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Auburn / Friday / Glomerata / history / photo — Comments Off
23
Feb 24

The 1946 Glomerata, part one

I recently purchased a new desktop document camera. It arrived and, today, I began playing around with it. There is a lot to learn, namely consistency of production values and efficiency. But, even in this learning curve part of this new toy’s workflow is already better. When I take a photo, it is already on my computer. Struggling with this camera, then, is already better than struggling with the phone.

Anyway, the first project is taking pictures of some of the photos in this beautiful book.

That’s the 1946 edition of The Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater. I collect the yearbooks. For one, they look great. For another, it’s a unique and contained hobby. I like that it was a finite thing. The first Glom was published in 1897. (I don’t have that one, so if you run across it … ) and the last, latest one I’ll collect was the 2016 book. There are 120 in between. (One year they published two books.) I now have 112 of them.

I’m sharing these images here as I digitize them, but just in case anyone else is interested, you can find them all here.

In the 1990s I ate at The Grille, the same restaurant where the English staff, are eating. I may have eaten in this same booth.

We ate there weekly. Spaghetti, with a free second plate. Every week. It wasn’t enough. The restaurant closed while I was in school, and it is one of those things you can’t not be sad about.

But that’s not what we’re about. We’re going to see how students lived in the 1940s.

Kirtley Brown was the director of student affairs. He’d been in PR. Sometime soon after this he and his wife, the now-famed author Mary Ward Brown moved back to the family farm. He died in 1970, and she passed away in 2013. Their son became a criminal justice instructor at the nearby Marion Military Institute. Kirtley Brown, the son, retired in 2023.

And we’ll probably share every photograph of people on bikes.

Mildred Woodham was the editor of The Glomerata. From Geneva, Alabama, she studied art, graduated in 1946 and moved to New York to become a fabulously successful sculptor.

Known professionally as Jean Woodham, she had prominent shows and won prestigious awards for almost 70 years.

Her last show was at the art museum at her alma mater, in 2013. She passed away in 2021.

I don’t plan on including a lot of the posed posed shots in this collection, but she was the editor of The Glom and all of this was worth mentioning.

This is a scene from the campus newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman. I worked there in school, of course.

I’ve no idea where this room is or was. The paper was in a different building when I was in school, a building that wasn’t even on blueprints when this photo was taken. It is housed in still another building today.

Here’s another surely staged scene from The Plainsman. The careful viewer will note it is the same room, with a slightly wider angle, panned to the right, with all new people.

It was a twice-a-week publication until the late 1940s. It was a weekly, the largest weekly in the state, when I was in school. They went primarily online in 2011.

In between, they’ve won 25 National Pacemaker Awards — basically the collegiate Pulitzer — including two when I was on the staff.

Yes, I have plaques.

Mimi Simms was the editor of The Plainsman. She was the second woman to sit in the big chair. She comes from Auburn royalty.

One of her brothers played football for the university, and was recorded as the best tennis player on campus. That many became a veterinarian, much like their father did. Their young brother is Jack Simms, the legendary founding faculty member of the journalism department.

Mimi did her graduate work at the University of Alabama, but we don’t hold that sort of thing against people. It seems she never married. She died in 2000, and is buried in Tennessee with her parents.

This handsome fellow is Greg Allen, president of the veterans’ organization, and yes, there are a lot of coat and tie photos in this yearbook.

Maria Duchac’s nickname was Skippy and that’s the best possible name. Also, this was apparently a family nickname, she’s heard it her whole life. She studied chemical engineering.

I love everything about this. Her major, her nickname and that door.

And as of this writing she is apparently still with us. War Eagle, Skippy.

The cutline simply says “Folk dancing class.”

I’m assuming there’s some rule that there’s a reason they were all women. But look how some of them were so intently having fun!

But there was plenty of dancing, elsewhere, of course.

The caption here reads “Winners of Jitterbug Contest.”

White leather shoes are about due a comeback, right?

And that’s 10 photos, and 800 words on the subject. That seems like a good stopping point for now.

More from the 1946 Glom next Friday. You can see all of the book covers I’ve collected, here. And if you just like old photographs, I’ve digitized selections from a few of the other old books here.

