We’re going back in time 100 years so we can see, just a bit of what college looked like at my alma mater in 1924. Some of the great old buildings are there, so parts of the place feel familiar, but a century is a long time of course, especially in a college town. Before the growth that came with the G.I. Bill, before the Depression, and in already cash-strapped 1920s, it may as well have been a different world.

Let’s see what’s inside the first few pages.

The cover is a simple, yet elegant one. An old version of the seal in the center, the iconic Samford Hall is stamped into the cover.

I love these front page leafs. They’re all gorgeous, glorious art in their own way.

Generic, unique, symbolic or space-filling, they all look so handsome. I only share it here because we all ought to appreciate these pages.

“Eat ’em up Tiger!” was one of the expressions of the day. That one should come back.

The 1924 Glomerata is dedicated to Dr. John Hodges Drake, who would die in 1926, at the age of 80.

He’d been a drummer boy for the Confederate Army. Depending on the exact timing, he would have been 17-20, and serving in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. He’d been with the university since 1873, almost the very beginning.

Fifty-three years of medical practice of a college community! His obituary said he never missed a day of work, until in his final months of service.

Drake was the third. His grandfather was too young for the Revolutionary War, but John the elder told tales of watching the British and the Americans fighting hand-to-hand, and seeing his childhood home destroyed in North Carolina.

John Drake VI, a Korean War veteran, died in 2007. He had also lived a life of service. There’s a John VII out there, today. He’s old enough to have a VIII and IX out there, but I didn’t look that far.

In my day on campus, I was tasked with documenting the renovation of Drake Hall, the Medical Clinic, which was by then well past its prime. Longstanding, like the man, the building remained in service until 2005 or so.

In my mind, all of college should look like this.

Big coats, folded hats, high collars, neat ties and tall slender people wearing too many buttons.

Whatever all of that means.

Here’s a tip for all of you interested in illustrating the sub-tropics, though: If the trees have leaves, there is absolutely no need for a coat whatsoever.

This is Spright Dowell, the president of the university. If he looks impossibly young, this photo was at least three years old, so he’s in his early 40s. He started in the job in 1920, and it was a fraught administration.

In 1921 Dowell said the college was in debt, the faculty was underpaid, the buildings and equipment were falling apart. Calling it “a long period of undernourishment” and pleaded for more money from the state.

By 1923 he was jousting with his second governor over funding, and then the Extension and Farm Bureau dust ups came to the fore. It was power politics.

That December the alumni were screaming for his head. His critics said Dowell lacked experience in higher education. They said he lacked respect among the students, who hanged him in effigy, which isn’t reflected by the yearbook. The alumni said he failed to inspire the faculty, saw enrollment dip and hadn’t kept up with the competition.

The board of trustees supported him, but he left in 1927, for a long, successful career running Mercer University.

Remember what I said a moment ago about leaves and coats? That doesn’t always apply.

They got four inches of snow, and somehow the yearbook was able to resist the urge to run this until page 30. Snow is pretty rare there.

This snow fall earned these three photos to document March 14th. They canceled baseball because of the weather.

Samford Hall and the president’s mansion are both still there. No idea when they last saw that much snow.

And apparently the male students terrorized everyone with snowballs. Go figure.

This is Earle G. Lutz, Jr., the editor of this edition of The Glomerata. He was a senior, an architecture major from Montgomery.

He stayed in the area and designed the new municipal building for neighboring Opelika. It’s still standing, a clean, neat, three-story brick bastion of local governance.

He and his wife had a daughter, Ann, and she had two degrees from the University of Alabama, worked at Bell Labs and taught computer science at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Think about it. This man was born in 1902. His daughter helped develop email.

He died in 1971, and is buried in Montgomery.

I can never get over these beautiful section setters.

The table of contents calls them each books. We won’t spend a lot of time in athletics, because many of the pages are a tiny bit damaged and most of them are headshots, anyway.

But it’s just an excuse to share this.

But first, these three guys who are looking for a tenor to round out their trio. Or they’d like to tell you about a new lawn treatment system … or is it bowling shoes …

These are the cheerleaders. You can just see it in their faces, faces full of cheer.

Donald Cathcart was the world’s oldest junior. The middle-aged Montgomery boy would study medicine at Tulane and became a pediatrician, practicing in Georgia. He worked on the Polio vaccine, raised money to purchase iron lungs also researched an anti-itch drug used on Measles and Chicken Pox. He died in 1982, at 77.

