Auburn


3
Sep 26

The 1926 Glomerata, part two

We return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. This is a quick tour, where we are spending just two weeks on this particular year. The photography is a bit limited, but there are great stories, so we’ll wrap up 1926 in this large batch before moving on to another book next week. Enjoy a few pretty pictures from the Plains. (See part one here.)

These were, as we learned last week, troublesome days on campus. The university president, a man named Spright Dowell, wasn’t viewed as particularly effective. The university was about to celebrate its 70th anniversary, but the buildings needed work, the faculty needed raises, the sports programs were all struggling. and the university needed some actual respect from the state. It’s a persistent tale, particularly in those early years. The students hanged him in effigy.

Curiously, people seemed to like him as an individual, but didn’t seem to think much of his job performance. The newspaper editorials were unsparing, and they took turns at pointing at all of these problems and more. Of course, one of the newspaper bigwigs was on the board of the university. The ties and tendrils were everywhere, as they always are. Dowell knew the score, at least somewhat. He pointed to the athletics issues. He mentioned, the next fall, that perhaps he could have spent some more time being a man of the people. Perhaps he had in mind here his predecessor, who was well liked. Instead, Dowell said, he chose to spend his time focusing on the money problems. Certainly, when he said that, he had a lot of influential people in mind. Weeks after he said it, and before this book was terribly out of date, he would resign from the university. His tenure would end after seven trying years. He became the president of Mercer University the next year, where he’d stay for 15 years. But this isn’t about him. It’s about what’s inside this book, a handsomely produced, 375-page piece of history.

We wrapped up last week with the athletics section of the century-old book. The next few pages showed the “Beauties.” These women don’t always show up in other areas of the annual. In some editions they seem to just be local people. They were selected for this by Florenz Ziegfield Jr., the director of the Ziegfield Follies, which was still a cultural high water mark for the country.

I’ve not yet found the rhyme or reason for how all of that worked, other than Ziegfield liked the photos they sent him. Also, these women can sometimes be difficult to trace if they took their husband’s name in public mentions. If nothing else, we can get a glimpse of the hair and some of the clothing styles of the day.

Nell Thomas, for instance. I believe she was from Montgomery. She might have been the daughter of a prominent appellate judge. (But even there following her digital trail gets fuzzy.)

Bertrice Black was from Birmingham. She would get married in 1927 or thereabouts. Her husband would become an accountant, and served as a captain in the army during WW2. They had one daughter. Bertrice, sometimes, or at least later, it was Beatrice, died in 1977 at age 73.

Eula Martin is a name that feels so incredibly familiar I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to figure out if I’ve ever written about her before. I have not. Clearly, though, she had a thing for flappers and fur. Also this is one of the most soft-focused photos in the book. (I happen to be an expert on fuzzy focus.) She attended Howard College, the modern Samford University. She was a dancer. And this seems to be a photo that became her promotional headshot. Martin, or someone with the same name, was quite active in the social pages of the late 1920s. She came from a family that had lived in the state when it was still a territory. She wrote poetry. Throughout her long life she would join all of the important social and community organizations that a woman of her stature should maintain. She would marry — 99 years ago today — a man that we’ll meet in just a moment. They had a son. She passed away at 90, in 1995.

Martha Porter likewise doesn’t show up elsewhere in the Glom. She was from Tuscumbia, in the northwestern corner of the state. She became a teacher in a little town on the Tennessee River. She got married the next year to a Bama grad. He was a roofer and would eventually become the president of that local firm. He died in 1970, she lived until 1993. She lived in Florida for several decades. They had one daughter, a woman who passed away just a few years ago, who has a lovely obituary.

Elizabeth Chester just looks here like a silent movie starlet. She’s from Atlanta. She’s not otherwise in the Glom. I can’t find anything about her for certain.

And this is Margaret Whittle. She’s from Atlanta. If you know anything about her, pass it on.

Good as it is, the problem with books of this particular vintage is that the casual photos are almost always small. Usually they are of spotty quality. The equipment available to a poor college campus might not have been the best. Or maybe its the photographs. Perhaps my limited digitization. Whoever we blame, and blame me, the few pages of casual campus life all look like this, and if you get cutlines they are usually short on details that help us find out more about the people in them.

You see some fans here, some sort of band thing, a line where students wait patiently in line to register for classes, and two shots of the Wreck Tech parade, which was part of the festivities before the Georgia Tech football game. (It was the final game of the year, in November, in Atlanta. The good guys lost.)

There’s a section called Death, and it’s filled with poems and prose and jokes that probably made sense to the 21-year-olds who were already feeling nostalgic, but most of it is lost to us as personal reference. There’s some fun art in there, filling up the space, though. This took up a full page. Some of it looks like campus, some of it doesn’t seem familiar at all.

We have a rule that we always show the bikes that wind up in the Glom. Apparently that applies to the ones that are drawn, as well.

They look almost as cool as the real thing, anyway.

Here’s another one of those little marginalia doodles that is destined to become some sort of clip art around here.

