Seventy years ago, things were different, but almost everything looks familiar. You can see it in the photos of campus life from the beautiful old yearbooks. And this is a look at my alma mater’s yearbook, the Glomerata, which I collect. My grandparents aren’t in this book, but their peers are. Maybe some people they knew, or would know later, are in here, though we’ll never know.

This is the second installment of our glance through 1954. Part one is here, but I’ll put them all in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all of the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

In 1954 the university was in the middle of the G.I. Bill enrollment explosion. The campus had their second largest ever enrollment, and the campus was still in a growth phase. I put a fair amount of context in the part one post, so let’s just jump in.

Since this is a highlight feature, rather than a complete look, I’ve been using a few rules — minimal buildings and minimal head shots– and I’m breaking both of my rules here. Just because this line art is well done.

This is a drawing of Comer Hall, which houses the College of Agriculture, where I spent half of my time. There was a computer lab on the third floor in my day, a small auditorium classroom on the second floor, and my advisor, the dean, had his office on the first floor. There was a fallout shelter in the basement, and that might be one of the few parts of the building I didn’t know anything about. It was built in 1920, burned and rebuilt in 1922. It is named after B.B. Comer, an early 20th century Alabama governor. And a progressive one, at that. (Progressive among his contemporary peers, to be sure.)

That’s the dean, E.V. Smith (no relation) who was director of Extension from 1951 to 1972 and a real power player of his era. The research center in nearby Shorter is named for Smith. There, researchers conduct experiments on plant breeding, animal husbandry, horticultural innovation, biosystems engineering and more. It’s comprehensive.

The younger man is the student president of the college of agriculture. I’m not sure when those positions disappeared, but we’ll figure it out in other books. Buck Compton was from a place called Nanafalia, which sits on a ridge above the Tombigbee. One of the 75 people there would have to drive some distance to find a town you’d ever heard of or read about. It’s the sort of middle of nowhere that’s surrounded by a lot of nowhere, is what we’re saying. It’s a small place now, it was small when Compton grew up there. Anyway, he met his wife, Barbara, in college when they were sophomores. They graduated and got married in the summer of ’54.

He joined the Air Force, and when he left the service, he returned to the family farm. He and his dad ran cattle, a timber company and a country store, and the cattle and store were still in operation until just a few years ago. She was a high school history teacher. They were married for 62 years until he died, in 2016. She passed away in 2020. Together, they raised two daughters, and they had five grandchildren.

On the same page are two smaller photos meant to be evocative of the CoAg experience. (I wonder if anyone called it that in the 1950s …) They’re a bit fuzzy because I resized them, but we’re obviously examining and weighing produce.

And it looks like we’re working on a small disc harrow here.

I wonder how long all of that equipment remained in use on campus, and where it went when they upgraded.

Here’s a drawing of Tichenor Hall, which is where I spent much of the rest of my time. By the time I showed up it was filled with journalism students. (Don’t laugh, there were a lot of us then.) The basement had some geography folks, but it was mostly just us. Tichenor was built in 1940, and is named after Isaac Taylor Tichenor, the university’s third president, serving in that role from 1872 to 1881. He was also a pastor, having served as a chaplain during the Civil War, a farmer, a mining executive and in the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Tichenor is one of those complicated 19th century people in modern eyes. He was a proponent of slavery. He felt the Confederacy lost their war because of the Union’s industrial strength. And that’s how he framed his work at the university, pushing for big changes in higher education and diversity in the local economies, sort of a preview of the New South that was to come.

Roger Allen went to college at Auburn, played baseball and graduated with a chemistry degree in 1918, and a master’s the next year. After lab work during World War I and some time in New York and at Howard College, he came back to the Plains to teach in 1928. They pulled him out of the classroom for a quarter-century run as an administrator, and he was at the helm when the College of Science and Mathematics saw a great deal of growth. He retired in 1967.

