and served as the Executive Officer of the unit, occasionally leading the unit when the Commander was absent.

The 656th shipped out from the New York port on December 16, 1944, and arrived in England on the 28th. After a month of additional training and preparations they boarded ships and sailed for Le Havre, France, disembarking on February 6, 1945. They were equipped with M18 tank destroyers and entered the line near Friesenrath, Germany, on the 28th.

Pushing toward the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany, they crossed into the bridgehead beginning on March 7th. The unit converted to the M36 tank destroyer late that month and supported the 9th Armored Division’s sweep to help encircle the Ruhr River in early April. They then dashed eastward to the Mulde River and turned south, entering Czechoslovakia near St. Sedlo on May 6th.

David was awarded the Bronze Star and also received the EAME ribbon with two campaign stars signifying the unit’s two campaigns of Rhineland and Central Europe. He also received the American Defense, the American Campaign, and WWII Victory Medal.

David stayed in the military for 30 years before his retirement. David Sr. served during the Korean War and at a number of posts including Frankfurt, Germany, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

He and his wife and two daughters and a son. He died in North Carolina, in 2001.

The other returning player was Frank Sindler, a junior architecture major, from Islip, New York. He’s second from the right on the back row, and was considered “an excellent floor man.” I’m not sure what becomes of him, so we’ll leave that alone for now.

Oh, the new basketball coach? Some guy named Ralph Jordan.

There was a new sport on campus in the mid-1930s. Some 37 people turned out to learn and practice the sport of kings. Most of their opponents weren’t schools, because not a lot of schools ran polo programs, I guess. And it was an open question, into the springtime, if the scheduled contests with LSU, Georgia and Florida would take place — if those institutions could find enough students who knew how to sit a horse. With all of that in mind, bright things were expected for Auburn polo, which had apparently earned some sort of championship the year before.

Polo first came to Auburn in 1932, via the the ROTC program and, specifically, Major G. H. Franke, mounted on the left, who led the ROTC program and was a star on the West Point team in his day. Also, the War Department thought polo promoted “skill in horsemanship and daring.” It stayed on campus until 1939. Tanks and war were presumably the reasons it disappeared, despite being a fan favorite.

Gustav Henry Franke was a lifer, an artillery man. Previously, Franke commanded the first US unit to fire on German forces in World War I. When World War II came he found himself commanding the Field Artillery Replacement Center at Fort Bragg in 1941, and then Artillery for the whole 6th Infantry Division. He also led the 81st Infantry Division at Fort Rucker (the modern Fort Novosel) and was largely responsible for the buildup of that installation. He would retire a major general in 1944. Both his son and grandson would later serve as army officers.

Sadly, the book doesn’t tell us who the rest of the ramblers are. Ramblers was never an official name for anything, but it feels like it should have been.

Speaking of names, I included this mostly for the title.

This was just the second year of swimming and diving on campus. They swam in a basement pool and wired their times to other schools, since the facilities were too small for competitions. From humble beginnings. Men’s swimming and diving have eight national championships, women’s swimming and diving counts five. There are 23 conference championships and 30 Olympians among the list of achievements as well, and to think, it all started with tank teams like these.

Marcus McGriff, a junior industrial engineer major from Livingston, Alabama, was captain of the team. He would later serve in the army, as an officer in Africa, where he received a legion of merit award.

It seems he left the army a lieutenant colonel. He died in 1972, just shy of 60.

Senior Lynwood Poole, a commercial art major from Montgomery, was the alternate captain. Probably just because of his name, and he brought his own swim trunks.

Poole, a diver, had to leave the team, a contemporary news account tells us, because of eye trouble. Whatever the problem was must have been minor, or solved, because Poole would also join the army. There’s nothing online about his service, but I know he also retired a lieutenant colonel. He died in 1979, at 68, in Florida, survived by his wife and two children. He and his wife are buried in Hawai’i. Their children are now in their 70s and 80s.

But the real star of the tank men was Howard Morris, a Montgomery junior studying electrical engineering. He was the captain, and the coach. Here, they list him as a conference champion, and I won’t even try to guess how they arrived at that. But was fast at the 440-free. He won all but one of his races that year. He was apparently a diver, as well.

He went into business, banking specifically. He got married in 1943, was showing horses a few years later. By 1950 he was a civic leader, a lieutenant colonel and nationally regarded as a dressage rider and horse trainer.

