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The 1954 Glomerata, part seven

The 26th Academy Awards were presented in March of 1954, held simultaneously in Hollywood and New York. It was the second national telecast, and the estimates are that 43 million people watched. As you might expect, all the major winners in this year were black-and-white films.

William Holden won Best Actor, Audrey Hepburn took home the prize for Best Actress. Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed won the supporting awards.

The best film nominees were Julius Caesar, The Robe, Roman Holiday, and Shane.

Cecil B. Demille presented the best film winner, an award he won the previous year. From Here to Eternity, which won seven other Oscars that night, got the statue. That was Demille’s only roll at the Oscars that year, but he also did some very important judging of his own, as you’ll see in a moment.

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

Now, when you’re presenting at the Oscars, you just walk on stage, read the lines, open an envelope and then head to the afterparty. Nice job, but not too challenging. In the fall of 1954, just 69 years and 50 weeks ago, in fact, he took on a far more demanding role. Somehow, he became the judge for the Miss Glomerata. More than 70 women were nominated, a panel of judges cut that down to 20 and DeMille selected the eight winners. This pageant took place in the fall. To the extent that it mattered, the results were well known by the time the book came out the next spring.

What isn’t known is how they got Cecil B. DeMille involved. The man was from Massachusetts, living in California and, at the time, he was in pre-production for The Ten Commandments. Maybe he took a break from work to leaf through some photos and dictate this letter, which is the only explanation we are offered.

I looked in the campus paper and DeMille gets mentioned, but there’s no explanation as to how they got him to do this.

His letter points out that they didn’t ask him to rank the women — thank goodness. All eight were winners of the Omicron Delta Kappa-Glomerata. Let’s see what we became of them all.

Nancy Dupree was a senior from Athens, Alabama. She was studying education, and she’d already been named Miss Auburn.

She got married and had three kids. One of them went to Alabama, UAB and Florida and became an oncologist. He died after a second fight with cancer, at 55. Another is a business owner. Her daughter became an optometrist. She’s still with us.

Mary Jim Esslinger was a sophomore from Gurley, Alabama. She was studying home economics. She was voted Miss Auburn the next year. She was also a finalist in pageants back home, so this was a thing she did regularly. She married Charles, a man who was a junior agricultural engineering major. He became a successful business man and president of his local chamber of commerce.

They had four children and are the heads of a great big family now. She’s apparently a pretty serious foodie.

I’ve never met anyone named Battle, and that’s been a disappointment for me, ever since I learned the word was used as a name, which was about the time I ran across Battle King in the Glomerata the first time.

The young woman with the disarming smile — who had to be pretty fierce if she choose to use her middle name, Battle — was a freshman from Decatur, Alabama. She would graduate with a degree in education in 1957. She married a guy who was a senior this year. They were both from the same town, so there may be a local backstory. Allen studied agriculture, played in the band. He graduated and flew for the Air Force for three years before returning to civilian life, getting involved in banking, real estate and insurance. When he died in 2008 they’d had been married for 51 years. They had one child and three grandchildren. She still lives in Alabama.

Marilyn Kurtz was a freshman from San Francisco, and how she wound up at Auburn might remain a mystery to you and me. She would marry a man named John in 1957 or so. He spent his first career in the U.S. Army, where he retired a colonel, before taking on two additional careers in the private sector. Marilyn was a military brat, probably that’s how they met, who was used to the lifestyle she and her husband undertook.

They lived in Korea, Louisiana, Japan, Washington, Denver, Texas, southern California and back to Washington. When John died in 2017 they’d been together 60 years. She has two daughters and two grandsons, and is living in the Pacific Northwest.

Barbara Searcy was a senior education major. She was born in Birmingham and lived in Tuscaloosa before settling in Montgomery when she was eight or so. She did the first part of her higher education at Montevallo, before going to Auburn. The year after this, she would be crowned the county Maid of Cotton, which was probably a local pageant that was exactly what it sounded like.

After graduation she became a teacher, and ran English, speech, and drama classes at her high school alma mater, and another of the big schools in Montgomery. Searcy got married, and had five children and four grandchildren. She died in 2011.

This is Pat Pond, a freshman home economics major from Fairhope, population 4,000 back then.