Bill Fickling was from Georgia, where he was a three-sport star, including two state championships in the hurdles. In college, he played varsity basketball and ran an incredibly respectful 110-meter hurdles, where he was a conference champion in his sophomore year. His dad was a real estate powerbroker, and Bill Jr. took on the family business. Junior did well for himself. He married Miss America, Neva Jane Langley, in 1955. They were together for 58 years, until she died in 2012. They raised four children. Her obituary is clear: her pageant life did not define her. But it followed her anyway. Bill was still active in his community through the twenty-teens.

A few scenes from Tichenor Hall. That looks like an adding machine of some sort.

And those typewriters, they even look clunky for their day. I hope at least some of them landed in the hands of collectors.

When I was in school we were working on Macs. They were almost as clunky, but incredibly modern. You never think about those things when you’re young and working on a deadline. I wonder what they are typing, and if it stuck with any of those students long after the assignment was complete.

This is Samford Hall, the modern administration building. The graduate school was housed there in the 1950s. Today it is the icon building for photos and branding, and it should be. It’s still a lovely place in the Georgia colonial style.

I include this one in appreciation for the dodging and burning that someone undertook to get this in the book. In darkrooms, you did this with paper and light. I had two courses in undergrad that were darkroom intensive, and I never mastered the analog skill. Whoever did this, though, had some talent. And whoever is in silhouette here is working on pages we might see later.

Did you notice the Coke bottle? That was a nice touch.

These next few are staffers of the Glomerata, and I include them because they gave us this wonderful book. That’s Fred Nichols on the left, he was the editor of the yearbook. He was from Columbiana, Alabama, and was involved in all sorts of stuff on campus. President of his fraternity, in two different leadership groups, edited the Greeks’ rag, was an associate editor of the newspaper (which we’ll see in our next installment) and in the student senate. I’ve no idea how he managed to study industrial management. He went into the Air Force for a time, got married and they raised two children and two grandchildren. He died in 2001. You’re going to meet her in just a few moments.

The guy on the right is Tommy Tate, who was the business manager. He ran track, was recognized in one the mysterious leadership groups and studied business. I’m not sure what became of him. Tate is a surprisingly common name.

Look at the middle photo. The guy on the right is Batey Smith. He studied architecture, served as a captain in the U.S. Army and then went home to create ahugely important Tennessee firm, helping to build modern Nashville. In 1999 he and his wife established an endowed scholarship at AU. His was a hugely successful career, the lifetime achievement sort of career. Founding member of this. board member of that. He and his wife retired to Auburn in 2013 and he lived there until he died, in 2022 at 88.

The woman on the right side of the right photo is Jean Cross. She studied home economics. If I’ve got the right one, she married a football player. He would become a high school coach and athletic director in Georgia, where they lived until they retired to Florida.

I’m not sure why these two got their own photo. Maybe they were late to the picture sesh. But they’re worth talking about.

David Irvine’s dad was on the faculty, and he’s a senior in this photograph. He studied art at Auburn, became a tank commander in Europe during the Korean War, came home and earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in educational psychology and counseling from UNC. He became a school counselor and a teacher. After retirement he became a writer. As of this writing, he, at 92 (!!!) is still writing for his local paper, The Daily Dispatch (Henderson, North Carolina).

The office space gets a little more crowded for the last series of Glomerata staff photos. Let’s see what we can find.

Kathryn Keith studied psychology and became a teacher, a vice principal and homemaker in Georgia. She and her husband of 50 years raised one child, a grandchild and a great grandchild. She passed away in 2006. Frances Walthall married an Auburn man who became a manager at Alabama Power. They had four children and 14 grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007, but she’s still living in the state.

Irene Donovan finished at Auburn, and then went to graduate school at Tulane. She became a social worker, helping families in Louisiana and Georgia throughout her career.

June Sellers married Fred Nichols, the editor of this yearbook we mentioned above. She survived her husband. They had two children and two grandchildren. She started the kindergarten program at her church, volunteered at Children’s Hospital in Birmingham, was in DAR and volunteered and was a member of a sackful of other organizations. In her later years she moved into an assisted living facility. Her 2007 obituary said “she participated in every activity and was, not surprisingly, a member of the Social Committee” there. Hers was a life of service and doing.

