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memories

Dean Foy

We woke up this morning to learn the sad news that a great Auburn man died last night. Dean James Edgar Foy was a graduate of Alabama, a World War II naval pilot, holder of a PhD from Michigan State (this picture, from the 1970 Glomerata, was just after he’d returned to Auburn from MSU) and a man who’d given the better part of his life to Auburn University.

He has a building named in his honor (should be two buildings, many have argued). The trophy shared between Auburn and Alabama for the fabled football rivalry also borrows Foy’s name. The famous Foy desk is named in his honor.

My personal memories with the dean are, sadly few, and center around the briefest and most cordial conversations at sporting events. While he was, in many respects, a man of another era, he was a timeless gentleman.

A friend of mine from undergrad remembers being honored at a Naval ROTC event with the dean. The two of them cut a cake together, my friend as the youngest attendee, Foy as the oldest. A lot of Auburn men and women have a great Foy story, there will no doubt be more in the coming days. Here’s a good one.

This picture was from the 1976 Glomerata. It is from the Florida game, a particular miserable experience from the yearbook’s recounting. But, apparently, the students always had fun with Dean Foy, who retired in 1978, still full of life.

Dean James Edgar Foy was 93. He is survived by the entire Auburn family, all of whom are grateful for either knowing him or benefiting from a legacy he helped establish. Dean Foy is an Auburn man.

journalism / links / memories / photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
22
Sep 10

Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium

This reminds me of the Bessemer City Councilwoman who foolishly thought she could claim an endorsement from the local football coach — as if no one would follow up on that. Except that lady, in her brilliant moment of mayoral campaigning, managed to Photoshop a picture of herself with the coach at a golf tournament. Of course the coach had made no such endorsement. And, also, the councilwoman’s campaign made a poor Photoshop effort. You can still see the coach’s wife’s hair in the image.

But this is completely real, of course. This young man traveled north and secured the endorsement of our most famous Founding Father. There’s no Photoshopping here. He has another poster standing beside the famous Rocky statue in Philadelphia. With endorsements like those he has to be a campaign favorite.

I love SGA posters. There’s another guy who is using a Forrest Gump theme. The young ladies all have cute designs and slogans, most that rhyme. There’s another campaign who has pressed Ron Burgundy into service. These are amusing popularity contests.

We critiqued the Crimson for about two hours today. They didn’t want me looking over their shoulder last night, and I was happy to oblige them, so we went over it line by line today. For only being three issues into their run the finished product was encouraging.

I picked a lot of minor details and a few obvious things that shouldn’t have escaped their attention. There’s no such thing as a perfect newspaper, but I’m pleased with this issue and still think they hold a great deal of potential. They had coverage of the gubernatorial debate and a Pulitzer winner. There’s also a story on record student enrollment and on Eleanor Clift’s visit.

Clift has covered a lot of great stories, but her own tale is a good one. She was a 1970s newsroom hire when you didn’t see a lot of female reporters. Someone assigned her to cover a darkhorse presidential candidate, some peanut farmer from Georgia no one had ever heard of. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election, and the tradition is that the reporter that covered the campaign follows the president-elect. Clift joined the White House press corps and the rest is history.

That story is a good one. They agonized over it for a long time, they said, because they knew Clift would read it. I’m going to threaten to send every story they write for the rest of the year to the Newsweek veteran.

You can see the full issue here.

Busy day. Started at the gym early this morning, where the biggest problem I had was in almost pinching my pinkie off on the Smiths machine. You’d think, since they named it after me, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but the left hand re-rack is a tricky maneuver. So I nicked the skin off the top of my knuckle, pinching it between the bar and rack. This flies into my fundamental goal of going through life with all of my appendages intact, so I’ll just move a little more to the right next time.

Visited al.com today. I think this was my third visit since I left there in 2008. My desk is still empty. Prime cubicle space like that simply can’t go empty, though, so they call it the “Kenny Smith Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium.”

After that a meeting here, lunch there, sales talk, the paper itself, and then studying.

I had to renew my IRB certification tonight. Required every two years for people doing research with human participants, mine was winding down. So I read the things you have to read and took the quizzes you have to take and now I have the nifty little certification to put in a filing cabinet and forget.

Meanwhile my lifeguard certification is woefully out of date. I can’t pull you from a pool, but I can give you surveys and run psychophysiology experiments with you.

