After a month away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Prepare for pretty pictures from the Plains.
That’s the 1954 edition of The Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater. To refresh the memory, I collect the yearbooks. It’s an almost unique thing, and they look great. 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.
In 1954 the world was changing quickly, and so was the old alma mater. Ralph B. Draughon was the president. On the faculty since 1931, he moved into the president’s mansion in 1948. There was, of course, political tumult between the university, the Alabama Extension Service and the governor. (All of this went on for decades.)
The day-to-day campus issues centered around a population explosion. The GI Bill doubled enrollment in the late 1940s and it was obvious they needed more faculty, more space, more books for the library, more everything. Draughon’s almost two decades as president concentrated a great deal on growth and modernity.
Money, as ever, was the sticking point, but Draughon hit on a unique idea. He convinced the presidents of the other schools in the state — the white ones, anyway, because segregation was still everywhere — to present unified budgets to the state legislature. It made for an uneasy alliance, but sometimes it worked. Other times that, too, was contentious. You get the sense the state might have preferred it that way. Much of the legislature didn’t care for Draughon’s emphasis on education and modernism. Alabama isn’t a hard place to understand when you come to understand that the people with votes don’t always want to understand how to improve things. And change, improvement, was coming.
During his tenure, he put up 50 new buildings, doubled the on-campus housing options, opened 16 doctoral programs, landed an important series of accreditations and boosted the faculty numbers.
Civil rights and segregation were as much a part of the era as the university’s growth. It was the spring of 1954 when Brown vs Board of Education was handed down, but it would be another decade before Harold Franklin enrolled at Auburn, overcoming the board and state government’s intransigence, ending segregation on the campus. Draughon spent years trying to thread a non-confrontational needle while walking slowly along the fine line of progress.
We’re looking at the 1954 Glomerata here, but it’s important to note that in just a few more years, in 1960, the name would finally change from Alabama Polytechnic Institute to Auburn University. (It had been a topic of conversation since at least 1948.) Also in 1960, they started work on a new library. In 1965 the university named it for Ralph B. Draughon. Several decades later, when I was in school, state budget cuts were so severe that the RBD had to cut back on book, periodical and journal acquisitions. Draughon, buried just two blocks away from his library, would have had a fit.
Let’s look inside the book!
The first photo is in big, bright, beautiful color. It’s a signal to you and I, dear reader, that the future, grounded in wonder, inspiration and science, was here.
On the opposite leaf was this lovely little photo.
He’s wearing an Auburn button, and there’s a little football hooked to it. You can occasionally see those on e-bay. Here’s one now. Her corsage suggests that was a homecoming photo, but there’s no caption with it.
I don’t know what building this is, which annoys me. You think you know everything, but then there’s this marble staircase and that’s certainly something that should stand out in the memory.
The marble stands out, but so do those outfits. That shirt the guy is wearing. His shoes. No way that’s not a staged photograph. That getup couldn’t catch a woman’s eye, could it?
Students playing cards on the shore at Chewacla.
If you look at this Google Maps image, this is where they would have been. Seven decades ago.
The Tektronix Type 511-D Cathode Ray Oscilloscope was a wide range, portable instrument. It allows scientists to observe a wide variety of electrical waveshapes and was primarily intended for laboratory and shop use, in the development and testing of all types of electronic equipment. And while I’ve been reading about this, I’ve wondered, how long did this instrument stay on campus?
It was sold through 1955 or so, but it would be a hard-to-part item today. And that over-engineered press in the smaller photo? What even is that thing?
We can see now how sports culture is starting to become a more prevalent part of campus life. There’s already a crowd shot here in this front matter.
I think that’s from the Ole Miss game, but we don’t know for certain. It is a pretty educated guess, though, and I’m sure it’ll come up again later.
Look at that dress! I wonder what event this charming woman is heading to.
And those wire fish on the wall! How have those not come around in fashion at least twice in the years since.
Here’s the classic arch shot from Samford Hall. That’s the administration building. In the background is Smith Hall, no relation. (This is basically the same view today.)
I love how the stone is almost glowing. Wouldn’t that have been a neat trick back then, architecturally speaking? It’d be a wonder today, too.
I imagine it’s hard to spend a whole career on a campus and have everyone love you, but that was the case for James Foy, who generations of students knew and loved as Dean Foy. The 1954 Glomerata was dedicated to “one whose influence, leadership, guidance, and loveable personal qualities are known and felt by all.”
He was the dean of student affairs. Probably that job is different, and harder, today. Back then, his duties included being a hype man and a vibe guy. There are photos, decades after this, of students tossing him high into the air. He loved every bit of it.
Foy learned Auburn’s alma mater as a boy from his brother, Simpson, who attended API in the 1920s. (We learned about him a few months ago.) Simpson was a contemporary of the guy that wrote that song. James went to Alabama, where he was a part of the group that helped rekindle the Auburn-Alabama football rivalry. (Indeed, the trophy Auburn and Alabama share around the Iron Bowl is named after him.) After his military service as a naval aviator, he spent 28 years working at Auburn. When he retired, he worked there as a volunteer for another three decades, almost up to his death in 2010, at 93. He was beloved, then, for a lifetime, and he loved the university and its people in kind. The yearbook picked this one well.
A building on campus, Foy Hall, is named after him today. When I was in school it was the student union, which was apt. Nowadays the university names buildings after other important historical figures, and do a thoughtful job of it, or anyone who gives them a lot of money.
As ever, this is not a complete examination of the yearbook, just the images that jump out at me as I flip through it. There will be more next week. This collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here. The university hosts their complete collection here.