This is the staff that put together the book. The business manager is Ben Screws Gilmer, of Montgomery, who was a senior studying electrical engineering. He’d worked on the Glom for two years. The blurb by his portrait in the class section recalls him as a gentleman, a conscientious student, and “As to him being a ladies man, we take great pleasure in referring you to Atlanta.”

Perhaps he was legendary.

He went to work at Bell System right after graduation, starting as an installer. Phones, wires, poles, I don’t know, but he did that for a month and then went into the company’s leadership training course. That was a wise choice by the company and him. He found his way into marketing and development, and then into regulatory work. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War 2, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He returned to Southern Bell, became an assistant vice president and, before long, was running much of the phone company’s business in nine states. He also worked for Northwestern Bell, Pacific Telephone, and, eventually AT&T, where in 1967, he became the president of the company. He also served as either director, chairman of the board, or trustee of more than thirty civic and charitable organizations. The university gave him an honorary doctorate in the 1950s. In 1975, he was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor by the state legislature. He is similarly honored in the Alabama Business Hall of Fame and the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame. His industry peers in Georgia would likewise honor him. All of that started right here. He and his wife had a daughter. When he died, at 98 in 2004, he also had two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The editor was Charles Snook, a senior architecture major from Birmingham. Snook was in all of the leadership organizations on campus, it seems. He was also an ROTC captain. Who knows when he had time to attend class. Later, he served as a commander in the Navy. In his professional life he went to back to the Birmingham suburbs and worked as an architect. Snook was vice president of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects and worked on at least one of those downtown revitalization projects that are necessary from time to time. I can’t readily find a list of his projects, to confirm it, but the odds are very, very good I know of some of his work, if I’ve not been in the actual buildings he designed — albeit decades later, of course. He had one son, who became a reverend, as did one of his five grandchildren. He died in 1973.

The art editor is William Sandifer, a senior from Mississippi who was also studying architecture. He was another prominent campus leader. Part of his yearbook blurb jokes that he majored in letter writing and minored in sleeping during class hours. And this was one of the men who helped design the Empire State Building, the World’s Fair, and several U.S. embassies. He’d served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the war, mustered out as a colonel, with Manila as his last duty station. In 1947 he and his wife purchased a huge, renowned ranch in Colorado, Greystone. He died in 1986, at 85.

Here’s the campus paper. I’d work there decades later, and didn’t give the first thought to the existence of any of these people, because I was 19 or 20 at the time, just like some of these people. They turned a post-game extra 15 minutes after the game was over using 1920s technology. That’s impressive in any era.

Jasper F. Thompson was another electrical engineering major from Birmingham. “Fritz,” it says here, “is a likeable cuss — always jolly, never worries and has a good word for everyone. The best ‘ain’t’ too good for him.” He worked as an executive with the Red Cross, pretty much running things across the southeast. He’d lived in Georgia for almost two decades, while his brother and his father were judges in Alabama. When he died, of a heart attack, in 1960 he and his wife had two adult children, a daughter and son.

Edward Donald Ball was the managing editor. Apparently he dosed off in classes. He caught on at the old Birmingham Age-Herald after school. He worked around the southeast, and in New York before the war. E.D., as he was known, would become a significant European war correspondent. Back home, he ran the Tennessee bureau of the Associated Press office. He worked for the AP for 31 years. He lost a young son, aged 18, in 1951. In 1959 he became editor of the Nashville Tennessean. He died in Georgia, at 88, in 1992. He was survived by his wife and a daughter.

William Horton was an engineering major from Virginia. He played football for three years, and was the sports editor of the paper. He was also an editor of a specialty engineering publication. They called him “the preacher, the philosopher, and the journalist of the Civil Engineers.” He’s difficult to trace definitively after college, however.

I’m assuming this was just yearbook art, but it also looks like a great poster. Illustrators could make some lovely work given the styles of the day.

Here’s the radio club, which is part of a fascinating little history at Auburn. I’ve written about it several times in a few places over the years. It was the early days of the technology, and these were days of important transitions with the technology on campus. By this point they had a handful of radio telegraph sets, and a radio phone. They could send a signal a good distance at night, but it was especially limited during the daytime. The hand-me-down gear was still serving the farmers who could hear the signal. The university had been a pioneer in the field in 1912 and 1913, but decisions had to be made about the future. And these guys were watching.

In 1925 WMAV would close its doors. This was a part of necessary upgrades. They built a 200-foot transmitter tower just south of campus. There were actually two stations working from campus after that. In February of 1926, probably just before this yearbook was released, WAPI took to the air for the first time. Many decades later, I broadcast on WAPI early in my professional broadcasting career.

One of these 1926 guys, as we learned last week, went to work for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. He was a natural. Louis Howle was sending messages to stations in California so rapidly they couldn’t decipher his dots and dashes. J.M. Wilder ran the old WMAV when it came back to the students, from Birmingham, in the year prior.

John McCaa had a great live broadcast moment earlier this year.

(O)ne night we had a request for a popular number. Everyone could play it, but no one knew the words . I was selected to sing the words, so 1 propped the music up in a chair where I could read the words while playing. Everything was going fine till, when about half through, a strong breeze came through the windows and blew the music across the room. I just broke out laughing as did the others. The confusion lasted for about five minutes before we got back to playing again. Our mail from that program was more than usual, and of all things, people asked us to repeat that program as they had enjoyed our “skit.”