Bill Wood was a senior, from Montgomery, and he was one of those fellows that did a bit of everything on campus. He even wrote the alma mater in his senior year, making this the centennial. Auburn is pretty lousy at recalling it’s own history (half the time they say he wrote it in 1946, for example) so no one has likely noticed. Wood taught history and English at the university for two years, and then left to go in the insurance business. He died in 1933, at just 31.

Blucher Cooper worked for Dixieco Company, which could have been anything back then, frankly. He was in Chicago on business when he died, in 1947. He was just 44 years old, and had one son.

“A man who will always live in Tiger traditions.”

I’ve never heard of him. Which is my problem, not his. Being someone that lives on forever is the goal of everyone who devotes so much of themselves to something so earnestly.

Young Rip here was a jock’s jock on campus. He was involved with all of the sports in some kind of way, but football was his natural fit. He’d only played two games in high school, and he’s listed here as weighing 178 pounds, radically undersized even back then.

He studied veterinary medicine in the College of Agriculture, got married in 1926 and then went back home to northeast Alabama and became a school superintendent.

They were still calling him Rip when they swore him into office. He died in 1971.

One more of our new friend Rip, who played on the varsity team all four years. And this year was a pretty bad one. New coach, young team, the punter had the best success.

This is from the Georgia Tech game. Auburn was 3-3-2, Tech was 3-2-3 and it was a cold and rainy Thanksgiving day, but 27,000 people came in to watch the game in Atlanta. The yearbook says Fox Howe had a punt sail 82 yards in the cold, wet weather.

Shaking hands with Rip here is Tech’s John McIntyre. He lived to see most of the 1990s.

This game finished as a crowd-pleasing 0-0 tie.

More from 1924 next week. 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.

More photos, via the new desktop camera, with which I am, so far, pleased. Eventually I’ll grow more proficient with it, but, already, like a better way to transcode the ancient photos.

So here are a few more selected shots from the 1946 Glomerata. Today we’ll wrap up this volume, having shared 40 photos and just a few of the interesting stories we find therein. The first 30 shots are on the blog, as a regular Friday feature. You can find all 40 shots in the Glomerata section, of course.

Let’s see a bit more of what was worth memorializing 78 years ago, shall we?

These are the officers of the Women’s Athletic Association in a not-at-all posed photograph. The WAA was aptly named. They offered a yearly cup to the winningest teams, sororities, it seems. They also ran the campus blood drive.

Anne Grant is second from the left. She graduated and went home, became a preacher’s wife. She studied home economics, and stayed active in the Methodist church for six decades. When she died in 2012 she was survived by three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The one on the right is Constance Graves. Her father, Eugene Hamiter Graves, attended API in the 19th century, and was on the first football team in 1892. He served during the Spanish American War and World War I. He became a colonel and, later, the mayor of Eufaula, Alabama. She went back home after school, and lived there all her life. She died in 2004, survived by three children and six grandchildren.

The other women have very common names, making the quick web search too challenging and pure guesswork.

These are the Auburn Collegiates, directed by Byron N. Lauderdale Jr., himself a student, a senior studying veterinary medicine. He served in the Army during World War II and in the Air Force during the Korean War. He would run a veterinary practice, a family business, in Illinois for 40 years. Byron died, at 77, in 2000. He was survived by his wife, his brother Harry (a WW2 sailor and Auburn man who passed away at 85 in 2011), two sons, four daughter and 10 grandchildren. On the face of it, that sounds like some kind of life.

I cropped her out of the photo because she wasn’t in focus, and I have this lovely headshot anyway, but her’s was the voice that people heard when the band played. This is LaHolme McClendon, a senior from Attalla, Alabama, studying science and literature.

I photograph these because they are interesting or, perhaps, because I think the person will lead us on to glimpses of a full career and life — such as we can get from a few obvious Internet resources. And I thought, for certain, we’d get just that here. A singer, an attractive young woman and, most importantly from our great distance, a distinctive name. But the Internet doesn’t tell us much about her. She appeared in her local paper when her father retired from the postal service — a front page, above-the-fold story, mind you — and I know she died at 53, in 1979, but that’s it.

These don’t always pan out.

But sometimes there’s gold. And while I didn’t want to do a lot of headshots and posed photographs, this is the ag club and the FFA, which is important for me. But it’s important for you, too. Look how the farmers were dressing in the 1940s.

