After several weeks away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Pretty pictures from the Plains, incoming.
That’s the 1944 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 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 some of the interesting images here as I digitize them, you can find them all here.
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 legislature created the Alabama Educational Survey Commission to prepare recommendations for the 1945 legislative session. The people running the campus in Tuscaloosa sent a contemptuous report to that 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, a young John Kennedy had his PT boat rammed and destroyed in the Pacific, 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 following month, listeners heard Edward R. Murrow’s classic report, “Orchestrated Hell.”
At the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944, The Great Depression ended, 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.
The book I have is signed Mrs. Joe H. Page. She, or someone else, helpfully told me where to find Joe’s photo. It’s in the Army’s Specialized Training Program. We’ll talk more about that program in a week or two, but the ASTP was prompted by General George C. Marshall’s recognizing that the U.S. Army had to overcome a shortage of soldiers trained in a variety of professional and technical capacities. Most of the people that went into ASTP were active duty soldiers, and they were enrolling for up to two years of engineering, languages, dentistry and more.
It took up 20 pages of this Glom, and there are 800 headshots of the people who made up this special category of the student body. Joe Page was one of those men.
Joe was born in 1924. At least one branch of his family could trace its lineage in Alabama back to territorial days. He died in 1980. His wife, Betty, lived until 2009. I looked in a few of the other books and I don’t see evidence that she attended Auburn. Her sister did. We’ll meet her in three or four weeks. But this is Joe, and this was his Glom. He and Betty had four children, all still living in Alabama.
The first full page sets the tone. It’s bright, and also subdued. It has playful graphics. And the future they saw was in science.
Then there are a handful of well done, double-truck photos, wide shots, atmospherics, silhouettes of people walking, and buildings. It comes with a ribbon of text that runs across the four pages. Here’s one half, just because the composition was promising.
The non-poem says:
Morning’s mists disappear into the early sun and day is launched in lonely splendor ….. to ripen, then, into a brazen noon — holding its bated breath under a heated sky … and chills into the long limpid shades of evening — to remain as a memory of our loveliest village.
I never know what these passages are meant to mean, or how they come to pass, and time has forgotten the unimportant conversations that came before them. Who supported the prose, and who groaned about it? Doesn’t matter. It’s surely meant to set a tone, that earnest tone we all had at 21.
Part of that passage, the brazen noon part, is over this photo. It’s another nice two-page spread of Ross Hall. It housed chemistry and became home to mechanical, chemical and aerospace engineering in the 1970s. I was always ambivalent about the building, but it’s a lovely composition. There are nine cars in the shot. And though the modern view has lovely landscaping, there are a lot more cars in view if you stand in that exact same spot today.
I wish we knew who these people were. Or where this was. We’ll have some open questions going forward. The 1944 Glomerata, at least in the early pages, is a bit spare in terms of cutlines. I also wonder if that hat was his. I wonder which of the two was more interested in this chat. And what was their relationship? And what did it become? and could either of them imagine we’d be contemplating this one moment, 80 years later?
That page was titled “diversion,” for some reason. The next page was “aversion.” I guess we disliked shop assignments and studying and what not.
All of that comes before the foreword, which reads:
We give you this Glomerata of 1944 as a record of some of your days at Auburn, with the hope that in future years you may open it to recapture in memory the spirit of the fun and the work you knew, and the friends you made and kept here in the “loveliest village.” In a warring world some things wave and fall, succumbing to the tide of change, but those days at Auburn will remain in your mind as a brilliant ray when the dull fog of strife is long forgotten. May this book serve to help keep that memory bright. This, then, is your Glomerata for nineteen hundred and forty-four.
There was always the war. This is Lawrence Cottle and Gibbs Ashley, the presidents of the executive cabinet. This was an undergrad organization that programmed campus activities. They also assisted in the community drives for war bonds, the Red Cross and more.
Cottle was a senior, from Montgomery, studying veterinary medicine. He married a woman who, I think, was a sophomore in 1944. He would live to 86, having run a small animal clinic in Mobile. His wife, a teacher and a tapestry artist, died just a few months before he did, in 2010. They had three children, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Ashley was also a senior, from a small town in Florida that had less than 2,000 people in it when he went to school. He was also studying veterinary medicine. His wife died in 1975,they had two children and four grandchildren. His wife passed away in 1975. He remarried at some point, then retired from his own clinic. He volunteered with the Humane Society and kept playing golf. He passed away in 1991, just 67.
Do you ever see photos of people you don’t know and see people you do know in them? This is Audrey Wilson, president of the women’s student government association in 1944. She was a senior. She also wrote for the campus paper. She was studying home economics, and from Evergreen, a small town in south Alabama that had about 3,000 people living in it back then, and not many more in it today. But I see someone entirely more familiar. It’s startling.
Sometimes we just wind up with mysteries. I haven’t yet found anything else about her.
This is Fred Duggar, the editor of the Glomerata. The page he’s working on here is the first one we saw today. John Frederick Duggar, III, was a senior, an architecture major from the impossibly small Hope Hull, Alabama. Fred’s parents are both buried at Pine Hill, in Auburn, at my favorite cemetery. His grandfather, the namesake, is also buried there. That man was a professor of agriculture and director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service. All told, the original John spent almost 50 years on campus.
Our guy, Fred, lived in Atlanta. He published an architectural book in the 1980s that is still a prominent seller in the genre, according to Amazon. He died in 2008 and is also buried at Pine Hill.
The Glomerata lists 16 people as staff, but says the book was produced in a continual “state of flux due to the war. The guy sitting in the left foreground is Frank Benning, a freshman from Atlanta, who was studying architecture. I assume their common studies will show their influence in some of the layout choices going forward. I believe he designed a movie theater outside of Atlanta. Not sure what else he did.
That guy, standing in the background? We’ll meet him next week.
That’s enough for now. The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.