If, that is, my IRB proposals are accepted. I have one of those due tomorrow. The Yankee helped (a great deal). And then there’s the reading. Another 100 pages to stumble through tonight. It looks like another after-midnight bedtime.

books / history / journalism / memories / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Sep 10

Teeming Tuesday

I’d like to try putting a few more things into a Tuesday, just to see if it is possible. Tuesdays are the fullest of days. Met with the boss. Tried, and failed, to install a new printer on my new iMac.

Called the tech guy who, happily, could not install it the first time. If it takes him two attempts I don’t feel so bad.

Had lunch. Met with the WVSU news director. We talked about Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, who is on campus this week. She’s been in classes and student meetings and will deliver a big lecture tomorrow night. She’s got such a great story, really. But more on that tomorrow.

Tried to meet with a student, but missed. Made copies of everything for my class. Held class, delivering a spelling test, talking about news leads and doing wholesale news rewrites.

We made fun of typos. There were two on the most recent cover of Soap Opera Digest. I can’t find a link and can’t bring myself to upload it here, but the designer has forgotten their rules on apostrophes.

And then there was the paper. The students have worked on it all night. I get a question here, make a joke there and listen and tell stories. Now, around midnight, they’ve announced they’re going it alone. I offer to copy edit the first few editions with them, but they rightly want to remove me from that process. This is the moment where they pedal away, around the block and you’re just so proud to see them go.

Tomorrow they make it back from their circuit around the block. We’ll critique the whole paper. We’ll talk about how to improve their technique, steady lines, standing, brakes and falling. Hey, I might keep this bike metaphor. You’re just so proud.

I decorated a wall in my office.

Those are Stars and Stripes announcing the end of World War II. The one on the right is the Paris Edition announcing the Germany surrender. I found that paper purely by accident at a place called The Deal in an artsy Louisville, Ky. That was the same day, incidentally, when I decided to build the half-hearted black and white section of the site.

It was a nice day. I’d spent a long weekend visiting the folks. They took me to a local funky, artisan restaurant and just down the road we found that store. It doesn’t deal in antiques. Or in things that feel like antiques. Everything is from that frozen moment when your grandparents stopped trying to be contemporary. Much of it was familiar, but vague. You could understand the function of all the merchandise, but if you weren’t from the period the why could be lost on you.

We ate at that restaurant and used bookstores and a record store and that shop. It was a great day.

They were stored in a desk pretty close together, the pictures and the newspaper, and they might have once belonged to the same family. There was also a Red Cross map of Paris. The woman sold it all to me for next to nothing, just glad to get it out of her way. She’d much rather sell mid-century modern furniture and clothes.

My step-father bought me a little bookholder there, too. It is sitting on top of one of my bookshelves and holds Winston Churchill’s history of the war. A friend sold me all six volumes for $20. He bought them from a library and realized he’d never read them. I Hope to one day. Maybe I’ll bring that newspaper home next summer and read the books underneath the authentic newsprint.

The paper announcing the Japanese surrender is also from Stars and Stripes, the Mediterranean edition of the military paper. It is a bracing headline, but that too will be a teaching moment. What is contemporary and acceptable today might not be a name that people approve of years from now.

I don’t have a great story for that paper, though. I bought it from e-bay. I wish I’d asked the seller to try and explain that particular issue’s history. Someone thought enough to bring it home from Italy, or thereabouts, but now we’ll never know the details.

Auburn / football / memories / Monday — Comments Off
6
Sep 10

Some Mondays are slower than others

And some Mondays the ideas come slower.

My Monday? I spent the entire day on class prep. How does one spend two hours on grammar and keep students interested?

I think I’ll have about 75 minutes, actually. And then I’ll do a case study.

I liked case studies. That was my favorite class exercise, talking about a story or circumstance and weighing the pros and cons, taking the other position just for fun. It was a bit Socratic. A friend of mine tells me I’d like law school for this same reason. For once I’ll just believe him and not find out for myself.

The thing I really missed, after graduating and finding myself in a newsroom, were those conversations. We just never had time. Too many deadlines. And, in some later newsrooms, there weren’t that many people. At al.com we had these discussions, but it was about a lot of 2.0 and 3.0 topics.

Do students still enjoy case studies? I bring up one or two in the Crimson newsroom when I can. Tomorrow I’ll add one to my classroom goody bag.