And this is the only Glom in which she appears. A few months after this book was circulated, she was engaged to a classmate, William Bowden — listed as a sophomore architecture student from Memphis in this book — and they would be married that September. There’s a 1956 mention in her hometown paper that the young couple had their first child. Pond’s grandmother came to visit, to meet her newborn great-granddaughter. The older woman was 82, and took a trip that, today, would be 226 miles. It wouldn’t have been an easier journey back then. Pat and William had at least one more kid. William was a Marine captain in Korea, and by the time he met his bride he was in the Marine Reserve. He died in 1980 and is buried in Arlington. Pat remarried, but the circumstances and details are unknown to the web.

Helen Wilson would, I think, be a junior here, but she doesn’t appear in the headshot portion of the book, which gives us that information. She’s from Huntsville, which was at the time growing from 16,437 people in 1950 to an astounding 72,365 people just a decade later — the first boom of the Rocket City.

Helen married Jimmy Caudle, an aeronautical engineering freshman in this book who eventually changed to industrial management. She was a musician, and an elementary school teacher. He served in the Air Force, eventually started a metal finishing business that celebrated their 50th anniversary last year, and became the president of Snapper on the side, turning them into a $250 million multinational while he was at it. Helen and Jimmy were involved in a list of organizations and charities longer than your arm. They had three sons, and nine grandchildren. Sixty years they spent together, until she passed away in 2017; he died in 2018.

Edwina Sims was a junior education major from Florala, Alabama. There were 2,700 people there when she was a child. There are fewer of them now. Sims was the local pageant queen, too.

She was also on the homecoming court — I refuse to believe that these were the only things young women did — but otherwise you won’t find her in the old newspapers. She disappears from the web’s view at about the time she graduated.

That’s enough for now. 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.

Auburn / Friday / Glomerata / history / photo — Comments Off
11
Oct 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part six

Just a few of the things that are different from the lives our predecessors did 70 years ago. If you were in the market for a car, a Chevy would apparently run you about $1,696, or you could splurge on an Oldsmobile for $2,362. Putting on some quality Firestones would run you about 50 bucks for the set. A suit would run a businessman about $60 in 1954, a quality woman’s coat would set her back about $20. Putting your little boy in pants, this library tells me, cost $3.95. Bacon sat at 87 cents a pound. You could buy eight pounds of bananas for a dollar, bread for just 15 cents a loaf, and three dimes would buy you five pounds of potatoes. At least in some parts of the country, though the numbers may vary, the theme you and I are exploring is the same: 70 years can be a long time, or no time at all.

Let’s see what was different, and the same, at the ol’ alma mater.

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

We’re wrapping up the space filling photos that float around the undergraduate headshots here. There’s no logical sequence to these, but some of them do provide a nice slice of life. For instance, this was on the weekend of Nov 21st. These women went down to the train station to greet the football team upon their return.

The caption says “waiting for boys to come home after ‘Clawing Clemson.'” Clemson estimated 20,000 people filled their stadium for the rivalry game, and the game went Auburn’s way, 45-19.

“Everybody votes for Egbert.”

Egbert has to be a nickname, right? There’s no one listed among the senior class or the underclassmen as Egbert. But maybe he was king for the day. Maybe we’ll find out later.

This is George Atkins and a ski champ, says the cutline. Atkins was from Birmingham, walked on at Auburn, earned himself a scholarship, lettered in football for three years and then spent a year with the Detroit Lions.

He came back to Auburn and coached the offensive line for 16 years before going into business for a decade. He came back to Auburn once again, spending the last 13 years of his career working in university development. He retired in 1995.

Atkins married his high school sweetheart, and college classmate, Leah Marie Rawls — and I’m pretty sure that’s her in the photo. They had four children and, when George died in 2015, he counted 16 grandchildren.

Leah Atkins won the 1953 World water skiing championships in Toronto in 1953, turned that into a career and then earned a Ph.D. in history from Auburn in 1974, specializing in local history. She served as director of the university’s Center for the Arts and Humanities, became the first woman in the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. She taught history at Auburn, UAB and Samford. She was on the board of the state’s Department of Archives and History. The university’s highest award for athletics is named in her honor. She died just last week. Her obituary listed all 16 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren by name. Leah lived an Auburn Creed kind of life, she believed in work, hard work. It says, “Leah lived an Auburn Creed kind of life, she believed in work, hard work.”