And just so where we remember where they are, all of the 1946 photos are landing right here.

Cozumel / cycling / photo / SCUBA / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Feb 24

A new high mark

We opened a ticket with the home warranty people last week. We generally have good luck with home warranty people, though many have nightmare stories. How it works with this particular company: you have a problem, you check to see if the home warranty will cover it, you put in a request … to the people who work for you … to see if they’ll do the thing you pay them for. And then they approve.

An email link comes back. You’re approved! And this company will send a highly trained professional well equipped in the trade will come out and examine your problem, make several deeply intimidating noises as it relates to the issue, criticizes the anonymous person or people who did or didn’t do the things that led to it, and then show you what a career spent in the industry means for creating the appropriately deft maneuvers required with their hands and tools. And what day would you like them to come?

Their system lets you pick three dates, and the general time of dya. So rank order them, which day is best? And why are afternoons always ideal? I selected this Tuesday afternoon, yesterday afternoon and this afternoon as my preferred choices. That way, I could sit here and grade, and do other fun things at home, while I waited for someone to pull up the drive. And I bet you can tell where this little story is going now.

We generally have good luck with home warranty people. Contractors, however. Hit or … what’s that other word?

I’m getting low on photos from our last SCUBA diving trip. This means that, next week, I’ll have to switch over to more SCUBA diving videos.

The things I do for you people.

The things I did for me: several decades ago I took a SCUBA diving certification course. Later, I talked my then-girlfriend into getting certified, as well. Then I purchased the SeaLife Micro 2.0 camera off eBay. Then I boarded a plane and flew to another country, where I endured pleasant temperatures in January and allergies so I could go diving, which allowed me to take this photograph.

She’s perfect in it, but the phone could be a bit better so, ya know, we’ll need to go diving again. Darn the luck.

Some photography simply needs to be improved on. Some are good enough to see variations of, over and over. Like another shot of Jennifer, the turtle.

Don’t worry, we’ll see a bit more of the turtle before we wrap up the photos. Jennifer the turtle is a star.

This was one of the views I had on my late night bike ride last night. Alone, it is of no significance. But when you put it all together, it means just a little more. Somewhere, right in this portion of the ride, I set a nice personal best.

It means nothing, really, this personal best, but my spreadsheet likes it. One of the pages on the cycling spreadsheet, there are several pages, is titled “Monthly Marks.” On this page I rank each month by the highest mileage. My top months, all time:

10. July, 2018
9. Feb, 2023
8. June, 2011
7. April, 2023
6. July, 2011
5. Jan, 2024
4. May, 2016
3. Jan, 2023
2. Nov, 2023

And right about at that spot above, this month, February 2024, became my all time high mileage month. And it’s a short month! And there’s still a week to go! And my legs feel all of it!

Tomorrow, we’ll start an entirely new experience on the site. I’ve no idea what it’ll look like yet, but it’ll be interesting, and probably too long by half. Come back to enjoy it all!

Monday / photo — Comments Off
19
Feb 24

We had snow this weekend

The forecast called for waking up to three to five inches of snow on Saturday. It was promised to be the good, dry, powdery stuff. We looked up the amount of snow required of a snow blower — because we have a snow blower now — and the consensus was two inches. That doesn’t seem like a lot to me. Drive over it. But maybe you don’t want to. So we could shovel two inches. Only our new driveway is a bit long for shoveling.

The old driveway was a little more than a car length, which you could do with two shovels in no time, and by yourself in about twice the amount of no time. But this driveway is more imposing. We’ve shoveled it once so far, and the evening we did that it was cold. You think you’ll get out there and keep moving and get your heart rate up and your body will warm up, but that did not happen. Also, that was a good six or seven inches of snow and it had been on the ground a day or two when we got back to it. It took a while. We did enough. And that was enough of a reason to invest in a snow blower.

Which of course meant that it sat in its box in the garage for weeks because we’ve had perhaps the mildest January and February possible at this latitude. Now comes the Friday night forecast, and thank goodness there’s nowhere we have to go tomorrow, but still.

