Samford « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Samford

You’ll be jealous of my errands, and these ads

Finals day today. My students feverishly were emailing in the last of the work I’ve challenged them with and made them endure this term. Well, some raced. One student turned in the final work on Friday.

The rest, well, they knew they had until 3 p.m., the end of our scheduled final block.

“Three p.m.,” I said, “does not mean 3:01. One minute after means that’s one less I have to grade.”

They’re going to live in a deadline-driven world.

The last paper came in at about 2:28, so the message was received. Also, I must now grade them all.

Want to see an amazing story?

“Why do it?”

“It makes me feel normal and whole.”

Watch this video. But you have to watch the entire thing. And it is absolutely worth watching the whole thing.

I ran errands today. Here are the three least exciting parts of that: I visited an eye doctor’s office to make an appointment for later in the week. A nice young lady answered all of my questions with a laugh an assuring assurance. They booked me for Thursday.

Are you riveted?

I washed my car. And then I took the floor mats out and dropped them through this shaker machine that gets 98 percent of the grass and leaves and crumbs off of them. And then I vacuumed the rest of the trash off of the mats and the floor boards. I noticed that my car wasn’t completely clean, but it was closer to clean than it has been in a while. I’d been enjoying an industrial grade of autumn dust lately.

I got gas. I dropped my card at the pump twice.

The other thing I did was slightly more interesting than that, somehow, and it will be the subject of Wednesday’s post.

To wrap up today, and in honor of finals — and because these are two of the last four clips I have at the moment, here are two old ads from mid-1980s Crimson issues. Two things you don’t think about so much any more, I’d bet:

John’s is closed now, but it has a special place in history. It was opened in 1959, the first color film processing lab in the state. John was 24. There used to be at least four locations. Two were in strip malls. One building is now vacant. The other now has either a hotel or a car dealership on the old lot. Based on some canceled trademarks registered to the owner, I’m assuming the stores closed about two years after this ad ran. He died just over six years ago.

Bet you haven’t said “I need to run to Kinko’s!” in a good long while:

There are apparently still over 2,000 FedEx stores, which is the brand now, of course. It is the seventh largest printing chain in the country and Kinko’s is nothing but a memory. And it was so close to becoming a proprietary eponym, too.

Auburn / football / Friday / history / iPhone / photo / Samford — Comments Off
5
Dec 14

The end of the semester

Last day of class today, and so we wrapped it up with broadcast scripts. I gave them a Christmas tree story, a real lean-in piece about how it isn’t trees that give some people an allergic reaction, but the mold sometimes found in live trees that irritate people’s sinuses.

We’ve all been there, covering strange non-stories and trying to make it feel important trying to feel like it isn’t a waste of our time. I certainly did my share in this newsroom or that. Not every story can be a triple homicide, thank heavens, so then every example shouldn’t be such a thing.

At the end of the class we went over the ground rules of the Monday final again. I crossed the lowercase Js on the last details of the class, wished them a happy holidays and, as always, thanked them for suffering through the class with me.

And then back to the office to finish up this and that, a host of emails, the required moment of listening to Van Morrison, traditionally marking the last day of class for reasons I’ve already forgotten. Ordering this, checking off that, phone calls and the details, details, details that always mark the end of a week, the sigh of a Friday, combined with the exhalation of the term.

I got out of the office a little later than I wanted, but still beat the traffic, for the most part.

I found these in that archive folder I’ve been working through. These aren’t from the Crimson, but rather from the Birmingham News, which was still a daily newspaper back then. This first one blows out the site’s template a little bit — I don’t regularly publish squares — but this was an important story, the fight over changing the area was underway:

Basically, when the university’s board purchased, for a song, the Lakeshore property and moved from Eastlake in the 1950s they got the land on both sides of Lakeshore. On the one side is the campus proper. (There are a few things across Lakeshore now.) But they also go the land on the other side, which was a swampy lake undeveloped and, of course, back then the atmosphere through the area was a lot more quiet.

Now there’s the high school, a business park, some retail development down the road and so on. Also, a lovely recreational area. Of course the residents weren’t keen on all of that once upon a time. I don’t remember the area as they were fighting over it, but the building up over the years has been quite nice. There is more traffic, yes, and the road feels too slow while the traffic simultaneously feels too fast. They were concerned about flooding, but that has always seemed minimal in my experience. At the end of the day, if you’ve never been through there, you’d think it was a charming area, because it is.

There is so, so much local and campus history built up in all of those events of the last 60 years, and specifically since the development really kicked in during the 1980s.

This clipping, also from the Birmingham News, is from 1987 and it details the sell of some of that property to Southern Progress. They would ultimately build three nice buildings and a handsome campus for their various publications. But Southern Progress, which has been based in Birmingham since 1911, has fallen on hard times like many publishers in recent years. Time has owned them since the 1980s, one magazine was sold off a few years ago. There have been cutbacks and rollbacks and all sorts of restructuring.