Mary Ann Willman, from Columbus, Georgia, was a sophomore studying home economics. She married Haskell Sumrall, an Auburn man, a BMOC who became a captain in the Marine Corps. They lived in Florida until retirement. They had three kids. She died in 2014, and he passed away in 2020. They are buried at Miramar National Cemetery, in California.

Bill Whitaker died just this year, at 91. He met his wife in college, while he was studying electrical engineering. Whitaker joined the Air Force and stayed in until 1968. By then he had a master’s degree and a lifelong infatuation with computers. He worked at IBM, then went into sales with another big firm, and put in machines at places like Oak Ridge, Red Stone and Cape Canaveral. He returned to Alabama to head up the data processing department of Trust National Bank. He started his own company, eventually sold it, went to Memorex and another place or two before retiring.

The woman standing next to him the photo? That’s his future wife, Margaret, a sophomore from Mobile. They had two kids and two grandchildren and what sounds like a full and hopefully wonderful life. They were married for 68 years.

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

After a month away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Prepare for pretty pictures from the Plains.

That’s the 1954 edition of The Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater. To refresh the memory, I collect the yearbooks. It’s an almost unique thing, and they look great. The first Glom was published in 1897. (I don’t have that one, so if you run across it … ) and the last one I’ll collect was the 2016 book. There are 120 in between. (One year they published two books.) I now have 112 of them.

In 1954 the world was changing quickly, and so was the old alma mater. Ralph B. Draughon was the president. On the faculty since 1931, he moved into the president’s mansion in 1948. There was, of course, political tumult between the university, the Alabama Extension Service and the governor. (All of this went on for decades.)

The day-to-day campus issues centered around a population explosion. The GI Bill doubled enrollment in the late 1940s and it was obvious they needed more faculty, more space, more books for the library, more everything. Draughon’s almost two decades as president concentrated a great deal on growth and modernity.

Money, as ever, was the sticking point, but Draughon hit on a unique idea. He convinced the presidents of the other schools in the state — the white ones, anyway, because segregation was still everywhere — to present unified budgets to the state legislature. It made for an uneasy alliance, but sometimes it worked. Other times that, too, was contentious. You get the sense the state might have preferred it that way. Much of the legislature didn’t care for Draughon’s emphasis on education and modernism. Alabama isn’t a hard place to understand when you come to understand that the people with votes don’t always want to understand how to improve things. And change, improvement, was coming.

During his tenure, he put up 50 new buildings, doubled the on-campus housing options, opened 16 doctoral programs, landed an important series of accreditations and boosted the faculty numbers.

Civil rights and segregation were as much a part of the era as the university’s growth. It was the spring of 1954 when Brown vs Board of Education was handed down, but it would be another decade before Harold Franklin enrolled at Auburn, overcoming the board and state government’s intransigence, ending segregation on the campus. Draughon spent years trying to thread a non-confrontational needle while walking slowly along the fine line of progress.

We’re looking at the 1954 Glomerata here, but it’s important to note that in just a few more years, in 1960, the name would finally change from Alabama Polytechnic Institute to Auburn University. (It had been a topic of conversation since at least 1948.) Also in 1960, they started work on a new library. In 1965 the university named it for Ralph B. Draughon. Several decades later, when I was in school, state budget cuts were so severe that the RBD had to cut back on book, periodical and journal acquisitions. Draughon, buried just two blocks away from his library, would have had a fit.

Let’s look inside the book!

The first photo is in big, bright, beautiful color. It’s a signal to you and I, dear reader, that the future, grounded in wonder, inspiration and science, was here.

On the opposite leaf was this lovely little photo.

He’s wearing an Auburn button, and there’s a little football hooked to it. You can occasionally see those on e-bay. Here’s one now. Her corsage suggests that was a homecoming photo, but there’s no caption with it.

I don’t know what building this is, which annoys me. You think you know everything, but then there’s this marble staircase and that’s certainly something that should stand out in the memory.

The marble stands out, but so do those outfits. That shirt the guy is wearing. His shoes. No way that’s not a staged photograph. That getup couldn’t catch a woman’s eye, could it?

Students playing cards on the shore at Chewacla.