So we open the great big Toro box. There’s a snow blower inside. Imagine, for my Southern brethren, a push mower, but, instead of that place on the side where the clippings come out, there’s an ejection portal on the top. You can spin the thing so it can blow strategically to the left or right or, if you are an agent of chaos, straight up into the air. It’s shiny and new. Corvette candy apple red.

I was going to go get a quart of oil, because while we had gas, we had no oil. Except a 12-ounce bottle was included in the box. Good! One less thing to do in the half hour before the hardware store closes. So, let’s assemble the thing. This is what I did before dinner Friday night. Assembly involves five sets of nuts, bolts and washers, and then you put in the oil and gas.

There was a little matter of the nuts, bolts and washers, however. They were not included in the giant Toro box. So I spent a long, long time peering through boxes and tool boxes, tool drawers and other random places I might have put nuts, bolts and washers I’ve accumulated over the years. And what I learned is this: you don’t get as many extra nuts as you do bolts and screws.

Not only do you have to find them, you have to, of course, find pieces that will fit with one another, and the blower itself. Exactly what you should be doing at 8 p.m. on a Friday night before this week’s storm of the century. Two screws, bolts and washers were needed for the handle. I made that work. Three were needed to attach the multidirectional snow chute. Two on either side, done, but less confidently, and a third, which some does … something. You’ll probably only notice it when you’re rotating the chute or when the whole machine has rattled into action. Thing of it is, this Toro has a hard-mounted, threaded bolt post. I only needed to find a nut for it. Except I didn’t have the hardware.

Now, I figured I could tear the house apart and find the right size. But that nut, wherever it is, is doing something important already. So I strapped three bungee cords to the thing and pronounced it road worthy. The most ratchety, brand new, road worthy snowblower in three counties, I’m sure.

I decided to wait until the morning to fill it with oil and gas. I’ve done all this in good spirits, and why would I want to ruin my Friday night with issues of dripping, pouring, volume or viscosity? Besides, let’s wait to see what we actually get overnight.

We got about two inches of snow. The beautiful, wonderful, dry, powdery version. The kind that looked beautiful on the lawn, and could not stick to the patio, driveway or roads. And now we can find replacement parts for the new snow blower in our own good time. (Ensuring we don’t have to use it for a nice long while.)

Until then, welcome to our temporarily monochrome world.

Also, I noticed Friday night when I did a preemptive inspection of the fig tree, that the first signs of spring are growing in one of backyard beds. They’re a hardy sort, at least.

As I said, the dry, powdery sort of snow.

And, as an extra bonus, it looks like it only came from the one direction.

The peach tree was doing just fine.

And the pear tree in the front yard had a good grasp of things, as well. This was a delicate snow, but it knew a thing or two about balance.

Or, if you want something more colorful, the flowers inside are still stinking the place up. These look like they should be dry, brittle and crusty.

Instead they’re soft and frail, like the sleeves of an old silk blouse.

The lilies, though, they’ve really come to life this weekend.

Back outside, our neighbor puts on the best sunsets.

Can I tell you how awesome that snow was? It was quite, pretty, dry and clean. By the time I went outside to take that sunset photo and walk around the back of the yard to put a few random sticks on the stick pile, the snow was all but gone.

By today, the only evidence of any weekend precipitation was in the perpetually shady spots.

The cats did just find with the winter weather. Here is Poseidon, in his warm kitty cave, in front of the space heater.

I don’t know why he always thinks he wants to go outside. He is too accustomed to all of the comforts of indoors.

Phoebe went another route to keep herself warm.

Both were effective. And now let’s bring on the inevitable sprint to spring.

Auburn / Cozumel / Friday / Glomerata / history / photo / SCUBA / site — Comments Off
16
Feb 24

A nice package arrived today

On the front porch, and a day earlier than anticipated, was a box with two books inside. I found these online, on e-Bay, actually, in one of the more fruitful examples of late night insomnia. The prices were low and right and the end of the auctions were listed during the Super Bowl.