Last month, Samford started the process of purchasing the property once again. Today, the university’s board approved the 28-acre purchase. The three buildings and parking on the Southern Progress campus will be shared by the pub pros and university units. Everything comes full circle.

This photo was on the back of one of those stories. I can’t now recall if I remember this name or if my searching my memory is giving me the wrong impression. Johnny Imani Harris pled guilty in the 1970s to a string of robberies and a rape. Apparently, his representation wasn’t very good and they convinced him to pled guilty or face the death penalty. He did. He got five life terms. He took part, or was caught up in, a 1974 protest of prison conditions that turned into a riot where a guard died. No one said in court that Harris stabbed the corrections officer, but nevertheless Harris was found guilty and given the death penalty.

When you dive into the entire Johnny Imani Harris tale, things quickly seem itchy. A circuit judge in 1987 agreed and overturned the death penalty. Somewhere in that part of the story is where we find this photo. The build up to that ruling and the finding itself brought up more demonstrations. He was paroled in 1991 on the rape and robbery. As far as I can tell he hasn’t showed up in the media since then.

Went to the last high school state football championship game at Jordan-Hare tonight. Sat in a booth with some folks from Clay-Chalkville. Two of them were on the last state championship team from that school. They both wore their letterman’s jacket from 2001. In the next booth was the grandmother of one of the Clay-Chalkville running backs. She said she’s raised him and we cheered for him because she was adorable and she kept bringing food over to our booth. Better, she said, than carrying it back downstairs. So go number 6, we said. Clay-Chalkville won in a blowout. Everyone we saw, then, was very pleased.

As we left the stadium from the nice little luxury boxes we poked our heads in the even-nicer president’s suite. Right by there is the elevator. Good to see Gene Chizik still hanging around:

I guess they figure “We’re still paying him, we may as well take advantage of the photograph.” He’s getting $209,457.84 a month, through the 2015-2016 fiscal year. Maybe he has pictures of key university players hanging in his home, too.

history / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
4
Dec 14

“I’m punching my card”

Busy day on campus and in the office, today. I’ve been making some adjustments to the new website we rolled out this week. It is starting to look pretty nice. Now to teach the quirks to others. That will mean meetings after the first of the year and, until then, a lot of detailed emails to people who would probably wish I’d find another hobby. Anyway, you can check it out at samfordcrimson.com.

I also watched the volleyball team, which has two of our majors, play in the first round of the NCAA tournament. They took an early exit today, but they’ve nevertheless had a great season. Southern Conference champs! And we heard about the coaching search for a new head football coach taking shape. And also there was plenty of things to grade as things wind down.

The key, as ever, is to put yourself ahead of the curve by standing as close to it as you can, because you are always behind.

What’s fun, though, is to look at where your students are now in their writing compared to where they were at the beginning of the term. Some make great strides. Others have made strong refinements. There’s a lot of pride in that sort of evolution. Good for them.

Tonight was the Hanging of the Green and the Lighting of the Way, a late season highlight and a lovely way to spend part of your evening. The Hanging of the Green in Reid Chapel has been marking the Advent at Samford since 1980. The program is based off the traditional Lessons and Carols Service in Cambridge at King’s College. The Lighting of the Way has been taking place on campus since 2001, it usually features a bit of singing or a concert and some impromptu messages and, always, the Christmas story. Dr. Jeanna Westmoreland read the message tonight:

A few hundred students piled out of Reid Chapel, in the background, to the middle of the quad to hear the story and countdown the lights and then hear a show.

The first song started “The weather outside is frightful … ” except it was sunny and 74 here today.

This is the administration building, and I thought the light treated it pretty well this evening:

You remember the movie Footloose, the tale of a young man who taught a rural town how to love and laugh and dance. That movie came out in 1984. I’m going to assume I saw that on cable a year or two later and I remember thinking, as a child, that the premise was a little flimsy.

Can’t dance? In this day in age?

Well. Let me show you what I’ve found in this Crimson drawer I’ve been slowly working through. Note the date, 1988:

Seems the Greeks got a mandate about dancing and guests in their houses and so they pulled out of the big spring show and that caused quite the stir. The story continues:

He got something of a sidebar in the same issue, which traced the contentious issue of dancing on campus back to the 19th century:

Two weeks later, the same reporter is back with an update, the president of the university, the late Thomas Corts, had signaled a formal sea change on the issue:

This was a long time ago. Right? Well, 28 years is ancient to some, and just around the corner for others. Nevertheless, history was made in early February of 1988 at Samford, everybody cut footloose:

In that same issue the Crimson published the results of a phone survey they ran on campus, where they learned that 82 percent of students were in favor of dancing.

I wonder if we’d do a text or an Instagram survey these days.

photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
3
Dec 14

In the clip below we revisit the word ‘mainframe’

I had a late night hanging out with the newsroom folk last night. And, after they were done, I still had to finish my work, planning a lecture and an exam. So I got to sleep at about 4:30 this morning.

