It is 1944. While war was raging abroad, at home, on the college campuses, a different battle was being played out. Funding was always the question, always the fight. The University of Alabama was in a near-blood feud with Auburn, and the University of Montevallo. The people running the campus in Tuscaloosa sent a contemptuous report to the Alabama Educational Survey Commission, which got Auburn president Luther N. Duncan's attention. He said he'd never seen "a bolder, more deliberate, more vicious, or more deceptive document." Duncan turned to his alumni base and said that if supporters of Auburn and Montevallo did not rise up to combat "this evil monster," it would consume them "just like the doctrine of Hitler."

It would be a mistake to think the tension between the two schools was about football.

And if the war rhetoric was overcooked between state-level officials, war was almost omnipresent for the people.

Just before school started, the Allies conquered Sicily. In September, Dwight Eisenhower announced the surrender of Italy. That fall Americans were looking for places like Bougainville, Tawara and the Gilbert Islands on maps. Stalin, Churchill and FDR met in Tehran that November.

The Great Depression was over. The Allied slog up against dug-in Germans through Italy dragged on. The Marshall Islands, Monte Cassino, Leipzig, the Mariana Islands began to enter into the newspapers in February. By mid-March, the war talk was about the bombing of Vienna, the Russian army reaching Romania and Germany occupying Hungary. In the spring of 1944, everything was still uncertain, and this is how some young people got up and went to school each day.

In 1944, the war shadowed everything, and its all over this yearbook, too, as we'll see.

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