A few years after this someone conducted a a survey of land-grant schools that had gotten into broadcasting. A lot of them got out — poor financing, poor gear, low power, programming and technical difficulties. Auburn was one of those that stuck with it, though the people working in this area would do it with some miseries. By the end of the decades the second boom period of broadcasting at Auburn was waning. Sports were proving to be the only thing that could keep and captivate listeners. There were also all sorts of problems with frequency hopping. And then came the rise of the networks.

I’m glad they stuck with it. The radio that I knew, which would be all but unrecognizable to all of those men in the photo above, was one important part of my student experience.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.


27
Aug 26

The 1926 Glomerata, part one

After a long time away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Enjoy a few pretty pictures from the Plains.

We go now to the 1920s, right in the middle of what might be the tumultuous era in the old alma mater’s history. Spright Dowell, who never enjoyed support as the president, was coming to the end of his time on the plains. He’d come over from the state department of education, which even, back then, referred to itself as The Department. Dowell replaced Charles Thach, an alumnus who’d been on campus for decades until 1920, just before his death the next year. They were engaged in political warfare with their cross-state university rival (with cloak-room maneuvering that went far beyond athletics.) State funds were low, there were charges of ethics problems through the Cooperative Extension Service. The university also had to survive a proposal that would move the campus 50 miles west, to the capitol city. Dowell wasn’t exactly against that idea, and that cost him in the eyes of his faculty and students. Also, the Great Depression was on the horizon. No one knew that in 1926.

Dowell knew, however, that he replaced a beloved man, and sometimes blamed that for his lot in life, because the real issues — disrepair of buildings, outdated equipment, debt, underpaid faculty — weren’t enough to blame. He wanted more money from the state, which often looked at the university as a secondary concern, despite its land grant status and importance to the region. People seemed to like him, there was a complimentary note about his welcoming style of conversation in this annual, but didn’t think he was equal to the job. He’d lost the alumni, the faculty were over him. Enrollment wasn’t keeping up with regional competition. Dowell might have been too much of a holistic bureaucrat for the moment, and didn’t bring the requisite passion for the place, but there was also the problems in athletics, particularly football. After the 1924 season the team was 4-4-1, and alumni wanted Dowell to be brought before the board of trustees, with students called to testify. This was the lever that moved alumni, but statewide politics that had nothing to do with sports were also at play. The students hanged him in effigy.

This is the cover of the 1926 yearbook.

The book was dedicated to Maj. John Everard Hatch, “who has been an inspiration to us throughout our four years of college life … in token of our love for him as a man, our admiration for him as a solider and our devotion to him as a leader.” Hatch retired as a colonel. He and his wife, Helen, are buried at West Point. They had a daughter and two sons, both of whom served as officers in the Army. They would have all been 10 or younger here. His father was a brigadier general, buried at Arlington.

Sometimes it is easy to think of the way-back-then as a monochrome moment, a sepia-toned, yellowed piece of paper is what we’ve got. That’s what we see, after all. But this book is here to show you, they knew about color. There are several plates like this marking the different sections of the book. Though, to my knowledge, we didn’t often have tigers walking a path to Samford Hall.

Nevertheless, it is the 1920s. The photos here are large shots of buildings, which we’ve discussed before, and small headshots, like these, of the senior and junior class officers.

Vice president of the senior class was Leon Nelson, who was from Gadsden. He went to Florida to coach and then to coach in south Alabama. A decade hence, he was the head football coach back home in Gadsden, and had a legendary decade-long run there. He went back to Florida in 1948, where he stayed until 1964. The stadium there is named in his honor. He died at 67, in 1970, in Miami.

Owen Frederick Wise return to Auburn in 1970 to receive an honorary doctorate. He was the director of the state’s Vocational Rehabilitation Service where he worked for more than 40 years, started in 1928. He died in Montgomery, in 1973. He had his wife, Louise, had two daughters, and at least one of them went to Auburn and would be listed as one of the Glomerata‘s favorites — a fact which was mentioned in her obituary, at 88, in 2023.

Louis Howle left school and signed on with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, where he worked for 43 years. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in Atlanta, in 1983.

Robert Young Brown went into the foreign service. He was stationed in Baghdad, Cairo, Bogota, and Panama in the 1930s. He would also serve in Montevideo, Manila, and Athens. He was named consul general in Jamaica in 1950. He retired in 1957, and served in the National Defense Executive Reserve. He died in 1964.

Dorothy Duggar was from Auburn, hers was one of those reasonably prominent families. She would become the first woman to graduate from the university with a degree in architecture. She stayed in town, and became well-known herself. She died in 1975 and is buried at Pine Hill.

Did these juniors do much? Eldon Pruett got married in the fall of 1926 and graduated in May of 1927. His wife became a teacher. He did too, becoming a coach at neighboring Opelika High. He stayed in the Army reserves, left OHS to serve in the war. At some point he did a stint in Korea. He became a lieutenant colonel, and a business manager when he returned to civilian life. He was active in local society, ran for the county school board, married off two daughters. His nickname in college was Dizzy, and people still called him that three decades later. He died in 1968.

