We’re putting one collection, the historic markers, to bed here. May as well get up-to-date with another. So let’s sneak back over to the Glomerata bookshelf. (I have a big bookshelf.) The Glomerata is the yearbook for my alma mater. For reasons that escape me I’ve been collecting them. I have several. (Told ya, big bookshelf.) A little at a time, I’ve been uploading the covers as a section on the site. I’ve got two or three more to go just now.

Pictured below is the 1944 cover. If you click that cover you can check out today’s addition to the group, the 1945 Glomerata. The campus was about to grow rapidly. If the book came out that spring, the G.I. Bill would be signed that summer. And within the year the place would be crawling with veterans ready to put the war behind them and improve their career options with an education. As the campus would grow in the next few years to meet the new crowds of students, they had young men living in tents. Imagine that today.

Anyway, the 1920s and 1930s yearbooks had some great customized covers. And the first photographs on the cover appeared in the 1940s. If you click on 1944 below you’ll see just the second photo cover of the series.

(These days they are all photograph covers and the books are just terribly formulaic. Yearbooks have lost a lot of personality in the last few years.)

See all my Gloms here.

While we are wrapping up the Lee County Historic Marker project on Thursdays, it is only fitting to get the Glomerata collection up to date, too. The Glomerata is the yearbook for my alma mater. I’ve collected them for some reason. Over time, I’ve been uploading the covers as a section on the site. Pictured below, for instance, is the 1914 cover. If you click that cover you can check out today’s addition to the group, the 1917 Glomerata.

You can see my complete collection here.

Since we’re wrapping up the Lee County Historic Marker project, it seems only right to return to the Glomerata collection, too. The Glomerata is the yearbook for my alma mater. And I collect them for some reason. I have quite a few of them. And, over time, I’ve been uploading the covers as a section on the site. Pictured below, for instance, is the 1904 cover. That one has been on the site for a long time. But if you click that cover below you can check out today’s addition to the group, the 1903 Glomerata.

The 1903, by the way, is the only yearbook in the now 119 volumes that uses a horizontal orientation. You can see the whole collection, here. Want to check out a few choice volumes, dive in here.

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. I’m still adding new-to-me editions to my collection and so here we are today. The one I’m showing you here is the 1993 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 1994 Glom.

See all of the covers in my Glom collection here.

Bill Clinton was the president. No one had thought yet of shutting down the government and we were a long way from our national debate on the meaning of the word “is.” NAFTA and Nancy Kerrigan were in the news and people were still saying “information superhighway.” Others were still struggling to pronounce Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Scream was stolen, the Olympics were in Lillehammer and American troops withdrew from Somalia. Kurt Cobain killed himself. Tonya Harding pled guilty and Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Richard Nixon died.

Students in the fall before, if they followed the news, learned more about Sydney and Mogadishu and worried about an uprising in Moscow and nuclear tests in China. Early that fall I decided, for sure, that I wanted to go to Auburn. I’d had ideas previously, but that fall I made some visits and fell for the place.

There were 263 million people in the U.S. in 1994. Some 4.26 million of them were in Alabama, more than double the pre-World War II census. Guy Hunt, the first Republican governor Alabama had known since Reconstruction, had just left office as Alabama’s first governor removed from office for a criminal conviction. He paid his fines and served his probation and got a pardon. Considered by some to be an accidental governor, he was considered a bumpkin by opponents but took advantage of a splintered Democratic party. Trivia: A minister, farmer and salesman, Hunt was the last governor of Alabama that didn’t attend college. He fought in Korea instead. He’s also a man who made Alabama a two-party state. And now, of course, state politics have tipped entirely the other direction. Guy Hunt died in 2009. When he stepped down, he was succeeded in 1993 by his lieutenant governor, Jim Folsom, Jr. He ran in 1994, but was beaten by the former-Democrat-turned-Republican (and Auburn grad) Fob James. James was returning to an office he’d held 20 years earlier. Folsom would show up, a decade later, again as lieutenant governor. (Alabama is a cyclical place.)

Alabama, and much of the southeast, was hit hard by an ice storm in 1994. Heather Whitestone, who would later become Miss America, was enjoying her time as Miss Alabama. Birmingham, the state’s largest city, was in the middle of a nine-year stretch of triple-digit homicides. Local boy and NASCAR hero Davey Allison died in a helicopter accident. I was busy navigating high school. As if that was all.

Back to the Glomerata section, where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 2011 edition. If you click the cover you can see the 2008 Glom.

There is a lot about the oughts that doesn’t make sense to modern sociologists. For the 2007-08 school year Lost was the top television show, Transformers was a top-10 movie, people still thought they liked Chris Brown and Joe the Plumber was somehow a stand-in for us all. George W. Bush was still president, Bob Riley was the governor.

The summer of 2007 ended, and students returned to campus, as 572 people were killed in suicide bombings in Iraq and 512 died in an 8.0 earthquake in Peru. And to really set the tone for the weekend, Russia announced their bombers were set to resume flights for the first time since the Cold War. That fall Marion Jones gave up her five gold medals and Vladimir Putin was named Time’s man of the year. Luciano Pavarotti died, as did Gen. Paul Tibbets — pilot of the Enola Gay — Evel Knievel and Norman Mailer.

In January of 2008 fuel crossed $100/barrel for the first time ever, Fidel Castro finally stepped down in Cuba, surgeons perform the first operations using bionic eyes in London and more than 133,000 were killed by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. Edmund Hillary, Heath Ledger, Roy Scheider, Arthur C. Clarke and Charlton Heston also died in the first part of the year.

Also, it was the beginning of the poorly named Great Recession in the United States. A lot of things about the oughts remain baffling indeed.