Yep.

Usually I don’t put buildings in these collections, because they are buildings. But sometimes exceptions are made.

The football stadium looks a bit different today.

This is a 2016 photo from midfield. I’ve oriented it so that you’re looking in the direction of where this photographer was standing. Spin around and you can see the whole place. The stadium has had nine project expansions since George Atkins retired in 1995. They tend to upgrade something substantial every three or four years now, where they need to or not.

When Atkins’ teams played, the stadium sat 21,500. When he retired, the capacity was 85,214. As of this writing, it is 88,043.

In last week’s installment we saw another photo from this parade, where the photographer was standing in the same spot. And, if you squint closely you can tell for sure this is a parade from just before the Iron Bowl.

Using the clothing as context, this is obviously at a different event. Maybe the homecoming parade. The caption reads “the land of plenty.”

Here’s the Sports Arena. Later, we called it The Barn. One of only three all-wooden structures on campus, and it has a story to tell.

In 1998, during a football game, The Barn burned. Investigators would later conclude some tailgaters pushed their grill too close to the old building, and then this happened.

Curiously enough, the university library does not have a digitized copy of the campus paper following the fire.

I was in the stadium, sitting at about the 40 yard line on the side where the fire is. So we saw smoke, and then glowing on the cement undersides of the walk ramps and, soon, flames coming above the bowl itself. At first, the voice of the stadium, Carl Stephens, read a message asking people to go move their cars. A moment later, he said, “Too late.”

There was only a small two-lane road between the barn and the stadium, and I’d studied enough forestry and burn management to know that wasn’t enough of a fire break.

I remember thinking, If you have to go, going with 85,000 friends is one way to do it. In truth, I’ve never felt perfectly comfortable walking into or out of crowded venues after that. Remarkably, there were no injuries. Miraculously, the wind was blowing away from the stadium where all of us.

When it burned, the gymnastics team still practiced there. They, of course, used the “phoenix rising from the ashes” imagery for a couple of years after that.

There’s a parking deck there now.

This was Drake Infirmary. I knew it as Drake Hall. This was the health clinic in my day too. The landscaping looks a little rough here, but that part was much improved by the time I came along.

Named for John Hodges Drake, who was the university doctor from 1873 to 1926, this was a $100,000 building when built in 1940 and it was the only hospital in town. Over the years, it became infamous for its health care. The joke was anyone that walked in came out with a flu or a pregnancy diagnosis. I never sought out any care there, but I did photograph the last renovations that the building underwent. It was a bit dark, a little cramped and felt a bit creaky.

It’s gone now, a proud engineering building stands in its place. A larger, more modern facility was built on the other side of campus.

The yearbook calls this “The ‘Y’ Hut,” and that’s an accurate name, but it took a second to register for me. It looks familiar, yet different, and that name meant nothing to me.

Today we call it the University Chapel. It is the second-oldest building on campus, and the oldest building in its original location. Also, it looks much nicer today.

Built with slave labor, it was a Confederate hospital during the Civil War. This was where they pulled the wounded to from the Battle of Atlanta, 115 miles away. That had to be a nightmarish experience for a wounded person. When campus life returned, the chapel served as classrooms, then became the YMCA/YWCA center and housed the university’s acting troupe. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is believed to be haunted. (Blame the theatre kids.)

Sydney Grimlett had his leg amputated, and did not survive the proceudre. He’s said to have shown up during stage productions, and players started complaining of props missing from their sets. The story goes that the ghost liked candy. (No idea how that worked.)

And finally this photo, which we’ll just use as a teaser.

The caption says “C.B. selects these eight as Auburn’s tops.”

And you’ll know, at least in passing, who C.B. is next week.

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4
Oct 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part five

The U.S. was in a post-Korean War recession, an 11-month downturn brought on by the usual things, raised interest rates, high inflation brought about from an influx of money into a wartime economy. The gross domestic product lost 2.2 percent of growth, and unemployment peaked at about 6 percent. McCarthyism ended, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccines began. Medical science also saw the first successful organ transplant, a kidney moved from one twin to another. Vietnam was divided into two countries according to the Geneva Accords. RCA produced its first color TV, and about 29 million American homes had a television, most of them black and white, of course. They invented the piña colada in Cuba, and RC mastered sodas in cans. The Butterball turkey, M&M’s, the transistor radio and the first electric drip coffee maker hit the shelves.

The Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, though it sadly took another decade before my alma mater integrated. Even though that was slow to pass, a lot was going on at the time. Some of it we can look back on here, in the old yearbooks I collect.

This is the fifth installment of our glance through 1954. Part one is here, and you can find part two here. We met some interesting people in part three. And part four was last week. All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

Freshmen are showing their spirit in their pajamas. It’s a part of the lore of the Georgia Tech rivalry, commemorating Auburn’s first home game against Georgia Tech, their first ever home game, in 1896. Tech was coming in by a special train, but before it arrived some API students coated the rails with grease, lard, soap and who knows what else. The train couldn’t stop, so the visiting team had to walk back, several miles, on that same railway, football gear in hand.

By game time, the Tech boys were understandably tired, and Auburn won 45-0. Campus stories are just the best. And from that story came the Wreck Tech Pajama Parade, with students marching down to the train station for a pep rally. It was an annual event until the series was discontinued as a regular part of the schedule in 1987.

In 1953 the game was in Atlanta, and Tech won 36-6. Probably the freshmen’s fault.

The caption says “Mike Donahue honored at Dad’s Day.” I don’t know if that means Father’s Day, or if there was some other university-centric theme here, but Donahue was even important in 1954. Born an Irishman, he came to the U.S., was a five-foot-four three sport star at Yale, and then getting hired by Auburn, starting out a sterling career, which culminated in this magical moment of human literature.

He coached football at API for 18 years, had three undefeated seasons, and held, for 70-plus years, the highest winning percentage in school history. He won six conference championships, became athletic director and coached basketball, baseball, track and soccer. He moved on to another stellar run at LSU in the 1920s for some reason, and so he has roads named after him on both campuses.

But LSU students are legendarily bad spellers, so he never got this honor down there. An inaugural member of the College Football Hall of Fame, he died in Baton Rouge in 1960, age 84.

We’re not in the sports section of the book yet, I promise, but this random space filler from the undergrad headshot section was too great not to share. That’s Hal Herring, in the suit. He’s the defensive line coach, in a suit.

He’s about 30 years old in this photo. Born in the nearby small town of Lanett, he played at Auburn, and then for the Buffalo Bills and Cleveland Browns. He would later work as a coach for the Falcons and the Chargers in the NFL as well. This was his first of 13 seasons at Auburn, where he helped cultivate a reputation of stout defenses, which were ranked first in the nation six times and were in the top 10 every season. He also helped cultivate the less-than-sterling reputation of paying players. The conference fined the school and the NCAA put them on probation for three years because he supposedly slipped a few C-notes to recruits. He was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 2002. He and his wife, had five children, and were married for 58 years. He died in 2014.

Frank D’Agostino, with the helmet, was on his way to becoming an All-American lineman who later played professionally for the Eagles and the New York Titans. He died in Florida in 1997. He’s sitting next to Vince Nardone. And I know that because this photo, and the team photo with captions, are the only places Nardone shows up in this yearbook. He’s not easy to track down online, either, but a bit of sports copy from an Athens, Georgia newspaper in December of 1953 tells us he left the team near the end of the season to go home to New Jersey, and was being enlisted into the Army.

I found a Vincent Nardone from that same town, a NYC bedroom community, population of 25,000 at the time. How many Vincent Nardones could there have been in that era? At least two, but I found the correct one.

Our guy served in Okinawa during the Korean War and then came home to work in the family contracting business. He raised two children, turned to gardening and thoroughbred breeding. He was 86 when he died in 2019. He had four grandchildren and that same smile.

Here’s the marching band, in parade in Birmingham. The cutline confirms it, but that Britling sign is the giveaway. Britling was a famous cafeteria chain which would eventually count 16 stores across that city and about a dozen more elsewhere. During the Great Depression the cafeteria gave a free hot breakfast to needy customers downtown. They did that until 1975. They were a big hit with kids, and sponsored the local children’s TV program, when that was a thing. Romper Room had a live audience and kids finished a glass of milk during their visit got a punch card. Drinking enough milk would earn you a ceramic mug with the Britling logo on one side and Romper Room’s jack-in-the-box on the other. You can still buy their stuff at auction.

