We’re going back in time 90 years so we can see, just a bit, of what college looked like at my alma mater in 1936. Some of the great old buildings are there, some not yet so old! It’s starting to look modern, in campus and in the people. But nine decades is 20 or so generations of student churn in a college town. And we’re more interested in the people, anyway. What was life like, in a cash-strapped university, in a poor state, in the middle of the Depression? Before the war, before the G.I. Bill brought the next population boom to campus, it was a different world — but some of this is going to look familiar.

This isn’t a complete examination, just a quick flip through some of the images and names that jump out. Even still, we’ll be looking through this for the next few weeks.

Clearly this particular book — which was unsigned and doesn’t seem to give us any context clues as to the original owner — has been through some things. I like to imagine that this is an Alabama clay treatment that someone put on the cover, just to remind readers of where most of the people inside came from.

Let’s see some of the photos from those first few pages. This yearbook was dedicated to university president, Luther Noble Duncan. (Guys you’ve already got the job.) The dedication reads:

Having labored unceasingly for the growth and progress of Auburn, Dr. Luther Noble Duncan is esteemed by the citizens of Alabama and beloved by the entire student body. It is with sincere appreciation of his services to the institution and profound admiration of his sterling character that we dedicate to him this thirty-ninth volume of the Glomerata.

Just a few years earlier, when he was the director of the Extension system, the largest newspaper in the state called Duncan “a master of political trickery…probably without a peer, certainly without a superior, in Alabama.” The publisher of the paper sat on the university’s board of trustees. Duncan came to this job when his predecessor, a man named Bradford Knapp, resigned, citing pressures and stress. Knapp, the son of the distinguished agricultural reformer Seaman A. Knapp and president of Oklahoma A&M College, was academically qualified, but politically outgunned for this job. (And believe me when I tell you that is the everlasting theme of the place. Duncan moved over to the mansion in 1932 after the locals landed on the governor demanding he get the job. They liked his financial sense, that he knew the state and the players. And, by then, everyone knew about his abilities in the political arena. There was a lot of figurative knife-fighting involved in Duncan finally getting the job, in 1935. I’m sure there’s some thin allusion in the above dedication to all that transpired, but there were a lot of problems on campus in those tense times.

Early (in 1932), the committee made its first report to the board. They had found that the college owed $160,000 for various supplies and expenses. Approximately $300,000 had been borrowed from this operating fund and placed in the building fund in anticipation of payment on state building warrants, which never materialized. They also found $10,000 in unpaid interest on loans. The treasury was empty and the committee had been forced to borrow money to purchase stamps. The faculty and staff, who had been paid in certificates of indebtedness for the past ten months, had been informed that no one could be assured of a job after July 1, 1933. No concerted effort had been made to register students for the fall quarter that had just ended.

Because of his budgetary experience as extension director, Duncan played a crucial role on the administrative committee during the coming months. As of September 30, 1933, the end of the fiscal year, the college had paid forty-five percent of budgeted salaries. Early in 1934, the board authorized the committee to obtain all state bonds due to the college, to exchange the state building warrants for bonds, and to pay the school’s outstanding debts with these funds. By July, the faculty were receiving sixty percent of budgeted salaries. In early 1935, when the board named a president, the choice was clear. Hanson still opposed Duncan, as did one other board member, but otherwise the extension director enjoyed solid support.

There was also the political theater around something called the Teacher-Training Equalization Fund, which was, by this point, a several-years-long program that favored some institutions in the state over others for funding. This was nothing new. But it was changing. Just a few months after this yearbook came out Duncan won over the new governor, Bibb Graves, and the funds were equalized. This would be the first of many such corrections required for the university, over the next six decades or so.

He’s got a road on campus named after him, and also a building. I had an on-campus internship and an office in that building for almost two-years.

These past few years had been pretty tough on the Plains.

Charles Cary was the first dean of the vet school, and had been around for forever. Before he had that deanship, though, he’d also served as the first state veterinarian, and led in establishing meat and dairy inspection laws. He helped wipe out fever ticks in Alabama, pushed brucellosis and tuberculosis testing and the mass production of hog cholera serum. A few years later, in 1940, they’d name a building after him. it was the vet building for 30 years. Later, I had two biology classes there.

Bolling Hall Crenshaw was a local man, son of a judge, and taught the pluses and minuses for a long time. He was also part of a three-man executive committee that ran the university while they got their act together and finally decided to hire Duncan. His home the Crenshaw Guest House, is now a B&B — 12-foot vaulted ceilings, to golden heart pine floors, all Victorian design.

Porter Crowl Brook was a Georgia boy, the second oldest of six. He died in Montgomery at just 42. His wife survived him by 41 years.

There’s a George Ludwig Fick buried at Pine Hill. He died in 1936. His marker lists his Navy service, but nothing about the university. (Most all of the markers there do.) Also, I’m not sure about the years, since this says he left campus in 1932, but the Fick I found passed away in 1936.