One of these young men is Buris Boshell, president of the ag club, and a future medical superstar from tiny Bear Creek, Alabama, population 240. I believe that’s him on the front row, fourth from the left, standing next to the older gentleman. Boshell studied veterinary medicine at Auburn, went to med school at Alabama, but finished his studies at Harvard. He would become an endocrinologist and eventually came back home, where he built an absolutely world class diabetes research and treatment program at UAB. The Diabetes Hospital would become a reality with an outpatient clinic, a specialized inpatient unit for diabetics, and several floors devoted to diabetes related research projects. He has a building named after him at UAB, and a program in vet medicine at his alma mater takes his name as well. There are also scholarships, endowed research chairs and something called Boshell Diabetes Research Day. He died, aged 69, in 1995.

There’s a Bob Scofield in that photo, too. He was a north Alabama farmer and business man. He owned a radio station for a time. Everyone in town knew him as the owner of the Ford dealership. He made it to 90, and died in 2016.

Ralph Hartzog started out as a teacher, went back to school and studied agriculture and became a county extension agent. He worked in a handful of counties until he retired in 1978. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in 2006, just shy of 87, and his name is now on a memorial plaque at the state’s 4H Center. When they remember you as fondly as they did that man, who’d retired 28 years earlier, you must have been living right.

There’s another guy in that group photo who I met, a lifetime later. Dr. Claude Moore graduated from the College of Agriculture, did his graduate work at Kansas State and Purdue, where he became the assistant director of regional poultry breeding, until he returned to Auburn in 1956 (almost everyone goes home again). He became head of the poultry department in 1959, and stayed in that seat until he moved over to the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station in 1986. He retired from there a few years later. And after another decade or so, I would intern there. He was president of the national Poultry Science Association, a fellow in the National Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the New York Academy of Science. He was a deacon at a church we attended, and a Sunday School teacher. When he passed away, in 2008, he was survived by his wife, five children and 13 grandchildren. He was a good man.

His headstone, naturally, has a rooster on it. It also says “A steady man.” He was an Auburn man.

Which brings us, quite logically, to the debate council’s not-at-all posed photo. Didn’t we all sit around discussing the finer points of rebuilding Europe or trade relations with South America or whatever they were discussing here? Or was that just me and my friends?

Anyway, the guy on the right is Bill Ivey, a local boy, and a sophomore, who was the council president. He was listed as studying business administration. His is a good story.

Bill met his wife, Julia, while she was working as a librarian at Auburn. He was a grade student at UNC. They were married in 1954 at her family home; she was the fourth generation of her family to wed there in the front parlor. (And don’t you hope that tradition has persisted?) They moved to Chapel Hill, and then to Arizona in 1969, before heading to South Carolina in 1975. Bill became the president of a hospital there. He died, and was buried in, South Carolina in 1998, age 70. His wife passed away in 2013. They had three children and nine grandchildren.

This is a simple little highlight placeholder in the Greek section of the yearbook. The cutline simply says “Alpha Gam affair.”

Alpha Gam, where the women were charming and the candles seemed unnecessarily long.

No one wanted you to linger at their parties long enough to watch those giant stacks of wax disappear … but the blurb about their sorority tells us they held an event called the Sunrise Dance … so, maybe?

There’s nothing with this photo, but it’s obviously a fraternity house mother fulfilling the other duties as assigned part of her job. I don’t know anything about either of these two people, but it’s a charming shot.

Cosplay has gone on for longer than you thought. These are the women of Delta Zeta guarding … something.

Just a few pages later, mixed among the ads, there’s another shot of these same women showing off their combat boots. Or their knees. Who can say what the photographer’s risque intention was there.

Most of the ads are all text, just a few with clip art. The interesting ones are the few ads for businesses that existed until my time on campus, or a few famous local names.

WJHO was, back then, a station in neighboring Opelika. It is the ancestor of the modern WANI, which is one of the five stations five stations I was on in my time. This advertisement likely misses the legendary Smilin’ Jack Smollon by just a year or two. He’d come along and work there and run it for the next 40 years, definitely a character.

At some point the call letters went to a station just to the north. In 2022 it became a classic rock station, but it looks to be off the air these days. Shame, too. WJHO took it’s calls from the station founder, a radio and magnetic tape pioneer, John Herbert Orr. He taught college students Morse code while he was in high school. He helped maintain the original campus station, and then dismantled it, which I’ve written about here before. He attended school for one term in the 1920s, and then went out into the working world. The man was a real genius of his age. But his was a different age.