No one was paying attention to e-Bay. But I have a particular set of skills, and so I was paying attention to e-Bay and watching the game and silently wondering, for about the sixth year in a row, why we still get worked up about the commercials which were — not exactly pedestrian — but standard fare for the most part. Many commercials are well done these days, so you have to really stand out with celebrities, but they’re in spots all the time. Many commercials are good. And so even the good commercials debuted during the Super Bowl didn’t stand out too much, except for the ones that were obviously going to be controversial in some corner of the web. And that wretched Temu ad.

But I digress. I won both auctions. The nice lady who sold me the books offered to combine shipping and, today, they have arrived.

I opened the box, and inside were two large Ziploc bags. Inside each bag was a book. That book was wrapped in guerilla-resistance strength cling wrap. And, beneath, that a two layer roll of bubble wrap.

The woman who sold me these books really understands me.

Inside the first bubble wrapped, shrink wrapped, Ziploc bag was this.

That’s the 1912 Glomerata, the yearbook from my alma mater. This book is 102 years old, and the cover is showing that age. Even if it does need rebinding, the pages inside are basically perfect. The cover, particularly of the older books, is where the fun is.

Longtime readers know I collect the Glomeratas. It seemed like a good thing to get. They make a handsome bookcase. And it’s a unique thing to acquire. I know of two other people who dabbled in this. And, importantly, it is a finite thing. The first Glom was published in 1897. (I don’t have that one, so if you get a lead … ) and the last, latest one I’ll collect was the 2016 book. There are 120 in between. (One year they published two books.) I have 112 of them.

As I said, it’s a handsome bookcase.

The other book was the 1907 Glomerata. It has been rebound. It’s a generic black cover. No need to show you that, but what’s inside is also where the fun is.

I just spent a few minutes flipping through the 1907 book. The highest quality photos are the studio head shots and the posed group photos. There are a few candid action shots, but they are all small. It was a limitation of cameras 117 years ago. There are some cool drawings inside the older books. This one was on the page introducing the students who put the yearbook together.

That was done by a guy named F. Roy Duncan, a senior. His blurb in the yearbook says he learned to draw in an English class there, and I’m not sold on his proficiency as an artist, or as an English student. But he becomes a talented engineer and architect. Born in Columbus, Georgia, educated at Auburn. He worked in Pittsburgh, and then on the Panama Canal. It seems he stayed down there for about three years, contributing to electrical, mechanical and structural engineering projects. And then he returned to Columbus.

Some six years after that photo was taken at school, he became an architect. Among his achievements are more than a half-dozen homes still standing in various historical districts (here’s one), the Taylor County (Georgia) courthouse and parts of this Columbus church. They all survive him, as did his wife, and this art. He had a heart attack while fishing and died, at 61, in 1947.

And so we’re going to have to look at these books. And all of the rest of the collection, over time. Because I also recently picked up a nice desktop document camera. These were the first three photos I took with it, and I’m pleased. It’s a little slow and awkward as I figure out the workflow, but it seems much better than trying to take a photo on my phone, emailing it to myself and then editing thing. At the very least I’ve got out two steps in the process. And so, next week, I’ll open a book and point it at the camera.

I think I’ll probably start in the 1940s.

But first, I have to add these two covers to the Glomerata collection on the site.

(Four minutes elapse.)

There, now the 1907 and 1912 volumes have been added to my Gloms cover collection. I’ve just noticed four or five other covers which haven’t been digitized, but I’ll get to them soon. And, as of this writing, these are the only ones I need to add to the collection: 1899, 1900, 1902, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1911, 1913, 1915, 1916.

Beyond a certain point, as you can imagine, they are difficult to find.

I just wrote 800-plus words about things that are only of interest to me! Let’s show you some diving photos, which I know you’ve been waiting for, patiently, and get you in to your weekend.

There is absolutely positively nothing like just … hanging there in the water. It’s so captivating that I spend time on most dives just watching other people do it. Like my dive buddy!

This is a shot-from-the-hip of a woman that was on one of our dive boats with us. She just happened to float over, or I swam under, or whatever it was, and I looked up. I love these shots, and I include it here as a reminder to myself to take more of them, which can only be done by more diving.