S.H. Lynne was a track star at Auburn and was hired as a coach at Alabama. He also studied the law there, and then became a county judge in 1934. He was named to the federal bench in 1946 by Harry Truman. When he died, at 93, in 2000, he was the longest serving jurist. His obituary recalls that his order kept George Wallace from barring two black students from attending the University of Alabama, though he wasn’t known as a proponent of integration.

His classmate and fellow class officer Moreland G. Smith was a civil rights activist, and architect. He joined a Nashville firm, studied at MIT, and then put out his own shingle. He designed a city hall, and an apartment complex where Rosa Parks would later live. He served in the Army Corps of Engineers. He later designed Montgomery’s Garrett Coliseum, served on the board of trustees at Tuskegee. He also worked on a church, a library and three county courthouses. He sold most of his interest in the architectural firm Sherlock, Smith & Adams because the very racist governor was threatening a bank with which they did business. He moved to Atlanta and joined the Southern Regional Council. He and his wife, Marjorie, had three children. He died in 1989.

It looks as though Rodney G. Carter became a teacher, and then a principal. He’s difficult to pin down, however.

All of the senior headshots look like this, though Sarah Frances Blackman is the only one smiling.

If I have the right woman, it seems that she got married in 1953. It’s possible she lived in Florida. And, if I found the right one I think I’ve just stumbled upon my favorite newspaper mention in this long-running project. In 1983, Blackman was demonstrating the microwave. No wonder she was smiling, decades and decades earlier.

The next woman is Mrs. Margaret H. Blair. She would go on to work at the Georgia Teachers College and the University of Georgia. By the mid-1940s she becomes nationally renowned in clothing and textiles. She’s in her 30s here, but she’s difficult to trace. She died in Savannah, Georgia, in 1973. Her sister, Agnes Harris, was at this time the dean of women at Auburn. The next year she went over to Alabama.

I only included the third guy because he was easy to find. Samuel Bonifay studied electrical engineering, became a meter tester, and eventually settled in Anniston, working for Alabama Power for almost 40 years. He served as a captain in the reserves, retired in 1966 and had a daughter and two grandchildren when died at 75 in 1977.

On that same page, at the bottom of the column, is Margaret Brown. She was studying education and, if you’ll read her blurb, was a total jock.

The varsity team didn’t form until 1971, of course, but women were doing things prior to that. And this, in 1926, is the first time I recall the yearbook bragging about it. Unfortunately, the athletic department doesn’t record or recognize those earlier teams. And Brown, of course, is quite the common name.

This is Wiliam Alton Goode, he was studying agriculture, livestock in particular. He’d eventually own a dairy concern. He died in 1979, age 75, the father of a son and two daughters. He is from one of my ancestral haunts and I bet someone in my family knew him.

I don’t profess to being an expert on the photography or portraiture of the era, but I bet this woman, Oriel Nevada McGinty, was desperately ready to be done with the 1920s.

She was the oldest of five from nearby Camp Hill. She was to become a teacher. She died at 86 in 1976.

It is a shame the photo isn’t bigger, but you can tell that the band is awfully proud of those capes. I bet they were new.

“They weren’t good, but they had rifles, and so we’ll say whatever nice things they want us to.”

Earlier we learned that the athletics were struggling. The solution was a rebuild. The university brought in David Morey, center. He was an All-American football player for Dartmouth College and a pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics. Auburn was his third stop, where he stayed for three years. He went 10–10–1 in football, with the high water mark being a 2–0 win against Tulane in the first game of New Orleans’ Sugar Bowl. In 1927 his quarterback was expelled for sneaking into a women’s dorm after a night of drinking. (Could you imagine that headline today?) His team started 0–3 and he resigned. he went back north to coach again.

Some of these other guys would have distinguished careers on the plains. Red Brown, who coached the freshmen, Boozer Pitts, Morey, Mike Papke, and the great Wilbur Hutsell.

Pitts was a local boy, and was a standout player at Auburn in the glory days. He was a center at 190 pounds. He’d coached the team in ’23 and ’24, and would step in for Morey in 1927. Aside from World War II, when he served as an army officer, he taught math at the university for more than 30 years. He died in 1971.

Papke would coach the basketball team for three seasons and still has the second-highest winning percentage on campus.

Wilbur Hutsell was fast his whole life, being a conference champion in the 400 when he was in college. He’d been on campus for a few years as the first track and field coach. In his career he sent five athletes to the Olympics. He also coached the basketball team for a time, before Papke came along. He trained the 1924 Olympics wrestling team and was an assistant track coach for the 1928 Games. He was also the athletic director, twice. The track venue on campus was named in his honor and he was inducted into four different halls of fame.

Morey, on the gridiron, had guys like this to work with. No idea who they are, as there’s no caption. The football team began their rebuild, in 1925, going 5-3-1. The yearbook says they were a thin team. As yearbooks must do, they were incredibly optimistic about the future.

