This is Bob Sharman on the left and Gene Griffiths on the right. Sharman was the managing editor of The Plainsman, the campus newspaper. (Generations later, I worked there, too.) Griffiths was the advertising manager.

They were reporting for an enrollment that was larger than expected. Despite the war, there were about 3,000 people in classes, split quite evenly between men and women. The upperclass had been thinned out for the war effort, as we'll soon see.

Bob Sharman becomes Dr. Robert S. Sharman, who by 1958 was the assistant to the director, Animal Disease Eradication Division, Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Then, in 1970, acting director of that USDA unit. Later in his career he co-authored two books. He died at just 68, in 1992.

Gene Griffiths was a junior from Pensacola, Florida. He was studying mechanical engineering. He was an Eagle Scout. He went into the Army, and Officer Candidate School, right after graduation. He served as 1st Amphibious Engineers in the Pacific Theater in the last phase of the war and in some unknown-to-me capacity during the Korea Conflict. He got married, they had two children. He worked as an insurance executive in Atlanta until he retired in 1981. He died after a long fight with cancer, on his 84th birthday.

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