If you look at this Google Maps image, this is where they would have been. Seven decades ago.

The Tektronix Type 511-D Cathode Ray Oscilloscope was a wide range, portable instrument. It allows scientists to observe a wide variety of electrical waveshapes and was primarily intended for laboratory and shop use, in the development and testing of all types of electronic equipment. And while I’ve been reading about this, I’ve wondered, how long did this instrument stay on campus?

It was sold through 1955 or so, but it would be a hard-to-part item today. And that over-engineered press in the smaller photo? What even is that thing?

We can see now how sports culture is starting to become a more prevalent part of campus life. There’s already a crowd shot here in this front matter.

I think that’s from the Ole Miss game, but we don’t know for certain. It is a pretty educated guess, though, and I’m sure it’ll come up again later.

Look at that dress! I wonder what event this charming woman is heading to.

And those wire fish on the wall! How have those not come around in fashion at least twice in the years since.

Here’s the classic arch shot from Samford Hall. That’s the administration building. In the background is Smith Hall, no relation. (This is basically the same view today.)

I love how the stone is almost glowing. Wouldn’t that have been a neat trick back then, architecturally speaking? It’d be a wonder today, too.

I imagine it’s hard to spend a whole career on a campus and have everyone love you, but that was the case for James Foy, who generations of students knew and loved as Dean Foy. The 1954 Glomerata was dedicated to “one whose influence, leadership, guidance, and loveable personal qualities are known and felt by all.”

He was the dean of student affairs. Probably that job is different, and harder, today. Back then, his duties included being a hype man and a vibe guy. There are photos, decades after this, of students tossing him high into the air. He loved every bit of it.

Foy learned Auburn’s alma mater as a boy from his brother, Simpson, who attended API in the 1920s. (We learned about him a few months ago.) Simpson was a contemporary of the guy that wrote that song. James went to Alabama, where he was a part of the group that helped rekindle the Auburn-Alabama football rivalry. (Indeed, the trophy Auburn and Alabama share around the Iron Bowl is named after him.) After his military service as a naval aviator, he spent 28 years working at Auburn. When he retired, he worked there as a volunteer for another three decades, almost up to his death in 2010, at 93. He was beloved, then, for a lifetime, and he loved the university and its people in kind. The yearbook picked this one well.

A building on campus, Foy Hall, is named after him today. When I was in school it was the student union, which was apt. Nowadays the university names buildings after other important historical figures, and do a thoughtful job of it, or anyone who gives them a lot of money.

As ever, this is not a complete examination of the yearbook, just the images that jump out at me as I flip through it. There will be more next week. This collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here. The university hosts their complete collection here.

We are, today, wrapping up our look at selected photos from within an 80-year-old yearbook. In the last several I’ve posted about here I think I’m averaging about four installments per year, so this is a slight expansion. This is nowhere near complete, of course, and hardly efficient or scientific, but rather just a few of the things that caught my eye, or photos I wanted to giggle at, or interesting people I wanted to look up. And with record enrollment in 1944, I suppose this was a good year to see a little boost, even as the war was still underway. But because of that, as I realized in this final installment, it looks like the good times and the golden days might have been a little bit leaner. That could have been economics, too, or just the mood of the yearbook staff, who knows? Doesn’t matter. It’s a nice look back, at my alma mater, 80 years ago.

Why are all of these people running?

That looks like Cary Hall in the background, which is where I spent a few quarters taking biology classes. Here’s the map view.

The building closer to us, then, is Petrie Hall, named after the famed historian and bringer of football. At the time of this photograph it was the athletic field house, hence it’s off-scheme orientation on campus. The photographer was standing here, and it looks like this. Later, Petrie became a geology building. Today, it houses people that work in athletic finance.

I spent a bit of time in high school in Petrie because, back then, it was, I believe, the place they shifted people too during renovations, or the place they rented out for state-level work as people passed through.

So they are running. But why? They’re chasing this guy.

Fred Carley, of Mobile, Alabama, was a freshman, studying aeronautical engineering. And this young man has a story to tell.