They were wrong. The team would go 5-4 in 1926 and wouldn’t see a winning season again until 1931. None of the fans knew that. Some 5,000 fans came out to see the homecoming game, a 19-0 loss to Virginia Tech. It was the largest crowd to ever watch Auburn play. In contrast, the 2026 A-Day game, the spring scrimmage, had 34,276 fans in attendance.

There were quite a few on hand for this game. Not sure where it is, but I want to say Columbus. The sports photography had a long way to go, in the 1920s, and this is the best of the shots assembled here. But, still, look at that referee running in at the end of the play.

This is the captain of the team, Edward “Red” Hawkins. He was a senior from Bessemer, studying civil engineering. He got married in 1928 to Mildred and graduated in 1929. He taught and was the athletics director of a high school for some time. He joined the U.S. Forest Service and then the war came. Overseas for more than two years, he was stationed in Calcutta, India for at least part of that time, where he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Ten days after his 90th birthday, in 1992, he died in south Alabama.

This is the rat football team. The freshman team, and the first one in the university’s history. It says here that some 120 “freshies” came out for the team. Twenty-two of them are listed above this photograph. It looks like a pretty fierce group to me.

Cheerleading was different then. These guys didn’t merit a real mention here, but they did get this photograph. I wonder if they had to supply their own white-on-white cheer uniforms. We do learn the cheer leader is Charles Roberts, a junior from Wadley studying electrical engineering. He’s the guy in the middle.

Roberts worked at Georgia Power, where he was a vice president for a quarter century. He cheered on the Red Cross and the United Givers as chairman of the local fund drives. He’d been president of the Rotary, the chamber of commerce and the Georgia State Fair Association. When he died, at 67 in 1971, he had a son and daughter, and seven grandchildren. His wife died three years prior, almost to the day.

Here’s the captain of the basketball team, which earned a two-page spread. Bill McKinney was from Mobile. He was studying electrical engineering. The season was still underway when the Glom went to print. They finished 5-10, but were looking forward to better days. And the next few seasons were better.

McKinney came from a time before load management. We learn here that he’d played every minute in the last two seasons. He made it to 98, his time at the university and his four varsity letters, his time in ROTC, and his being a team captain are sentences three through seven in his 2003 obituary. But he was more than an Auburn Man — they for sure got that in his obit, as well they should. He was in the Rotary Club. He worked for the American Blower Corporation, which made industrial fans, for two decades. He started McKinney Associates in 1948 and, it says here, he never missed a day of work until he retired at 97.

One of the guys on the team is the great Euil “Snitz” Snyder. Streak was his college nickname for a time, and he came by it honest. He was a three-sport start, but it was the track where he shined. He held the American record for the 300 meter race for a time, at 48 seconds flat. He ran the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds. In two years he would become Auburn’s first Olympian. He would win a heat race in the 400 meters, but didn’t advance past the quarterfinals.

After school, Snyder coached football for 30 years. I grew up near a stadium named in his honor. The mayor said “Everyone didn’t love him — no man can claim that — but everyone respected him. Not many can claim that.” Wilbur Hutsell, who we met above, said “I never played for Snitz. I envy those more fortunate.” The newspaper wrote “He produced so many outstanding athletes for Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech that he was often accused of running a Tech training camp.” He trained at least three All-Americans and one football national champion. He won seven state football championships. His basketball team was a state runner-up. During World War II he ran a physical fitness program on a college campus. The Boston Celtics came to town and his team beat them. He died, at 72, in 1978.

This is Cecil Stewart, captain of the baseball team. The Glom says “his uncanny ability to wield the willow and handle the horsehide is sure to carry him to the top.” Those are both baseball references, though I had to look up the first one. Stewart played seven years of minor league ball as a second baseman. Soon after he hung up his spikes he got married. He and his wife, Catherine, started their lives in Dallas. Geechie, as he was known as a young man, died at 85, in 1988.

Here’s one more baseball shot. The guy on the right is Ben Sankey. They bragged about him here as a shortstop, and they weren’t wrong. He spent three years in the bigs, playing all around the Pittsburgh Pirates’ infield. He died in Georgia in 2001, at 94 years old.

Last one for the day, these are the track and field captains. I’m not sure what the Ts mean on the uniform. Leon Lavert “Nurmi” Nelson has them, but the whole team does not wear them. Nelson was also the vice president of his senior class, we learned about him, above.

The other guy is George Clifford Murrow. He ran cross country. He got a masters degree at Alabama. He became an educator, and then a principal, which was one of his job titles for 32 years. In the summers he worked as a funeral director. He retired in 1971. He died in 1988, survived by his wife, Ola May, and two daughters.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.


22
Nov 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part 12

This is the 12th and final installment of our glance through the 1954 Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part 10 and part 11.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

These are a couple of quick shots with a lot of substance behind them, so let’s get to the good stuff.

This was a play or a skit and we have no idea what was going on here. There’s nothing written to support this one moment in their lives. Hopefully it bubbled to the surface for them from time-to-time, and they thought of it fondly.

Dig that fancy flash the guy is holding. And is this really hazing? You could get in a lot of trouble for that today, of course. But things were different, one supposes. Or maybe it was just in fun.

“Fun.”