And that’s where we will end this look at the 1946 Glomerata. Forty photos in four installments (parts one, two and three) was a pretty good start, and I thank you for skimming along with me.

The idea, now, is to look back on the obvious anniversary years. So 100 years ago, the 1924 Glomerata, is where we’ll turn, starting next Friday. Should be a lot of fun, and there will so much to enjoy before then, starting with the weekend!

More photos, via the new desktop camera. The workflow is getting a little bit better. The quality of photos seem a bit nicer, and I expect they will continue to improve. I am, so far, quite pleased. This feels, at least, like a more efficient way to share ancient photos.

So here are a few more selected shots from the 1946 Glomerata. The first few shots can be found, here in the blog, where this seems to be becoming the Friday feature. The full collection lives in the Glomerata section, of course.

Let’s see a bit more of what was worth memorializing 78 years ago, shall we?

So here are five freshmen. You can tell from their rat caps, which we touched on last week. Also, you can tell from the caption.

Why are the freshmen running around in their pajamas? This is about the Georgia Tech game. This yearbook is from 1946, and this is from the 1945 football season. This is an event commemorating Auburn’s first home game against Georgia Tech, their first ever home game, as it turns out. That was in November of 1896 and Auburn wrecked Tech, 45-0, a score that might have had more to do with Zzzzs than the now-traditional Xs and Os of football.

Tech, you see, was coming in by a special train in the early morning before that 1896 game. Some API students decided to head down to the tracks and coated the rails on either side of the train station with grease, lard, soap and who knows what else. The train couldn’t stop, so the visiting team had to walk back, several miles, on that same railway, football gear in hand. When they got wise, Georgia Tech got mad. They refused to play the Tigers the next year, and only suited up in 1898 when the university threatened expulsion over any similar pranks. But the legend was by then, well, legendary. The Wreck Tech Pajama Parade, an annual (but sadly discontinued) commemoration and symbolic reenactment of the hi-jinks featuring a pajama-clad march to the Train Depot for a pep rally and even more questionable hijinxs.

Hence the pajamas. After this parade, the Tigers lost 20-7 in Atlanta. Blame the freshmen.

Which brings us to the athletics section of the 1946 Glomerata. Here’s a generic shot that fronts the section. If there was a caption, I’d tell you all about it. Alas.

I’ve settled on avoiding headshots for this feature, but this is Curtis Kuykendall. Curtis Kuykendall was a bad, bad man. In 1944, against Miami, he rushed for 307 yards rushing, still a school record, and probably it always will be. (In the 80 years since, just five SEC running backs have broken 300 yards in a single game.)

He was a two-time team captain, a Blue-Gray all star, and was drafted by Washington, but he never played in the NFL. Kuykendall became a veterinarian, something of a family tradition.

Here’s a wide shot from a football game. This one was played in nearby Columbus, Georgia. This is the annual meeting with rival Georgia, who won this game 35-0.

The legend goes that, for years, the two head coaches would sit down and separate the gate money between the two schools. One dollar for yours, one dollar for mine.

Those buildings in the background aren’t there anymore. In their place now are parking lots and the town’s civic center.

This is one of my favorite photos in the book, and perhaps from the decade. Let’s jump in.

The guy on the left is Robert Larry Riedel, a pre-vet major from Florida. He passed away in 1967, two kids. His daughter was in the jewelry business. His son became a champion saddle bronc rider. His wife survived him by 50-plus years.

The next guy over is Herman Smith. He’s listed as a pre-law junior. A quick search doesn’t yield much definitive about him. Blame the last name. (No relation, by the way.)

The third young man is Bill Cook, who would become a veterinarian. He worked in Tennessee for almost 60 years. Loved the lake. He died in 2016 at the age of 91.

On the far right is Louis McClain, also a pre-vet major. He died just three years after this photo, in Birmingham, in 1948. He was just 24 years old. I don’t see any stories about his death in the local paper. He’s buried back in his hometown, in Anderson, South Carolina.

I love the photo because of the young women who are leaping. Leaping into the future, really. Helen Walden is on the left. She was a local girl, a sophomore, and she was studying the perfect 1940s hairstyles and, more importantly, aeronautical administration. A little under two years from this photo she married a man named Curtis Silvernail, a sailor during the war, and an International Paper employee thereafter. They were together for 50 years before she died, in 1997. They lived around Mobile.

Then there is this confident, intent look on Wyleen Hill’s face. She’s jumping into the future, and she sees it all before her. You can just tell. A native of Dalton, Georgia, she was a senior and a pharmacy major, one of only two women to graduate from the program that year. She went home and worked in her father’s pharmacy. She helped start a school for children with developmental disabilities in 1957, a concern that is still in operation today.