He became an official in the state banker’s association. At one point he was teaching artillery to Chiang Kai-Shek’s army. (So you can never say nothing interesting happened in the 1950s.) Tall, smiling, balding, he was also a long serving member of a prominent insurance firm. But all of those newspaper mentions about the banking organization end in 1963. He started Pinchona, a horse farm, near Montgomery in 1969. It’s still active today. Also in the 1960s, he served as president of The United States Pony Clubs, which teaches riding and the proper care of horses to children. If I have the right man, he died in 2002, at the age of 89.

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.

We are once again jumping in the time machine, heading back 90 years, to see what the ol’ alma mater was like in 1934. (Part one is here.) By that, of course, I mean the people as much as anything. It was an exciting young time for a bunch of young people in the middle of the Great Depression. There’s was a different world — but some of this does look familiar.

I’m flipping through, avoiding most of the posed photographs in favor of the more interesting images and names that jump out me. While isn’t a complete look, we’ll get another week or two out of 1934. So let’s see what is inside.

This page is titled “With the young journalists,” so, of course, I insist we stop and linger here. And if you saw the first installment of our look at the 1934 Glomerata last week you might recall a room that looks like this. It is, in fact, the same room.

It isn’t uncommon for the campus paper and the yearbook to be closely related, sometimes sharing staff and resources, so this isn’t too much of a surprise. A few people worked on each of these publications, in fact.

Do we know what issue of the newspaper they are looking at? Yes we do. The biggest stories in the Jan. 31, 1934 edition of the paper were about an upcoming drama tournament, the conferral of honorary degrees, and approval of new concrete stands from the Civil Works Administration (the first, public employment experiment of the New Deal and the predecessor of the WPA) “for the building of a stadium.”

The project as approved calls for the building of stands on the east and west sides of the field suitable for the seating of nine thousand four hundred persons and the filling in of the south end with 75,000 cubic yards of dirt so that wooden stands may be erected thereon to seat three thousand more persons, thereby increasing the seating capacity of the stadium to twelve thousand four hun­dred. It is hoped that at some fu­ture time the bowl may be completed in its entirety, but for the present no such plans are being made.

The total cost of the project has been estimated at nearly one hun­dred twenty-six thousand dollars, not including the cost of the grading and draining project which is at present under way. Of this total amount it will be necessary for the school to raise approximately thirty-two thousand dollars according to CWA regulations and various plans are at present being formulated for the pro­curing of this amount.

[…]

Provided Congress approves the President’s request for the necessary funds to continue CWA work and provided the school will be able to raise the thirty-two thousand dollars necessary on this project, which at present seems almost assured, Au­burn will have a new stadium before May first.

As people read that particular issue, things were still a bit up in the air, but the plans solidified in the next few weeks. This was the beginning of a big shift for the campus, and the community. But a lot of places were about to start seeing changes. In Auburn, it was the start of a dream that would finally be realized in 1989. Prior to this project, the school played almost all of their home football games in bigger cities nearby, Birmingham, Montgomery, Columbus, and so on. They played one game at home each year and fans sat on temporary stands that allowed 700 people to watch a game. The casual version of history goes like this: getting the stadium built, getting the interstate to pass through town (I-85 was built in stages in the 1960s, including, sadly, redlining a vibrant African-American community in nearby Montgomery.) and getting Bo Jackson on campus made the place all grown up. And it started with what was going on around these guys in that photo, right there.

The Glom said The Plainsman had a circulation of 2,000. I suppose that was a reasonable number for the time. They also shipped copies around the country to subscribers, which is a tradition that would die around the turn of the century. In 1933-1934, the paper was led by this young man, Horace Shepard. He was a senior from Mobile, a member of Spades — the senior leadership organization — and studying aeronautical engineering.

Horace would go on to become Brigadier General Horace Shepard. Born in Mississippi, he became a flying cadet after college, becoming a second lieutenant in the Air Reserve in late 1935. He taught flying to others until 1940, along the way earning his regular Army commission as a 2nd lieutenant in the Air Corps. He was transferred to Hickam Field, Hawai’i, in 1940, where he served as the chief engineering officer until a 1943 transfer to Ohio. He was a colonel when the war ended, and resigned his commission in 1951.

He moved on to run a firm called Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, TRW, spending 26 years with that company. They made automative, aerospace and military products. In 1976 he donated some land to Mississippi, and they named it as a park in his honor. He retired in 1977. He and his wife had three children and, when he died at home in Georgia in 2002, he had eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. He’s buried in Mobile.