I think everything in this photo is different now, but this is where the band was marching.

It’s OK to admit it, but for the longest time, when you thought of college, it looked something like this, didn’t it?

To those students, this is the Main Library. Today, it is Mary Martin Hall, named for the woman who served as library from 1918 to 1949. It was the first purpose-built library on campus, and was still in its prime here. In 1963 it became an administrative building, housing the registrar’s office, financial aid and career center. This was the Street Maps view in 2016.

The caption reads “We’ll be there next year.” This was at the end of Shug Jordan’s third year at the helm, the Tigers finished 7–3–1, losing to to Texas Tech in the Gator Bowl. So there was real optimism. Vince Dooley was wrapping up his stellar career and there was surely more to come for his younger teammates.

With that spirit and some talented players, the next year they went 8–3 overall, reeling off seven-straight to finish the season, including a win over Alabama in the Iron Bowl and a return to the Gator Bowl, where they bested Baylor. That sign was ahead of its time. They didn’t make it to the Sugar Bowl until 1972.

The caption here reads, “No dealing off the bottom, Gaylord.” So I was settling in to spin the yard of a notorious east Alabama card shark …

But there is no one in this yearbook named Gaylord. Nor does it seem to be a common slang expression, and so we’ll never go.

Go fish.

“This ain’t no time for jokes.”

Indeed it’s not. This might be part of a play, “Skin of Our Teeth.” Either way, engage your core.

“This is the way to twirl girls.”

Sleeveless shirts were in that year, it seems.

We don’t have a lot of context here, either. The Schlitz sign was a big national campaign, so that doesn’t help. Searches for Sizzling Steaks aren’t terribly productive. There’s a loans sign in the background, and an indecipherable street sign.

It looks like it might be chilly, though. Late in the fall? Let’s say it’s back in Birmingham as the holidays approached, like that marching band photo. Probably, then, this was a part of the same party on wheels, before the Iron Bowl. (Auburn lost.)

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.

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2
Oct 24

Productive, but not nearly enough

The grading continues. And it will continue later tonight. It will also continue tomorrow.

If it goes any longer than that I will begin to evaluate my grading. My self-assessment might not be a positive one in that eventuality.

But I should give myself some grace. I started this round of grading with some 70-plus items to grade. About 34 of them require real feedback. The assignment includes an element where they have to ask a question of something they’re reading, and some of the questions are pretty easy to answer based terms or something else the class has addressed. Some I’m fielding are of that pleasantly squishy almost-formed social science question that an undergrad can ask, the sort that actually opens the door to something quite important. I try not to revert to the grad school ways of getting to an almost-answer. Some of the questions are purely philosophical and then I think, this should be asked in a proper classroom, on a day when the halls are quiet and the sky is gloomy and you can make the snap decision that, no, this question is much more interesting than what I’d planned to talk about today, so we’re doing 40 minutes on the politics of art in a society of mass culture.

While not padding my feedback, I am averaging … a lot of words per response. Probably too much, but you know how it is when you get on a role explaining early 20th century media philosophy, or seminal sociologists or artificial intelligence. The words just flow, and soon you’re wondering, Will this particular student appreciate a newspaper column’s worth of thoughts on their assignment? Then you have to trim it. Getting back down to that 200- or 300-word range is the time intensive part.

The students were reading a paper that crossed Erving Goffman and Walter Benjamin, and by the end of it all, I find myself hoping I don’t come off a bit like the random guy in Good Will Hunting.

I’ve now read, and re-read this piece that I might actually understand it. And then not. And then truly grasp it.

So I went to campus. One part of my job is teaching. Another part is grading. Still a third part of my job is to receive training in this or that. I’ve had three rounds of ethics training in a calendar year. I’ve watched webinars of the privacy of this and the security of that. I have two more in the queue, because someone decided there wasn’t enough to be done. And today I had an in-person session, QPR training.

That’s Question, Persuade and Refer to you. And it was 90 minutes of talking about interacting with someone in a mental health crisis. There was also role playing. We had three minutes of role playing, which is not enough time to work your way through the scenario that was presented. I turned to the guy sitting next to me and invited him to pair up. He was in psychology.

Great, I said, a ringer!

“Experimental psychology,” he said. “If I never saw anyone at work I’d be happy.”