After class today I spent the afternoon working on a website and then critiquing the newspaper and hanging out with the news staff again. It was a full and long day. So this is short.

I received a Christmas ornament from a friend, handmade!

So that will go in a place of happy Christmas joy.

And, we’ll just end the long day with this, another one of those clips that are resting in a folder in a drawer in my office. This little blurb is from 1987, which was just years after the journalism department was reinstated, and not too long after the first personal computers showed up on campus. My, what a marvel:

I have four computers in my office and there are five more in the bullpen just outside my door. “You have here a whole world of information possibilities,” indeed.

It is still very much in progress, but check out the relaunched samfordcrimson.com, the “product of modern technology.”

Auburn / football / history / photo / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
2
Dec 14

Pat Sullivan resigns as Samford coach

Pat Sullivan, Samford’s winningest football coach, the 1971 Heisman Trophy winner at Auburn, announced today he is stepping down and putting away his whistle. He played in the NFL, coached at Auburn and UAB and was the head man at TCU. He’s also a wonderfully kind and thoughtful Southern gentleman.

I wrote a little profile about him a few years ago for a now defunct magazine. We reprinted it at The War Eagle Reader:

Sullivan was relaxed in his office, which still feels new. There are framed portraits waiting to be put on the walls. He works out of the handsome new field house at Seibert Stadium on the Samford campus, not too far from where he attended high school. This is home. He looks upon the stops in his career with gratitude, but he’s happy to be here.

“It’s been very special to me. My father came to school here. He played on the first (then named Howard College) football team. He was struggling with cancer about the time I got the job. It was special to be able to come here,” Sullivan remembers.

Bringing in the Auburn-great was the start of a significant chapter in Samford sports history. The Bulldogs soon joined the Southern Conference and now lines up against schools like Chattanooga, The Citadel and Appalachian State.

“It’s where I wanted to come and try to do something that you could be proud of. We changed conferences. We’ve built up our facilities. We’ve really raised our level. We’re not there yet, but we’ve made tremendous strides. I’m excited about our future and where we’re headed. It’s just taken a little while to get there,” Sullivan said.

And in that space between here and there, Sullivan is content.

What didn’t make it into that profile is my second-favorite Pat Sullivan story. At the time we were about to sit down there was a mild controversy going on in college football and he felt adamantly about not discussing that issue. It wasn’t in the plans for my profile anyway, but I said “Coach, I’m not going to ask about that. I’m an Auburn man.”

And, to one of those men who personifies that concept, that answer was good enough.

My favorite Pat Sullivan story came later that fall. I had one of his football players, a starter, in a class I was teaching. One day I let them out a few minutes early and the football player stayed behind. I asked him if he needed anything and he said no.

“Coach said ‘If you’re class doesn’t end until 5, I don’t want to see you out here before 5.'”

The man is about so much more than football. Always has been. He’s been a great asset to Samford and he’s talked, since he signed on there at the end of 2006, how fortunate he was to be there, and how well treated he was by everyone. Pat Sullivan is a Southern gentleman, mentor to young people and, also, a football coach.

Here’s a video from his 2011 trip to coach Samford at Auburn:

Sullivan’s statue outside Jordan-Hare:

The second winningest coach at Samford? A guy who also coached at Auburn: Terry Bowden. And he looked impossibly young in 1988:

He’s about 31 there, ready to start his second year on the job and feeling good about what was ahead. He’d gone 9-1 in his first campaign, but he and his staff had a setback in 1988. The braintrust:

Tony Ierulli is on the Carson-Newman staff today. Both Engle and Armstrong share names with legendary coaches, so they are difficult to find today. Bob Stinchcomb is the athletics director at a Georgia prep school. Todd Stroud is back with Bowden today at Akron. Jack Hines has had stops at West Virginia, Florida State, Samford, Auburn and Clemson and is now a defensive coordinator for a Georgia high school team. Jeff Bowden’s career has followed his famous brother and his even more famous father. Jeff, these days, is also at Akron.

Mark Howard and Benny Fairbanks are in the wind. I found a Vic Colley, but I’m not sure if it is the right man. Colin Hutto, I think, is at a private high school in Tennessee these days. John Harper played receiver at Samford. No idea where he is today.

The last guy on the coaching staff you might have heard of:

Jimbo Fisher played one year at Samford, that 9-1 season from 1987. He had a cup of coffee in professional football — but said he was too small — and came back to be an assistant at Samford.

He’s spent a great deal of time following Bowdens too, of course. Jimbo and both Bowdens coached at Samford, not bad for the tiny school on the side of a hill. Things have changed a lot here, all over campus, as we’re learning through these quarter-century old newspaper clips. A lot has changed over in the football program, too, much for the better. A lot of it because of Pat Sullivan.