So, yes. this took a great deal of the day. But the slide show, for the grammar, should be thorough.

We grilled steaks tonight. Had dinner over the Boise State-Virginia Tech game. Very fun to watch. They both look fast, if only Virginia Tech played with more certainty early. Since it was a back and forth game, though, and since Boise is from, well, Boise, I’m sure people will argue they haven’t proven themselves. They get a sponge cake of scheduling every year, but they beat everyone they play, even in the marquee, game of the week settings halfway across the country. Boise State belongs.

Those uniforms do not. Just dreadful stuff. The game looked like Tecmo Bowl, 8-bit graphics and a flea flicker to start the action followed by calls with little internal logic. Not that anyone noticed, every fanbase was too busy silently thanking the merchandising gods that their school wasn’t in a Nike deal. And the Nike fans were just dreading the next big “experiment.”

When I was in undergrad — two memories in one post! — someone had the nice idea to add an orange shadowbox under the jersey numbers. You would have thought they were tearing down beloved campus buildings based on the response. It is hard to imagine what would happen if Nike had the Auburn unis with which to tinker.

Not much else here for now. No history lessons today. The day just got away from me. Sorry about that. It won’t happen again.

Anyway, enjoy your four day office jaunt. And while you’re already mentally coasting into Wednesday, you can join me in wondering why someone didn’t advocate for Labor Week.

Just something to think about.

memories / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
Aug 10

Sales meeting, and also, Ted Turner

Getting to be that time of year again:

Samford fanfest

Incidentally, that white vehicle on the left margin? That’s an armored truck absolutely running through a stone cold red light. Almost whacked that car, which was turning under a supposedly protected green arrow. I hope the money made it to wherever 45 seconds earlier than necessary. But I digress.

I stopped by an outdoors store — where they pay a guy to ride a forklift, full time, moving giant gun safes back and forth across the parking lot. It is a curious activity. Anyway, I’d stopped there because I have this old knife:

USMC knife

My great-grandfather gave it to me, years ago. It is a Marine Corps knife, though my grandfather was in the army. (You can read a bit more about the knife here and here.) He was a medic in Europe, earned a silver star and a purple heart. After the war he came home, never talked about it, raised his family and farmed his land. I think, if I remember correctly, he found this on the side of the road and gave it to my mother to give to me when I became old and smart enough to not cut off my hand.

Not that there’s any danger of that right now. The blade needs sharpening. But, otherwise, it is in great shape, except that the one tang has the point snapped off. The blades need a good deal of cleaning. I know a little about knives, enough to know you can damage them if you clean them incorrectly. So I’ve been hoping, for a while, to find a knife expert. Hence the outdoor store.

Find the knife counter, they had a knife counter, and the guy working there interrupts his conversation with another man who was Ted Turner.

Or his twin.

And, yes, you’d think he would have been taller. In the South the man is as big as life itself. In person, this gentleman was about five-foot-four.

The guy behind the counter says he can show me what I need. He leads me away. I apologize to Mr. Turner, who says “A great-grandfather’s knife is far more important than I am.”

Which is how I realized that the man I met wasn’t Ted Turner. There’s no way that guy is as cool as this guy.

The stuff I need, is a product called Flitz. Wash the blades with a mild dish soap, he said. Dry it. And then go to work on it with Flitz. It will take elbow grease, but it will shine the blades up nicely, he said.

I’ll let you know how the project turns out.

Met the new sales manager today. She’s a nice young lady. I try not to overload them with too much material all at once, but sometimes there is just a lot to be shared. We talked for about an hour about rate cards and sales approaches and this and that. I think she’ll do a very nice job.

I’m going to sit down with the Samford Crimson staff next week and talk about goals and achievements and try to start them out with a good, passionate first step. The are a little young, this year, but there’s a lot of potential in the group and I expect they’ll take some great strides and be doing great things before the year is out.

No pressure.

At the gym I had a monster workout. Basically doubled the reps on squats and lunges. I did way too many trapezoid curls. I did abs. I rode 30 miles. All together it was a two-hour endorphin ride. That ended before I even made it to the shower, unfortunately. But! But. If I could work out for two hours on a regular basis I’d be very pleased with myself.

If only.

Tomorrow: I work the phones. I read. And the 1939 World’s Fair will make a comeback.