Or something like that, I was too busy trying to figure out how I would navigate through very specific hypothetical to take notes. In the end, we felt we’d done our part to help the troubled young man in the imagined scenario. And then we talked some more as a group, because this was 90 minutes.

It wasn’t that bad, but you could see where it might be a charged or otherwise difficult sort of conversation. At the end, the woman running the thing did something fun. She made everyone in the room say something they were looking forward to doing in the next 24 hours. A palate cleanser.

The thing of it was that everyone there had these interesting plans. Except for the guy who had to teach that night and all day tomorrow, so he was looking forward to sleeping tonight. When it came to me, I lamented that everyone else had these interesting plans. I was going to grade. Maybe ride my bike. Definitely pet the cats.

The woman who went after me was looking forward to hanging out with her chicken.

I went back to the office and did some grading, did some reading, and worked on the desk. It was a productive afternoon.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature which finds me riding my bike around the county, hunting for historical markers. This is the 50th installment, and the 82st marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.

Sadly, I’m not sure why this merited inclusion. No one really spells out the history for us. And what even is the historic part of a local courthouse, anyway? The signs give nothing away.

Just 702 feet away is the truly historic Old Salem County Courthouse (1735), ” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>which we saw previously. That is the nation’s second-oldest courthouse in continuous use.

And a block away is this building. A court which is still in its first century of existence, sitting in a dour building which looks like it is hoping will be its last century.

Municipal Court, what are you gonna do?

Next week, we’ll see a sturdy 19th century brick home. It, like all the previous installments, will be better than this one. If you have missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

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27
Sep 24

The 1954 Glomerata, part four

We get in our time machines and travel back 70 years, to a world strange, yet familiar. But perhaps mostly strange? Here are a few more photos from my alma mater’s yearbook, the Glomerata, which I collect. If my grandparents had gone to school there, they’d be somewhere in this book. They’re not, their peers are. I wonder if they knew any of the people inside.

This is the fourth installment of our glance through 1954. Part one is here, and you can find part two here. We saw part three last week. All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

This is 1954.

We left off last week with the Army ROTC. All able-bodied male students served a compulsory two-year stint. Some of them, of course, would stay on. Even in ’54, as we’ve been seeing, quite a few of these young men were changing from their civilian clothes to a cap and gown to a uniform, at least for a while. And it wasn’t just the Army ROTC. This is Col. James W. Townsend, professor of air science and tactics.

He graduated from Purdue in 1937. He joined up in 41, and during the war, Townsend was a captain in the 416th Bombardment Group, at least while they were stateside in Oklahoma. The 416th flew medium bombers for the Ninth Air Force in Western Europe. They were awarded a Distinguished Unit Citation in France, bombing out infrastructure that hampered the German retreat. In 1951 Townsend was high up the command chart at Continental Air Command at Mitchel Air Base in New York. After a brief stint in Germany, he was at Auburn from 1952 through 1956, and he and his family were a popular part of town. They packed up their two kids and shipped out to the Philippines. He finally retired from the service in 1961 and went to work in his native Indiana as the assistant chief for the division of land acquisition for the Indiana Highway Department, a job he held until he died in 1971, aged 63. He and his wife had a son and daughter.

The Air ROTC unit had a good pitch. Why sign up with the Army, when you can go over to the air base and pose up a storm with some of the bombers?

And spare a thought for that staff sergeant, who is probably three or four years into his Air Force career, and now he’s having to walk around these college kids.

Sometimes, you got to pose in the bomber.

Do we know anything about that plane? Yes, we do. That’s the serial number there and the world wide web still has plenty of wonders.

The B-25J-25-NC (serial number 44-30748) rolled off the line in Kansas City in February of 1945. It was listed as surplus right away and was finally put into service in 1948 as a trainer, bouncing around a few stops in those roles in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Illinois, later, Texas. Those cadets met the plane in Mobile, where it was getting some upgrades. In 1958 it went into storage and was later sold into civilian life. At least one owner used it as a crop sprayer. Then, in 1969 this plane was sold to a Hollywood company and the plane would appear in the classic, “Catch 22.”

Sometime in the next two decades it was restored and deemed airworthy again. On April 21, 1992, this plane was the first of two B-25s that launched off the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ranger to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid. (In 2011 I wrote about one of the Doolittle pilots.)