They have a four-page spread of deans. The first one you meet is Marion Jacob Funchess, and he has clearly mastered the new art of the candid photograph. He has a building named after him, built in 1961. That place denies the rights and rules of physics. It houses the biological sciences department, entomology, plant pathology, agronomy and horticulture.

It smelled of formaldehyde and sawdust. It featured neglected taxidermied animals. I had … quite a few classes there, and so did a lot of my friends. We called it Funky Hall. It’s due to be razed sometime soon. (It is, in my estimation, on the list that need to go, but not at the top of the list. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

George Petrie, history professor, father of Auburn football, author of the Auburn creed. Man about town.

He worked on campus in varying roles from 1887 until his retirement in 1942. I wonder what happened to all of those books after that.

Petrie Hall was opened in 1939 as the athletics field house. Over the years it has had some academic uses, but has largely been administrative. Now it holds some athletics offices and storage. It’s a small building, in the shadow of the football stadium. How it has survived the march of progress I do not know, but I’m glad to see. I’m sure the name above the door has been a part of that.

John Wilmore would like you to hurry up with your little photograph, so he can get back to the important work of deaning.

Educated at Purdue, Wilmore spent 55 years at Auburn, and was dean from 1907 until 1943, during which time the engineering program went from 20 students to around 900. It’s one of the biggest, most prized, most valuable elements of campus today. Wilmore also served on that three-person committee with Brook. The Wilmore Engineering Laboratories building, a 65,000-square-foot facility, houses the academic offices for materials engineering, and office space for all sorts of engineers.

Major Gustav H. Franke led the ROTC program. He was a star on the West Point polo team way back when. The Army lifer was an artilleryman by trade. He’d commanded the first U.S. unit to fire on German forces in World War I. So you know no one tried to pull campus pranks on this guy.

This was his last year on campus. When World War II came he found himself commanding the Field Artillery Replacement Center at Fort Bragg, and eventually artillery for the whole 6th Infantry Division. He also led the 81st Infantry Division at Fort Rucker (the modern Fort Novosel) and was largely responsible for the buildup of that installation. He would retire a major general in 1944. Both his son and grandson would later serve as army officers.

First it was a department, but it became the School of Architecture, or Architecture and Applied Arts, under Frederic Biggin’s guidance, a man so well-respected still respected well enough that they use his name for high-dollar donors. His house, a Dutch Colonial Revival that is on the historic register, has been gifted to the school for meetings and classes. A New Yorker, he was on campus from 1916 until his death in 1943. He had a daughter, and she had two children who have passed away in recent years. They all stayed in the area.

He would never see it, but there’s a building, right on the corner where town and gown meet, named in his honor. It opened in 1951 as the College of Architecture, Design and Construction, but has been home to the Department of Art and Art History for some time. The university notes that the building’s “most prominent feature is a wall of windows facing north on Magnolia Avenue to let in abundant natural light favored by architects and artists.” At one point, the story went, the wife of a university president had a bunch of tall shrubs and trees installed so she wouldn’t have to see that building when she went by.

Shows what I know. Zoe is a popular name in this century, but the Greeks used it, too. I just learned that, reading up on Zoe Dobbs, who started at API as a professor of English and education in 1920. Later that decade she became the social director, and before long they named her the dean of women. She stayed on until retirement in 1952. Soon after, a dormitory was named in her honor, but its gone now. She died, and was buried in neighboring Opelika, in 1973.

Dean Isaac McAdory would like you to not notice his messy desk. He wouldn’t mind, however, if you realized his seat is right next to the radiator, and that his office is so small his plant is behind the radiator.

McAdory was on campus from 1904 until he passed away in 1952. In my time on campus, part of the veterinary facilities were named after him. This was notable to me, as I had also attended McAdory High School. Somewhere along the way I learned that Isaac’s middle name was Sadler. Two miles from my childhood home, and about that same distance from my school, was the historic Sadler house, pen log house done up in the Georgian style. It wasn’t until much later that I put the rest of this together, but the owner of that house was Isaac’s maternal grandfather. I wonder how much time he spent in that house. My high school, which opened in 1920, is named after his father, Isaac Wellington McAdory, who became a teacher soon after he mustered out of the Civil War.

John Scott would like you to know that he is so studious he has a special book on a special stand. He can leaf through it at anytime, and it’s got a look that suggests it was being used just enough. I wonder what that book was.

He’s about midway through his time on campus here, working through the economics department from 1927 through the mid 40s. And this is how you know university life has changed. He was the head of the economics department (which offered 35 courses) and dean of the academic faculty. In 1930 he was the dean of the School of Science and Literature, head professor of Business Administration, head professor of Economics and Sociology, and director of the Bureau of Economic Research.

That’s … a lot.

There was a great story about him in the local papers the next year.

Odd as it may appear, Dr. John W. Scott, dean of Auburn’s school of science and literature has today the experience of legitimately writing a letter to himself.