There are a few collages like this in the book, “Around and about the campus.”

Click here for the larger version.

They have cutlines that made sense to the people in the photos, fragments of sentences that the people putting the yearbook together assumed would be memorable for forever. And maybe a few of them were, to someone, but most of them are meaningless to you and me.

Click here for the larger version.

Here’s another wood engraving, just because they are beautiful.

As I’ve said, we’re not too concerned with the posed studio portraits. And I’m even less interested in making fun of fashions and styles. But I just want to point out this guy’s hair, because he had a tremendous coif in his day.

Ben Hutson was born in New Orleans, but he always called Mobile home. He studied electrical engineering in school, and he’s a senior here. His interest in electricity earned him the nickname “Juicey.”

He served in the army, first at Ft. Knox and then at Brookley Field in Mobile and Hickam in Hawai’i during World War II. He left the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel, and went to work for Alabama Power for 35 years, retiring from the company as division manager. He and his wife — she was a nurse, a Vanderbilt grad, who served as a flight nurse during the war — were married for 63 years, until she passed away in 2008. He died the next year. Together, they had two sons and a daughter, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

The athletics wood engraving. Again, none of the buildings here are relevant to the Auburn campus.

On the subject of football games, this was a parade prior to a game in Columbus, the annual fistfight with Georgia.

Do we know where this photo was taken? We certainly do. The main building opposite the photographer is still standing.

In the Atlanta Constitution, No less than the great Ralph McGill wrote about that game.

Until the last bitter moment, as Georgia’s championship dream shattered against the force of an Auburn drive in the ist of a dark November day, a child’s hurt, shrill voice kept shouting, “Come on Georgia, you can hold them Georgia.”

But who can hold the thunderbolt? And who can shackle a flitting sunbeam? And who can catch a brown leaf tossing in an autumn gale?

And so it came about that Georgia’s string of seven straight games was broken here this afternoon, snipped clean by a 14-to-6 score.

McGill was the publisher of the Atlanta paper. He would go on to write syndicated columns, become a Peabody jurist and later win a Pulitzer.

Here’s one of the quality action shots. The cutline says “Tally makes short gain against Tulane Greenies.”

Tally was Marion Talley, a senior from Decatur, Georgia. He studied textile engineering and was an all-around jock. In addition to football he was a pitcher on the baseball team, and basketball, and was on the track team. He married soon after college, had a daughter in 1941 and lost his wife in 1978. He got remarried sometime after that, and died in Georgia in 1995. The web doesn’t tell me a lot more about him, but Marion Talley’s stiff arm should live forever.

I believe that’s Harold Memtsas, a 167-pound end he’s about to pie face. He was something of a legend in Louisiana sports. But 167 pounds! Tulane’s smallest defensive end last year was 230 pounds. (And that’s undersized.)

The leaders of cheer. Still just the guys. I wonder if, in the next few years, they felt shortchanged. Four years hence, the first women would join the cheer squad. But these guys wouldn’t see it.

Ralph Sargent was a freshman from Birmingham, studying aeronautical engineering. Next to him is Bill McTyeire, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. He married Katherine, served as an engineer in World War II in Germany and the PTO. He spent much of his career after that at the Birmingham Ornamental Iron Company, where he established Meadowcraft, a furniture division that would, one-day, be one of the successful casual furniture makers in the country. He served as a general chairman of the United Way, was very active in many of the prominent civic and social organizations in his hometown. (I’d list them, but it is excessive.) He was also on the board of some of the largest business concerns in the state. He died, at 90, in 2003. He was survived by his wife of 61 years. They had five children and eight grand-children.

Third from the left is Ed Prewitt, a junior electrical engineering major from Mobile. He was the captain of the squad, but what he did after school escapes us. Next to him is Billy H. Morrison, a Memphis boy, a senior, studying civil engineering. He married a Missouri girl and went to work for the Portland Cement Association, which has poured cement we’ve all stood on or stared at, seems like. He died in 1980 at 68.

I think my favorite things about that photo are the hand-painted megaphones and those sweaters. A lot of the old looks should come back every so often, and that’s definitely one of them.

That’s enough for now. In next week’s look at the 1934 Glomerata, we’ll check out the basketball squad, the new sports of polo, swimming and diving, and more.

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.