In high school, Carley was on the track team, an outfielder on the baseball team, and a lightweight boxing champion. He also played in the band. And he’d do some of those things in college, too. He would become the lead trumpet in the orchestral band, the Auburn Knights. He was captain of the track team for two years, and the first track scholarship recipient in the history of the school. Sophomore year, he placed sixth at the NCAA championships, the only mile he lost in three years of college. He won four SEC championships, three in the mile and another in the 880. Only travel troubles kept him from the Olympic trials in 1948. He earned three degrees from Auburn. He did three active duty tours with the Air Force, eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He was an engineer and a track coach, and led his high school alma mater to 11 state championships. He started the track program at the University of South Alabama. He coached a bunch of other track stars in varying capacities while he was stationed at Eglin AFB, tallying 16 individual national championships and 17 national age group record. His athletes set six world records. And we haven’t even touched on his lifelong contributions to engineering, which led to his 1997 induction into something called the Military Packaging Hall of Fame. His wife was a prominent ballerina. They had two children. Their daughter held a U.S. record in race walking, and was a semifinalist in the Miss USA Pageant. Their son was a six-time World Record holder and twice a national champion in Track and Cross Country. He died in 2019, age 92.

Seems like a charmed life, no? This run was no exception. As a freshman, he was the winner of the ODK Cake Race. Back then it was a 2.7 mile run. The winner received a cake and a kiss from Miss Auburn. (I hope that part of the tradition has changed.) The Glom notes he got “exactly fourteen kisses.” That wasn’t the plan. Apparently there were camera problems. (No photos of the smooches were published here.)

Today, the ODK Cake Race lives on as a 5K. The top five men and women will each receive a cake. You see all of those long and heavy clothes the crowd is wearing, above? That won’t be the case when they have the 95th Cake Race this September.

This is where we remember there weren’t a lot of sports that year. The war, and all. There was no football in 1943, no basketball in 43-44, and no baseball in the spring of 44. So this yearbook moves dutifully on, and quickly. There’s no solid lead one the names here, but it’s an action shot of sorts, so …

If you’ll notice, in that first link above about Petrie Hall, you can see the building’s orientation to the modern football stadium. In 1939 it opened with 7,290 seats on the west side. The town was small, and there was a concern about bringing in that many people. There were apparently only two stores with public restrooms back then! Only a year later 4,800 wooden bleachers were added to the east side, and I think that’s what we’re seeing in the background of this shot.

While the stadium was dormant in 1943, the football Tigers returned in 1944. The first game in Auburn after the war was against the Fourth Infantry Raiders. Wikipedia tells me that 5,000 people gathered to see the Tigers win, 7-0, ending a 23-month layoff between varsity play.

There’s some other photos of guys tossing around football. One of women playing basketball, I think, some calisthenics and, for some reason, a three photo tennis spread. One of them introduces us to the powerful forehand game of Louis Shepard, a senior civil engineering major from Mobile, Alabama.

Shepard graduated in 1944 and went into the Navy, serving on the USS Sanborn in the Pacific. He was there for the assault on Iwo Jima, the invasion of Ryukyus and a feint on Okinawa. At the end of the war, the Sanborn transported occupation forces to Japan. Later, Shepard returned to the Naval Reserve during Korea.

When he wasn’t in uniform, he was an engineer, working for Texaco in El Paso, Texas, before settling in his beloved Gautier, Mississippi for Standard Oil. (The modern Chevron.) He fished, caught crab and shrimp, and he did it until Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home. The family rebuilt, and he stayed there until he died in 2012, survived by his wife, three children and two grandchildren.

This two-page spread was titled “C’est le guerre” and it features three photos and it’s all tongue in cheek.

Later we come to a page in the organizations section that is for students called into service before they could finish their education, curtailing the various roles they played on campus. These shots all look like campus photos, but they could be a bit more expansive. One of the names really pops out.

The last guy, Frank Wyatt, fought in Europe. He was a captain, attended the Nuremberg Trials, stayed on for part of the German reconstruction. Came home to law school, which he finished in two years. He worked in the Office of Chief Counsel of the IRS, and then went into the private sector as a corporate VP of finance and treasurer.