She died in 2010, in her mid-80s. The second sentence in her obituary noted her smile, which was still radiant even into her later years. The fourth sentence mentions her time as a cheerleader. It also mentions her additional work with another health care foundation. It looks like she has six children and five grandchildren. Wyleen sounds like a wonderful woman.

The cutline here says this is from the Mississippi game. Modern iterations of the 1945 basketball schedule tell me that Auburn didn’t play Mississippi that year. They did, however, play Mississippi State four times — twice in December and twice in February. I guess if you were taking a train you decided to play two days in a row.

Auburn won three of four.

Let’s check on the track team. On the left we have Don Harper, a sophomore from tiny Elba, Alabama, population of less than 3,000 back then and not much more today. Harper was studying agricultural engineering. He caught on with Thiokol Chemical in 1955 and worked there for 34 years. He worked on the Saturn V rockets and on ballistic missile and space shuttle programs, specifically the solid rocket boosters.

He helped found his church. He was married for almost 48 years, until his death. He and his wife had two children. One of them is a now-retired business professor.

Running alongside Harper is Harold Hartwig, who was a freshman from just up the road in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I haven’t uncovered much about him, however. (The year book cut his head off, not me.)

Similarly, I found a Tom Tabor, who is the young man jumping on the left, here. He is listed as a junior studying business administration. But I’m not sure if the older man I found has long jumps in his past, so I’ll leave it alone.

This other fellow, though, getting ready for the hurdles, on the right? That’s Richard Lasday. He was studying veterinary medicine, which seems to be a theme, this week. Born in Pittsburgh, he was a gardener and a painter, and active in his Jewish communities. He went to Cornell, and then Auburn. He served, domestically, in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He married, in 1950, a woman he met on a blind date. They had three children, and they had five grandchildren. Lasday lost his wife, who seemed incredibly active in every community they would call home, in 2011. They were married almost 62 years. Richard worked in the veterinary field until he was 85. He passed away at 95.

There’s a building on campus named after this man. I took classes there for three terms. At that time, I thought it was named after two people. Most buildings get the shorthand, last name treatment. This one got two names and, for a student concerned about making it into classroom on time, it just seemed like this building was named after two folks. Nope. Just the one. Just this one. This is Telfair Peet.

His middle initial is B. I just learned his middle name was Boys. Peet was the drama department chair in his day. He died at just 60 years old, about two decades after this photo was taken. He’s younger in this photo than I am today. His wife survived him by decades. I was still attending plays in the building named after her husband when she died.

Speaking of performances, our last photo of the day is of Dr. Hollace Arment. He was the director of the glee club. You can tell he’s excited, because he’s just heard of these new inventions called briefcases and backpacks. He’s just waiting for the first ones to arrive in local stores.

He graduated from an Idaho high school, and would wind up singing all over the country. Probably you and I will never know how he wound up at API, but Arment was a singer of some renown. He was a tenor, and he performed all over the country. In the 1930s, he was in a group called The Balladeers. I believe he might be singing lead on the song Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming.

He retired from the Daytona Beach Community College in 1973, where he spent the last nine years of his career. Soon after the local paper wrote a profile on the man, his childhood in a covered wagon, singing for others, traveling, and teaching. He was also an accomplished puppeteer and, possibly, an amateur geologist. His wife was a high school teacher. They had at least two children according to that first story. He died, just three years after retiring in Florida, at 70.

If I keep looking these people up they will just get more and more interesting, so this is probably a good place to wrap it up for now.

I’m back to putting my new desktop document camera through its testing phases. The workflow will improve. Presumably the quality of the photos will, as well. For now, though, I’m extremely pleased. Not the least of which because this is a better, easier, way to show you some ancient photographs.

What follows are a few more selected shots from the 1946 Glomerata. (The first few shots can be found, in the blog, here. The full collection lives in the Glomerata section, of course.

Let’s see a bit more of what was worth memorializing 78 years ago, shall we?

The cutline here simply says “electrical engineering students.” This is one of those photos that sits alongside the headshots, the sophomore class, in this case.

They look pretty old for sophomores, don’t they? (I spent some time looking for the guy in the middle in the faculty photographs … ) I suppose the age could be the post-war enrollment effect. If it isn’t that, we’ll surely see that soon enough.