Dive boat dynamics are interesting. Unless you go as a big unruly group you’re surrounded by strangers. These are two-tank dives, which means you go out, take the first dive, and then enjoy another, all without having to return to land. For safety reasons that have to do with the chemistry of your blood under the mild pressures involved with reef diving, you take a surface interval. So you wind up talking to people. And they’re often just fascinating. This dive had a bishop from Miami, a high powered business man from Denver, this woman, who is in pediatric medicine and, of course, us. Plus there’s the captain and the divemaster, who is an underwater welder doing this in his free time. That’s an awesome amount of brain power on one little vessel, and also me.

So you wind up having some interesting chats. Usually it’s about equipment, things you just saw, how your diving has been, something innocuous from back home. It’s small talk. And you’re all the best of friends.

Except now I can’t remember anyone’s names.

I don’t know if she got to see this turtle. Not everyone on that dive did. But that’s the breaks. Sometimes you see the high profile sea life, and other times you hear about it and appreciate what you were able to find. But we found this giant turtle.

That’s easily a three-foot shell. Easily.

OK, that’s enough for now. Enjoy your weekend! (We’re getting snow.)

Cozumel / cycling / photo / SCUBA / site / Thursday — Comments Off
15
Feb 24

It’s Spanish for “shark” (there’s a shark in the photos below)

Site news! I just sold this place! Some joker is buying it for $1.3 million and I’m cashing out! See ya, suckers!

That would be about what I’d say if that were true. And if Kenny “The Jet” Smith’s people want to call me — as we have a longstanding social relationship — which earned me a piece in a textbook a few years back …

Worth a shot.

No, here is the actual site news. The front page photos have been updated. It is now diving-themed once again. For example, a larger version of this photo is there.

There are 10 images in the current rotation. I’ll three rotations of 10 each for a while. That should keep us until the front page needs re-freshening with some other amazing photographs, or when The Jet buys me out, whichever comes first.

That was one of the things on the day’s list. Updating the front of the site, not selling out.

(Seriously, Jet, my number is 555 …)

There were eight things on that list when I closed my computer last night. And I managed to do six of those things today, and did some other work prep besides, so I am satisfied with the effort.

One thing I did, of course, was take a little bike ride down in the Smith Indoor Training Center. I did 66 minutes, which is about where my enthusiasm has dwindled the past few rides, come to think of it.

I did an actual training ride, today, an anaerobic capacity into VO2 exercise. I did this because I read a site recently which said that, without a training plan, I was just doing junk miles. Miles for miles’ sake. I was fine with that, of course, until someone put that particular name to it. My base miles are not junk. And they’ve come with some real exertion. But today I did this interval workout with five sets above my wattage threshold and set some new Strava PRs in the process. Behold! My phone!

I took Tuesday off from riding, opting for quality time, instead. It must have been the right choice because I didn’t feel bad about it, or second guess myself in the moment. Even still, today was my 20th ride in the last 21 days, which is a fair amount for a duffer like me.

On my cycling spreadsheet — everyone has one — I have a page that shows the best of each month. So I know what my most prolific July is, which year had the most miles in August, which September saw the most pedal strokes, and so on. (2011, 2023, 2014, respectively.) I have a separate column for February, because it’s February. And February of 2023 is my most successful year, for now. But that mark is going to get crushed, probably before the end of this week.

We’ll look back on this month and see the asterisk, but the asterisk will be about the leap day, definitely not about junk miles.

Meanwhile, back under water, since I told you about the front page updates and we’re still working our way through the photos from our last dive trip. I found one where my lovely dive buddy is actually demonstrating evidence of breathing.

The first rule of diving is just keep breathing. That’s actually a rule. I got quizzed on one of the dive boats because, someone has to be the fall guy and the divemaster asked me about the first rule. I said, “To make sure my partner comes back up. And also to keep breathing.”

I started diving at the beginning of the George H.W. Bush administration. That guy was just going to have to overlook my flip little joke.

Tortuga!

That’s Jennifer, one of the famous turtles of Palancar Reef. I believe she was trying to introduce us to her friend. Do you see that little overhang she seems to be working her way to there? Can you see what is underneath it?

Now you can.

Tiburón!

If you’ve been enjoying views from under the sea just off the coast of Cozumel, not to worry. I have a few dozen more photographs, and a lot of videos to work through.