We don’t have a caption here, it’s a photo meant to point out the fraternities and sororities are coming up. It’s a strange, collegiate artistic layout. I don’t know who they are, but if any of these beautiful young people are still with us, I’d pay good money to ask them if this was staged.

And, finally, just one advertisement from the slim ad section in the back. Just the one because the rest were text only. But the theater went all out. I’m sure this cost extra. I do wonder who wrote that cutline though … and if the theater liked that.

They had one screen. It was the first theater in town, opening in September of 1926. It stuck around until April of 1984. Two other small theaters closed the next year. And though theaters come and age and go quickly, that marquee, would have kept a lot of cool character downtown if they’d maintained it. But they didn’t think like that in the 1980s. College towns seldom do these days, either.

As of this writing, there’s a nail salon, a beignet joint, and a dumpy pita restaurant in that spot today. There are also two other little spaces there that they can’t keep businesses in, and this in the heart of town. But, maybe, if that marquee had somehow stayed in place …

And that’s it. Thanks for following along with this casual glance of the 1944 Glomerata. All of these photos from 1944 photos live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful book covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.

Coming soon, we’ll check out the 1954 Glom. A few things will have changed in between!

Fridays mean we return to the past, we go home and we pore over old books. Right now, we’re falling back 80 years on the Plains, there were classes, college life, and the war. Here’s the next batch of photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata. Let’s learn a little about the time, and maybe something interesting about what became of some of them.

This installment takes us into a new section of the yearbook. It’s called …

… and really it’s just a section of almost 20 pages of glamour shots. Up first is Miss Auburn. A tradition since 1934, Miss Auburn, is the official hostess of the university, a goodwill ambassador and so on. And in 1944, Miss Auburn was Margaret Rew.

Rew was a sophomore, an education major, and also a cheerleader. She met an Army officer stationed at Fort Benning (now named Fort Moore). Lewis Sponsler was from Missouri. He was at West Point, but enlisted for the war. The Sponslers ran a pharmacy in neighboring Opelika for 34 years and were together for six decades until she died in 2006. They had three daughters, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren when she passed away.

Marian Boyle was a freshman from Georgia, studying commercial art. Or maybe it’s Marion. Both names are used in different places.

She’s one of those people that drifts into the digital mists. I will assume she did so deliberately after she realized her faux fur faux pas.

Claire Marshall, was a sophomore education major from a small town in southwest Georgia. There were about 365 people living there when she was growing up.

Claire Marshall married a Dr. Clarence Sapp. Her obituary says she was a basketball player in high school, which would have been something to see in small town 1940s. She was a homemaker. When she passed away in 2009 she had one daughter, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

I like this one. It looks like picture day just happened to be taking place as she walked by.

And she is Jeanne Townsend, a local girl, a sophomore, studying pre-law. She and her family had moved up from Florida a few years before, but she became popular quite quickly. In the fall of 1944, her junior year, she married Lt. Lawson Robertson who had also been an Auburn student before he joined the Army. He became a B-17 co-pilot in the 350th Bombardment Squadron in Europe. He died in 1972 and is buried at Arlington. It seems they got divorced in the 1960s. (But I wouldn’t swear out an affidavit on it.) She died in 1979 at 55, and is buried in Florida, with her parents.

Sarah Burrows was a sophomore from Jacksonville, Florida. She studied science and literature, and she was an actress in campus productions.

After that, she becomes a mystery to us.

This is Sarah Evans Glenn, a junior education major from neighboring Opelika. She taught in Texas and met a man who had served in the Pacific during the war. She came back home for a time and was teaching at the university when they announced their engagement.

She had a son in 1948, but she’d already lost her husband, a lieutenant in the Navy. They’d only gotten married in January of 1947. The son, named after his father, is still with us. I’m not sure, from a handful of web searches, what became of his mother.

Marie Strong was a freshman from Anniston. She was studying secretarial training. And lipstick application. She was a socialite of east Alabama, a beauty queen in high school, an honors student in college and would become a class leader the next year.