I’m beginning to think the impression I’ve been given of the morally upright 1950s might not have been a complete … picture.

What do you suppose this guy was working on? Note the ink jar, too.

This feature has a “post every bike” policy, and now that extends to unicycles. This could come back to haunt us later.

That guy is riding at the gates at Toomer’s Corner. The brick column and the Class of 1917 sign are the clues. This it what it looks like today (in 2015).

You’ll note those globes have been replaced by eagles. Those are 19th century eagles They were brought to campus in the 1960s.

I find I’m over the dodging and burning they were doing in the darkroom to cut out these images. What was going on behind the uni-cyclist could have been interesting to us, too.

From the advertisements in the back … This is obviously a sporting goods store, one I’ve never heard of. A quick search tells me they existed at least until the 1960s. They had a great spot, right next to Toomer’s Drugs.

Businesses come and go. The one in Atlanta is gone, too. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the model’s choice of footwear for this photograph.

J&M is still going strong, though. I bought my first Auburn t-shirt in that store. Shopped there a lot over the years.

It does look a bit different today. The building is bigger, and they sell more apparel and souvenirs than books. The business keeps changing, but the Johnstons are still standing there.

Trey, a kind-hearted guy, still owns the place, and it’s still a family concern. Trey was a football walk-on. He grew up in town, and around that store, which his father opened the year before this book was published. It’s a part of everyone’s lives and has always been a part of his. It’s one of the last things downtown that feels old and familiar and I hope it goes on for forever. (Another bookstore I shopped in closed in 2022.) Trey’s lifetime devotion to the place and the people deserve that.

Hawkins is gone.

Has been gone for decades. Hawkins, over time, became Johnston & Malone. So this book is at the beginning of the crossover period. (J&M traces their roots, indirectly, back to the 19th century.) And Burton’s were the headwaters.

Robert Wilton Burton opened the first bookstore in Auburn. They offered “Something New Everyday” for 90 years.

Born in 1848 in Georgia, he enlisted in the Confederate cavalry at the end of the war. At the ripe old age of 17 he spent two days in the saddle before he was captured and spent the last three months of the war in captivity. Burton spent most of his adult years in Auburn, first as a teacher, and then a business man. In 1878 he opened his bookstore became the literary center for the town. Himself a poet, Burton was published in newspapers and magazines around the country, and had a successful series of children’s stories, too. He died in 1917, and his daughters took over the store, until it closed in 1968 when his last surviving daughter was 77.

Burton, his wife and his two daughters are all buried in Pine Hill, an old cemetery steeped in the area’s history, a place I enjoy as much as one can say they enjoy a cemetery, and, oddly, the last place I visited on the weepy, dreadful day we moved away.

And that’s the end of the 1954 Glomerata. These are the editors. And I bet those tires and candles made for a good joke.

I wonder how many people were in on it.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.


15
Nov 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part 11

Venerable old Milwaukee County Stadium was opened in 1953. The Milwaukee Braves and the Green Bay Packers played there, as the MIlwaukee Brewers would later. The Sitting Bull Monument, on Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was built that same year. Plans for the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier in Philadelphia began in 1954.

The top television shows at the time were The Milton Berle Show, You Bet Your Life, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Dragnet and I Love Lucy.

Kitty Kallen was atop the charts. Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, the Crew-Cuts and Jo Stafford — my favorite of the era — all had huge hits.

People read a lot of Annemarie Selinko (Désirée), A.J. Cronin (Beyond This Place), Samuel Shellabarger (Lord Vanity) and Morton Thompson (Not as a Stranger) who all held the New York Times bestseller spot during the period. Yeah, I haven’t heard of any of those, either.

That was 1953 and 1954. Let’s see what else people were doing.

This is the 11th installment of our glance through the Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, and part 10.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

This is one of those photos they use to fill space at the beginning of each new section. We’re heading into “Activities and Snap Shots” and I was not expecting this in a wholesome book about the 1950s. I’m not here to pass judgement, but this was probably someone’s grandmother several decades later.

The editors of this yearbook should have thought about that when they were in their 20s, is all.

We don’t spend a lot of time here on buildings, because buildings are only interesting in certain ways and certain times. And, usually, they’re unchanging. But this one is new. At least it was in 1954, when it opened that January. Sometime after that, all of these people posed for the moment.

It’s difficult to imagine Foy Hall — Foy Student Union in my day — as new. It was awkward when I started, a structure that would was a vestigial branch of modernism that didn’t fit in with the Georgia colonial architectural style that predominates. By the time I graduated it had changed. I practically lived there. The newspaper was housed there, and so was the radio station. It had that old, tired feeling a building can adopt when everyone knows it is on its last legs. The care isn’t as frequent. Resources and time are spent elsewhere. Offices move to sexier places. Everything feels a little careworn.

Which is a shame. The building, just the Student Union to the people in that photograph, would later be named after the beloved Dean James Foy, who was the dean of student affairs in 1954. In fact, this yearbook was dedicated to him. You read about him a few months ago.

Here’s Foy Hall today, or at least in 2016, and from almost the same angle.

A few years back the university built a brand new building that serves as the student union. Let’s have a quick look at what it was like way back when.