You can see some beautiful archival shots of this bomber. Or see it today! It’s still flying, out of Oregon. And yes, there’s video.

But we don’t know the name of the cadet in the bird, so I can’t look him up.

This is Col. George E. Bell, of Artesia, California, a professor of naval science and tactics, and a Marine.

He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1936, and earned a silver star with the 6th Marine Division on Okinawa as a lieutenant colonel, commanding the First Battalion, Fourth Marines, 6th Marine Division. It was June of 1945, and Bell realized his entire battalion was suddenly at risk when the left side of his assault stalled. So, he moved up, found the location of the enemy fire, got wounded and coordinated the attack until the Japanese threat was reduced, allowing his Marines to seize the ridge.

The First Battalion had fought at both Guam and Okinawa, some of the most bitter fighting in the Pacific. So that’s who the Midshipmen were learning from, before settling into their three-year hitches. It says here that 16 percent of the Middies were going into the Corps.

Bell married twice, but it looks like he was single here. And this was his last year on campus. What comes next for him is an open mystery, but it appears he might have also been assigned to the Philippines sometime soon after. If I have the right guy, he made it to the 21st century, and died at 90.

I wonder if that was an invasion of the beach at Lake Martin.

This is Arthur Moore Jr., from Pell City, and president of the student body.

He was an Eagle Scout, he served as an Air Force navigator for three years after graduation. He married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth, and went to work with Alcoa Aluminum for 41 years. He became a masterful horticulturist, and president of the American Orchid Society. He worked closely with his church’s missions and was a big supporter of the arts. All the local kids got to see The Nutcracker, and whether they understood it or not, or knew it or not, Moore was the man behind it. When he died in 2017 at 84, he and his wife of 61 years had two daughters, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

This is Suzanne Morgan, president of the women’s student government association, because there was one of those back then. She was a popular classmate in high school in Wetumpka, Alabama. And she was popular in college, too. She was voted a campus favorite, which is a yearbook photo honor, worked with the WSGA, and was also on the homecoming court. Somewhere along the way her parents moved to Texas, while she was studying education.

Right after graduation she married Ensign Albert Dilthey, who was working on his MBA degree at AU. He sailed on submarines for the U.S. Navy, became an exec at the Miami Herald worked with his local chamber of commerce, and various other civic groups. He died in 2011. She’s still with us, in North Carolina.

George Uthlaut was a senior from Orlando in this photograph, taking time from his studies as a chemical engineering major and being one of those people who are somehow involved in nine different busy body things on campus. But his life has been full of activity. So much so that in 2011 the Ginn School of Engineering inducted him into their Hall of Fame.

Uthlaut went into the gas game, and he got good at oil and gas exploration and production over three decades with Exxon, working from Florida to Alaska. When he left there, as managing director, he went over to Enron Oil and Gas and basically had a second career. Along the way, he and his wife, Dot, have been heavily involved in many philanthropic adventures.

Maybe my favorite is this, Prayers Of the People, from which Dot retired in 2016. These people volunteered for so long and so hard they had to retire from it. They visited patients in hospitals, weekly, for 35 years. And somehow baked into that they set up a parking program for families visiting various hospitals.

They’ve also given donated generously to the engineering school and have a computer lab there named after them. They still live happily in Texas.

This is Royce Jones, and Royce Jones’ reflection. He’s from the small south Georgia town of Tifton, which counted fewer than 7,000 people when this photo was artfully taken. Jones left to go to college, and then did a brief stint in the military, but after that, he went right back home, and right back to the family business. Over his career, he took over Jones Construction, and also owned concrete and paint companies.

The best part of the 2007 news copy I’m reading here is that it was written by someone who understood him. An old friend got in a great quote, and the reporter at the local paper knew that was the one, “He worked hard behind the scenes to make this a better community and asked for no credit. He was a man of character and integrity …”

Jones Construction did, and does, a lot of big business, he built stuff for the University of Georgia, prominent local farms, banks, and the local hospital. He not only added on to that hospital, but he made some significant donations to it. too. The man was the proverbial pillar.

Two of his sons are running the construction firm today, so it’s at least a three-generation company. And those two guys also followed their dad to Auburn. They were there just a few years before I was, in fact.