She shows up in the society pages a lot as a young adult, vacationing here, visiting there, hosting teas for this and that. Then, 1947 was her year, the parties and the buffets were for her. She got married and they moved to Michigan, but quickly returned to Anniston. They had a daughter, in 1952. Marie died in 1953. Her mother died the next year. Her husband was also from Anniston. He went to Georgia Tech and served in the Navy. He got married again in 1957.

Her name is Ann Black, or Anne Black. This yearbook isn’t always consistent. She was a freshman from Auburn, studying science and literature. (Some catchall program, to be sure.)

Anne — it’s Anne — married a man named Leonard Pace, who attended Auburn a few years after she did. He earned a degree in agriculture after serving as a corporal in the Army. Her great-grandfather moved into the area from Georgia just before the Civil War. Leonard’s family had lived in the area for several generations, and they stayed close by, as well. Anne died in 1982, age 57. Leonard passed away at 76, in 2000.

Betty Ware was a freshman from Auburn, studying home economics. A few years later, she was studying education. Her father was a professor of horticulture and forestry. (It’s weird to me to see them grouped together as a discipline.) She got married in October of 1946 to a veterinarian, Edwin Goode. He died at 55, in 1979. They were living in Auburn, but he’s buried in Birmingham, which was his hometown. They had three children.

Sometime after she married another Auburn man, Murphy Armor, who served in the ETO during the war and studied agriculture education after. He taught for a while in nearby Smiths Station and then ran an oil company for three decades. It’s possible I met them in passing. He died in 2010, a man I know officiated his funeral. Betty survived her second husband as well.

This is Rebecca Fincher, a freshman from the tiny town of Wedowee, Alabama, population 505 or so back then.

She was named Miss Homecoming the following fall. She was getting married in December of 1946 to a man with a terribly common name, and then they both elude me.

This smiling face belongs to Lilibel Carlovitz, who is our first proof that the hairstyles of the 1980s really came from the 40s, they just had more hair spray the second time around. She was a sophomore studying secretarial training. She was in the dance club and on the yearbook staff. She was from Auburn.

In the fall of her junior year, which is to say the fall of 1944, she got married to Morris Spearman, of Birmingham. He graduated from Auburn in 1943 with an aeronautical engineering degree. She worked as a stenographer for a few years after school, in Virginia. He worked at NASA. In an amazing six-decade career there he became an authority in aerodynamics, stability and control, aircraft, spacecraft, and missile performance, publishing over 300 technical papers and presentations in the field of aeronautics. She sang in the church choir all her life and helped found a bunch of different community organizations.

She died in 2011, 86; he passed away in 2015 at 93. They had three children, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Julia LeSueur was a freshman from Roanoke, Alabama, studying aeronautical engineering.

Roanoke is a border town in east Alabama. At the time, just over 4,000 people lived there. I’ve no idea if she went home, or went elsewhere. Rather fits that mischievous expression on her face, though, doesn’t it?

We’ve already met Margaret Rew. I’m not sure why she’s included here, but I assume it has something to do with the lipstick, or the excellent fill light in this photograph.

Maxine Tatum was a sophomore from Opelika. She became a high school history teacher and librarian in Union Springs, about 40 miles to the south, where she also coached students in speech contests.

She got married in 1946 to a man from south Alabama who attended The Citadel before being commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. The union didn’t last. She got remarried in 1953 to Joe Gholston, a man who flew with the 8th Air Force, before spending a year in a POW camp in Poland. They had 14 years together. She died in 1967, just 41 years old.

And, finally, meet Betty Peeples, a sophomore interior decoration major all the way from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. She really looks like she’s going places, doesn’t she?

I’ve just no idea where that was. The web, for once, is silent. Which is probably a big hint to me.

So that’s enough for now. Next week we’ll take a glance at the campus life section of the 1944 Glomerata. All of these photos from 1944 photos live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful book covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.

It is Friday, and, around here, we get in our time machine and we go home on Fridays. We return once more to a time now 80 years behind us. These are a few of the photos that I found interesting in the 1944 Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater.