At the beginning of the freshman class photos, we see this next photo. Even back then there were great efforts made to make sure the new students felt involved. Mostly by making the rats and ratlets, as they were still called, to learn their place and the rules.

These were the rules. Don’t walk through the main gate. Carry matches for upperclassmen. Learn the “Rat’s Excuse For Living.” Speak to absolutely everyone you meet. Attend all mass meetings. Learn and sing the alma mater. Know the landmarks. Wear your rat cap at all times. Learn the Creed.

This was the excuse for living: Insasmuch as any living creature, no matter how small or insignificant, has a right to strive for its existence, so I, a lowly rate of Auburn, lowest scum of the earth except those of Georgia and Tech, do hereby strive for mine. Thank you very kindly, sir!

It sounds like hazing, and probably it kind of was, but it was also an important part of the social experience.

You can see the guy’s rat cap on his knee. The way it worked was, freshmen had to wear this in the fall. If Auburn beat Bama, the rat caps could be put away. If the Tigers lost, the freshmen had to wear these until June. If you were caught without your cap, you were thrown in the hog pond. This whole tradition died out a decade or so after this guy wore his.

Including that photograph first in the freshman section probably says more about the editorial choices of the upperclassmen doing the layout. But they have let us down here. Don’t you want to know who this guy is? Surely he went on to a successful career. And that young woman, well, she’d probably rather we didn’t wind up here.

The two of them, after all, are the winners of the freshman “Tacky” Party.

You wouldn’t have to change much of his outfit to make him fit into a fraternity party today, I bet. Remarkable, really.

There’s a famous photo from a few years before where students had gathered to learn about the attack of Pearl Harbor. But now, on a sticky night in the middle of August, the students gathered to listen not to radio reports from speakers bolted on the roof of a car, but to university president Luther Duncan.

Duncan was the director of the Extension Service and became university president in 1935, a position he held until his death in 1947. He was a political animal, not universally respected in the office, but he sat there during a critical time for the university.

You’d like to think that there was some record of what was said on this night, when peace was coming at last. But the university has never been good at keeping those records. They aren’t listed among the library’s databases. Maybe there was less thought given then to memorializing such a somber, joyous moment.

This photo was apparently also from that night. You wonder what brothers, neighbors, boyfriends they were thinking of in some far off part of the world. You couldn’t fault them for wondering How long until we see them again?

This one is also said to be from the V-J announcement. You just know some of these kids told this story for decades. Where they were, what it felt like, who they were with, what it meant for tomorrow.

More of these things should be remembered and shared. It’d be lost on later generations of students, perhaps, but later generations of alumni would come around to marveling at it. Things have a way of persisting. Some of the things Duncan was fighting about, some of the things that he was appreciated for and hated for, still resonated a half century later when I was in school. Some of these more personal recollections would be worth noting, too.

One of the pageant winners, Yvonne Wallace. She was Miss Auburn that year. She’d been an education major according to earlier runs of the campus paper, but the yearbook says that, in her junior year, she was studying science and literature. Perhaps the courses of study weren’t dissimilar at the time.

Wallace was from Panama City and her name appears in a lot of these pageants. There was a woman with her married name who died, in Missouri, in 2021. Her husband, according to his obituary, also attended AU, sometime after the war. He was raised not too far from the campus. He’s not in this Glom. But, if it’s the right pair, he ran in some important professional circles. Board of this, board of that, vice president here and there and so on. His wife, was a socialite, also active in her community. I think that might be her. But it’s just a guess.

A few more slice of life photos. The cutline here is “All the mail has been put up.”

So go check your Instagram and TikTok, young ladies.

You know that shot is posed. Everything is just so and perfect, though it’d be nice to see some more of the guy back there handling the letters and care packages. Even still.

Some things we have long since forgotten about appreciating. Taken for granted isn’t even the right expression. Maybe it’s just … expected, these modern conveniences. A quick snack from a vending machine had to start somewhere. And from humble beginnings. Take a look at these candy machines that used to be in the dorms.

When people show off this particular version of the yearbook, they tend to show this photo. There are no names to accompany it.

Sometimes, her left foot seems awfully close to the water. You wonder if they stayed together.

This is part of a photo collage, which is what those white lines are about. I count 12 people in this car. That’s a dozen bad decisions in one photograph.

We’ll continue working our way through the 1946 Glomerata next week. (The photos I’m digitizing will all wind up in the Glomerata section, of course.) As soon as I add these there will be 20 on display, with many more to come.

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 year book 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.