This photo was too small in the book, but it’s fascinating. The cutline tells us “Display boards keep students well informed on campus activities.”

It is probably not real, but I think I have a memory of someone telling me about these things. I don’t remember the actual boards, but I know where they were.

I also know right where this room was. It doesn’t look like that today, thank goodness. With windows above your eye line, and nothing to but that relentless brick wall, you really didn’t need whatever is going on in the background, too.

This is from Homecoming, a 16-7 win over Florida. And that’s Miss Homecoming, Joan Davidson. She graduated in 1955 and became an elementary school teacher in her hometown, married her college sweetheart and they had four sons. Her husband, George, died in 1971, and when Joan remarried she added three stepdaughters to her family.

She was president of the Junior League, a director at a nursing home, and a board member of Joan was a dedicated member of this community, having served as the President of the Junior League of Columbus, served on the boards of a nursing home, the local historic foundation and chamber of commerce. She passed away in 2020, celebrated by a family of seven children, 15 grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.

She’s standing there with George Uthlaut, who we met a while back. He was a senior studying chemical engineering, a real BMOC, and became successful in oil and gas exploration and production, first with Exxon for more than 30 years, and then with Enron Oil and Gas. He and his wife, Dot, volunteered in their local hospital for 35 years, visiting patients weekly. He’s still with us and they’re living happily in Texas.

This is a pretty basic formation, really. I could do that. I could do that today!

And by “that” I mean stand there and look pleasant and casual while a woman stood on my quad. I wonder what the cheer was. I wonder what it was like to have only seven cheerleaders. There are 21 today.

Also, they had puppets. It is unclear if these are props for this photo or something they used. Maybe pom-pom technology hadn’t really caught on by the 1950s. I must confess to some ignorance of cheerleader history.

That’s Jean Dudley on the left. She married her high school sweetheart. She died in 2020, survived by her husband of 63 years, a guy who was studying mechanical engineering in this yearbook. Together, they raised a family of three sons, eight grandchildren, and ten great grandchildren. Her husband, John, did two years at Auburn, and then transferred to Penn’s Wharton School of Business. He became a stockbroker and a financial adviser. He died in 2022.

The one on the right is Ann Wilson. She’s from Mobile, and after she graduated from Auburn she got a master’s degree from Alabama. She became a social worker, working at the county level, then worked in state pensions, served in FEMA for several years and went back to state-level work. She had five children, and she’s still with us.

The woman in the middle has the incredibly exotic name of Catherine Cole, and it’s a bit too difficult to dig her out of the interwebs.

Hey, look, it’s the Auburn Knights! They were formed in 1928, and they’re still going strong today. Over the years they’ve earned and maintained a terrific reputation. Now, as then, they toured all over the region, playing colleges and clubs.

On the drums is Jerry Micklic, from suburban Birmingham. When he put down the sticks he went home and ran a business for 60 years. He died in 2014, the father of three, grandfather of four.

Betty Jean Brown was the singer for the Knights. She was a freshman. She stayed in Auburn, where she taught elementary school, sold real estate, played piano for her church and sang in the choir for 60 years. She’s somewhere in this reunion choir.

She and her husband were married for 67 years before his death. They raised two sons and three grandchildren. They toured all over the country in their RV. It seemed a lovely little life. She passed away in 2021.

There’s no context included for this photo. It’s on a page highlighting skits. They must have been funny.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.


8
Nov 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part 10

In 1953 and 1954 there were plenty of sports for fans to read about, listen to, and watch. The NFL was conquered by the Detroit Lions, who beat the Cleveland Browns at Briggs Stadium, in Detroit. If you had a TV, you might have tuned in to the DuMont Network to listen to Harry Wismer and the great Red Grange give you the game. It was the Lions second championship in a row.

The Yankees won the World Series in 1953, four games to two over the Brooklyn Dodgers. Also in baseball, the Braves were settling in to their new home in Milwaukee, having left Boston, as the first MLB franchise to relocate in 50 years. The Minneapolis Lakers remained the kings of the hardwood, winning the 1954 NBA Championship Series over the Syracuse Nationals (the future Philadelphia 76ers). It was the Lakers third consecutive championship, their fifth in seven years.

Rocky Marciano was the heavyweight boxing champion, having won the title in 1952. He held it until he retired in 1956, age 32, an undefeated champion. Tony Trabert and Maureen Connolly were the national champions in tennis.

The Detroit Red Wings were Stanley Cup champions. The 1954 NHL finals saw the Red Wings and Montreal Canadians meet in the finals for the second time in the 1950s. Defending champions Montreal blew a 3-1 series, and Detroit won their second Stanley Cup in four years and sixth overall.

In Europe, Fausto Coppi, on his way to becoming a legend, was the winner of the Giro d’Italia. The great Louison Bobet won the Tour de France.

There was a lot to see on campus, too.

So let’s look at some sports photos!

This is the 10th installment of our glance through the Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight and part nine.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

We remember, at considerable length, the 1953 football team last week. So we’ve met all three of these men, but I include this photo just because of these amazing Senior Bowl uniforms.