And even more unusual was the fact the letter had to be of a congratulatory nature, if he was to act in his strict line of duty as a college dean.

You see, it was this way: The name of his attractive daughter, Eleanor Lucile Scott, Auburn sophomore in science and literature, appeared on the list which came to him of students whose scholarship average for the first semester was 90 per cent or above. Miss Scott averaged 91.45 in her eight subjects.

Ten years ago when Dr. Scott came to Auburn from Oklahoma A. & M., he initiated the practice of writing personal letters of congratulations to parents of Auburn students who averaged 90 or better in their studies.

“Writing these letters to parents is one of my most pleasant duties,” said Dean Scott, “and I’m glad that Eleanor has placed me in this ’embarrassing’ position. I hope she does it again.”

Cliff Hare doesn’t know why you’re here, and thinks you should probably be over in one of the chem labs, working on your practicals.

By this point Hare had been on campus for 40 years. He would stay on the faculty for another 13 years. He was on the first football team, in 1892. If you watch Auburn play a football game, you’re watching in the stadium named after him. He was also president of the Southern Conference for a time. Also, he designed the first local golf course, helped the baseball program get off the ground, ran a local bank for 34 years, served on the city council, and as interim mayor. He also helped established a local medical clinic for people in the town. People sing his praises a great deal, but he’s still probably undersold for his importance.

This is one of the few people in this list I didn’t know anything about. Dana Gatchell was a professor of foods and nutrition. She was on the faculty for more than 30 years, retiring in 1956. In the university’s collection is a scrapbook she made that included pictures of the beds of royalty and aristocrats from Europe, and her notes on the development of bed styles from the 16th through the 19th century. What a great area of study!

She wrote several cookbooks, and collected them as well. She also wrote books titled Handbook of Menu Planning, Know Your Table Linen and Laces, and Know Your Tableware. She passed away in 1960.

You have to have a certain kind of confidence and swagger to make your way through this modern world with a name like Zebulon. You take one look at this man, and you know he had it in spades.

Judd was the school of education’s first dean. He was there for 40 years. The original purpose of the education program was to offer courses to people studying agricultural education. He died in 1960, at 83.

After the deans come the class photos. And at the front of each section is a photo of the snappily dressed class officers. Let’s wrap this post up by finding out a little about these seniors.

John Rush is the class president, and the guy on the far right, here. He was from Mobile, and majored in aeronautical engineering. He became a naval aviator. He died far too young, just before his 27th birthday, in June of 1941. He was conducting a test flight of the Curtiss SNC-1 Falcon when he got caught in a squall off Pensacola. He and his co-pilot were killed. Rush was buried at Arlington.

The light-haired guy sitting in the middle is William Fredrick Black. He was from Macon, Georgia and he, too, was studying aeronautical engineering. He was the class vice president. He played football in high school, and football and basketball in college. After he graduated he did six months at the naval base in Pensacola and was moved over to the reserves in 1937. He became a state trooper in Georgia soon after that, one of the first in that state, in fact. He would also be the first Georgia trooper killed in the line of duty, at the end of 1940, when he was just 29 years old. He and his partner stopped a car in north Georgia. Driving that car, which turned out to be stolen, was a man who’d already done three stints in prison. He’d broken out of a Oklahoma jail while awaiting trial on a robbery charge. Black was shot three times and died on his way to the hospital. The shooter was also wounded, but ran into the woods and led hundreds of law enforcement officers on a five-day manhunt. He was executed in 1943. Black was married to Juanita, who never remarried but focused on social work and service. She worked with the WPA, training women to sew parachutes and military uniforms. She apparently knew generals George Patton and Omar Bradley.

In the back is John Prentice Abel, and if that name seems familiar you were paying careful attention earlier. He was a senior from Roselle Park, N.J., studying mechanical engineering. He was the class historian, and he also appears on the In Memoriam page that we saw above. Abel died two months before his 21st birthday, just a few months before this book was released. He’d been riding in a car in Georgia and that car collided with a truck. It was December, I assume he was traveling home for the winter break.

That square-jawed man on the far left is James Moreman, a business student from Waverly, and secretary of the senior class. After graduation he went to work for General Motors in Birmingham. Like a lot of men his age, he found himself called to active duty. He was a captain in the army by 1943, and had been at Fort Bragg, Fort Sill, and Camp Clark, in Texas. In 1944 he was a major, and sent to Europe. The newspaper clippings tell us he was in the ETO for 18 months before returning home in September of 1945. It seems he and his young family bounced around the state a little bit before settling in the Birmingham area around 1950 or so. He was the commanding officer of an army induction station there until about 1951. He was active in the Civitan Club. Moreman worked as an accountant and controller for a truck leasing company. In 1975 James Moreman died, at 60, in Huntsville, survived by his wife and three adult daughters, a son, and six grandchildren.

Next week, we’ll take a look at a few of their classmates.

All of this 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.

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.

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.