In 1944, the war loomed over everything, and we’re seeing that in this yearbook. As we saw in the last installment, the local barbers had put an advertisement in the paper urging civilians to get their hair cuts during the week, allowing the service men in town to get in and out in their limited weekend free time. The war was everywhere, even in what we often think of as the carefree days of college.

Which isn’t to say that there was no fun. This guy was having fun. The girls seemed to be enjoying the conversation. It’s a filler photo, sitting around the class headshots. There’s no caption here, so we don’t know what they were discussing, or where this was or how uncomfortable he might have been. But, whatever it was, he didn’t mind.

This, we would say today, is so meta.

“The Rains Came” was a 1939 movie — it took a while for film canisters to move around back then. The summary, via IMDb, “In India, a married British aristocrat is reunited with an old flame, but she truly has her sights set on a handsome surgeon.” Starring Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power and George Brent, it was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning Best Special Effects. The movie features an earthquake and massive rains and floods. They used 33 million gallons of water to make the movie, roughly the same amount of rain you could see in a good spring rain just down the street from where this photo was taken.

Another no caption photo. Which is a shame, I want to know more about those socks and shoes.

One of the rules is that we have to feature every bicycle. This is a terrific composition. And if you look closely inside the background of the rear wheel you’ll see what I believe is the top of Hargis Hall. It’d be difficult to recreate this photo today because of newer buildings and tree growth.

In a just world, one of these women kept her book and dogeared the pages where she appeared. Some years later one of her granddaughters pulled that book off the shelf, where it had sat quietly down the hall for a good long while. She leafed through the book and then stopped when she got to page 101 and saw a familiar face.

Many giggles were had as the grandmother tried to remember the moment and told stories about her friend. Maybe they stayed in touch. Maybe she called over and they had a laugh they’d waited a few decades to share.

This isn’t a generational thing, but if we today say the youth have it rough, it’s worth pointing out that these people were surrounded by propaganda posters like this. That little bit of masonry on the right side tells us this was a blood drive sign up, or some such, right at the gates to campus.

Also on campus, as we’ve previously learned, was the ASTP. (Not to be confused with the ROTC.) The Army’s Specialized Training Program came about when General George C. Marshall realized that there were shortages throughout his army. Universities became part of the service chain for service men. In ASTP, men already in uniform, or people headed that way, were enrolled in professional and technical classes. ASTP students took up to two years of classes in foreign languages, engineering, medicine and more. More than 800 headshots filled this section of the yearbook, which was 20 pages in the Glomerata.

So it wasn’t just the posters or the news, but all of these men marching from building to building in formation.

The war was everywhere, even right outside the dorms. This is Broun Hall, which was built in 1938. Today it’s a co-ed dorm that houses 96 first-year honors students. Back then … it probably wasn’t a co-ed dorm.

Not all of those ASTP guys were in the Army. Some just drifted up from the Gulf and marched around in their Navy dungarees until someone told them what to do.

I saved this one for last. The face jumped right out at me. The look is just about right, too, though here he is so obviously looking into the future. And the future was an impressive one. This is Pete Turnham, a senior from Abanda (which was just a place that a rail line ran to and little more). He was studying agriculture. His Wikipedia page says he was born in an equally small nowhere, nine miles south.

Turnham was in the ROTC and went into the Army right after graduation. He became a lieutenant and then a company commander in George Patton’s Third Army. After the fighting was over, he found himself in charge of protecting a castle with a lot of stolen art. If you read the book, or saw the movie, “The Monuments Men,” you would see where Turnham found himself.

I’m not sure when Turnham came home, the Third Army stayed in Europe until 1947. When he did, he worked for a decade at Extension, and started his own business. He served on the local school board, and then ran for the state house in 1958, where he served for 40 years — longer than anyone. He served alongside nine governors. He kept his business up for the rest of his days. He called himself a workaholic. But he was a family man, too. He met his wife in college, in 1940. They had four children and were married for an amazing 73 years until she died in 2016. Together, they had four children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren when he passed away. He was widely celebrated in the news obituaries that announced his death in 2019. He was remembered as a man of true service, the kind of politician you wanted to have representing you.

That’s enough for now. All of these photos from 1944 photos live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here. The university stores their complete collection here.