Ed Baker, left, became a highly successful high school and semi-pro football coach, and ran a school for two decades. Vince Dooley, center, became a Hall of Fame coach at Georgia, where he won six SEC championships and one national championship. All Bobby Duke did was letter for three years at Auburn, coached high school football, joined the Air Force, retired as the director of fraud investigations, then almost two more decades as a paper company executive. All of these men lived long, successful lives, raising families and probably never forgetting those incredible jerseys.

Here are two quick shots from the same football game. Auburn hosting Georgia. And you can’t see this view from the field anymore. That’s Samford Hall peering out from over the trees in the background. If you were standing on the sideline today where this photographer was, the background would be a wall of fans.

That’s Bobby “Goose” Freeman, #24, running with the ball. He’d play for three different clubs in the NFL, as a defensive back, then coached at Auburn for a decade, and raised a huge family.

Same game, this is Duke collecting a pass from Dooley.

Auburn won that game, 16-7. Auburn led the series 16-12-2 after this game. The series is just as close today (43-39-2, Auburn.)

The Glom says this game had the largest crowd ever in attendance, 25,500 people. The stadium capacity today is 88,043.

Here’s the head man, and the famous pose. Ralph “Shug” Jordan. This was his third year at the helm, and on the foundation of this team they were building a championship and a powerful program. He won his first of four SEC Coach of the Year award for the 1953 season. In 1957 he’d win a national championship. Pretty impressive considering the ’53 team made the school’s first major bowl. (They don’t count the 1937 Bacardi Bowl for some reason.) This team went 7-3-1, and in his long career, which ended in 1975, Jordan went finished with a record of 176–83–6 in football, including a Heisman Trophy winner in the great Pat Sullivan, and all of that overshadows his respectable basketball coaching career, where he amassed a 136–103 record.

One of the O.G. members of the good ol’ boy network, Jordan served on the university’s board of trustees, in retirement. He helped expand the seating capacity of the stadium with his name on it to seat 72,000. He died of leukemia in 1980. Six of his former football players were his pallbearers.

Posthumously inducted into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1982, he is remembered as a coach today, but he was also a father of three, and a World War II veteran. Ralph Jordan saw action in North Africa and Sicily before being wounded in the shoulder and arm in Normandy as a part of the D-Day invasion. After recovering from his wounds, he was shipped to the Pacific theater, serving at Okinawa.

Leah Rawls Atkins, who we met a few weeks ago, wrote a nice piece on Jordan, the man who coached her boyfriend, and then hired her husband, in 2016.

Auburn basketball was 16-8 in the 1953 season. Here, they’re playing Kentucky. It’s a fine photo, but it was a bad game. The Tigers lost 79-109 in Montgomery. And no matter where the games were played back then, they all had these cool compositions, those old flashbulbs making it look like they were playing in the dark.

At the time Auburn was a middling basketball team, but Kentucky was already a basketball blue blood, having collected three national championships since 1948.

Here’s the wrestling team. The guy on the far right of the back row is Swede Umbach. He coached high school sports in Oklahoma, joined the staff at Auburn and then, from 1946 until the early 1970s, he was the head man of the wrestling team, producing 25 Southeastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association championship teams and winning four SEC tournaments. He was 249-28-5 in dual meets, coaching 127 conference champions and four national champions and had Auburn hosting hosting the 1971 NCAA Wrestling Championship. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1991.

In the 1953 season one of his wrestlers, Dan McNair, one of the great southern wrestlers (in a time when you didn’t have a lot of those) had a legendary run. He’d started wrestling in his junior year of high school and didn’t win a match. He was a “skinny 185-pounder” when he got to college, but grew into a 6’2″ 210-pound heavyweight who was undefeated his junior and senior year. He out-wrestled a defending heavyweight champ at the 1953 NCAA finals.

They canceled the wrestling program in the early 1980s.

Yes, the students dressed well up for football games. Yes, they still do.

Helen Langley, in the center, met her husband when she was in school. They were married for 68 years, until her death in 2021. For 35 years, she ran a 2-year-old Sunday school class.

Sylvia Couey is the woman on the right. Born in Colorado, raised in Connecticut, she graduated from high school in Alabama, studied art and English and then spent more than three decades working at the Huntsville Senior Center. She died in 2010.

Here’s the track and field team, and those simple, clean uniforms.

On the back row, left, is athletic director James Beard. The old coliseum is named after him. Honestly, one of the reasons that building is still standing is because his name is above the door, but the university is once again pondering it’s future. On the far right is the legendary coach Wilbur Hutsell. The track is named after him today. In 1921, he was hired as the first track & field coach and retired from the job in 1963. He amassed a 140-25 dual meet record and won three SEC team titles, coached four Olympians, was a trainer on the 1924 Olympic and an assistant track coach at the 1928 Olympic Games. He served as president of the National Track Coaches Association, the university’s athletic director twice, and is in the Helms Track & Field Hall of Fame, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame and the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame.

And, finally, here’s the tennis team. If you’ll have noticed in most of the photos above, shots most assuredly submitted to the yearbook from the athletic department, most of these games seemed very serious. But the tennis team, in their t-shirt uniforms, they seem like a jolly lot.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.