Since it is Friday, we go home, and we go back in time, courtesy of the old pages of ancient books. Eighty years ago 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.

We’ll start with a two-fer. This is Bob Sharman on the left and Gene Griffiths on the right. Sharman was the managing editor of The Plainsman, the campus newspaper. (Generations later, I worked there, too.) Griffiths was the advertising manager.

In my time it was a weekly, the largest weekly in the state.

Kids those days were living history, too. There was an editorial message in that first paper about the things that students were losing — joy rides, lost desserts and so on. It went from twice-a-week to a weekly at the beginning of the 1943-44 school year, which they said was a wartime concession.

They were reporting, as I have learned from the first issue of the year, for an enrollment that was larger than expected. Despite the war, there were about 3,000 people in classes, split quite evenly between men and women. The upperclass had been thinned out for the war effort, as we’ll soon see.

And this was a joint advertisement in that first issue of The Plainsman.

Anyway, back to the people. Bob Sharman becomes Dr. Robert S. Sharman, who by 1958 was the assistant to the director, Animal Disease Eradication Division, Agricultural Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Then, in 1970, acting director of that USDA unit. Later in his career he co-authored two books, “Principles of Health Maintenance” and “Attacking Animal Diseases: Concepts and Strategies for Control and EradicationAttacking Animal Diseases: Concepts and Strategies for Control and Eradication.”

He died at just 68, in 1992. His brother, three or four years his junior, would also become a veterinarian. I can find out more about him than Bob.

Gene Griffiths was a junior from Pensacola, Florida. He was studying mechanical engineering. He was an Eagle Scout. He went into the Army, and Officer Candidate School, right after graduation. He served as 1st Amphibious Engineers in the Pacific Theater in the last phase of the war. (Timing-wise, I think he would have missed out on any heavy action, but he also served in some unknown-to-me capacity during the Korea Conflict.) He got married, they had two children. He worked as an insurance executive in Atlanta until he retired in 1981. He died after a long fight with cancer, on his 84th birthday.

Back to the campus paper, which, 60+ years on, Griffith’s obituary notes with pride, this is “that rugged ‘Plainsman’ staff.”

There was a local weekly in town, and I believe this was during the years that the pros at the Lee County Bulletin, (founded by Neil O. Davis, a graduate of the class of 1935) shared some space with the student publication. The address was Tichenor Avenue, which was named for Isaac T. Tichenor, the turn-of-the century university president … unless the road was named for Reynolds Tichenor, his son, who was a quarterback of one of the first football teams, and later coached a bit, was a referee, a sportswriter and an attorney. So probably his dad.

This is Buck Taylor and Shirley Smith. They were the editors in 1943 and 1944. Taylor won a national prize for his paper — believed to be the first at the paper, the first of many, many (we won two in my day). His time as editor was cut short, though, because of his Army obligations.

Can we find the paper they’re reading here? Sure can, and you can read it today, January 14, 1944.

Taylor was a senior from Mobile, and he was studying business. More on him in a bit.

Smith was the first female editor of The Plainsman. Her first paper was June 8th, 1943. The top three stories were freshman orientation, 65 students enrolling in an Army veterinary program and the death of a local boy, and university graduate, who died in a Japanese prison camp. (He was in Bataan in 1941. He was wounded. And it only got worse from there for him. The story says he reportedly died of malaria in an unknown camp. His father was a police chief.)

Smith, no relation, was from tiny Springville, Alabama. When she was growing up there, less than 400 people lived there. She was studying science and literature. She was also on the publicity committee for the local War Chest Appeal. There, she was rubbing elbows with publishers of the two local papers and the radio station. Just as The Plainsman won All-American honors the previous year under Buck Taylor, the American College Press gave them a second honor under Smith’s tenure.

And then, she quickly drifts away from what the web can tell us. I blame the last name.

The page before the class headshots simply, somberly, reads …

Our next few shots are the supplements that are mixed in with the class portraits. Here’s another shot of Buck Taylor, as promised. He was the editor of the paper, a senior. His name is William Buck Taylor, and he was in everything. He was a member of several leadership organizations. He was in a handful of different social and professional fraternities, and the president of one of them. How he ever went to class is a mystery, but he was also in the National Honor Society. Buck was also class president in high school. He must have been some kind of guy.

He was a company commander in the Army, and spent two years in Okinawa as part of the occupation force after the war. When he came home, he started a contracting company, and worked for 61 years. He headed his local library board in Mobile, was on the board of the carnival association, was a deacon in his church and was involved in just about everything. He married a Bama grad, she was a Master Forester. They had four children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren and what sounds like a lovely life. Buck died in 2015. She passed away just a few months ago.

Do we know what issue he’s reading? Yes we do, of course, January 7, 1944.

Here’s Merrill Girardeau, another BMOC. He was a senior, from Montgomery, a mechanical engineering major. He was in a lot of the leadership organizations, and was on the football team, but it doesn’t look like he ever played. After graduation, he served in World War 2 and during the Korean war, in some sort of capacities.

He went to work for an ironworks concern in Birmingham. He died in 2007, at the age of 85. He and his wife were married for 63 years. (She passed away just last year.) Together, they had three sons, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

This is our friend, Billy Maples. He was a senior from Huntsville, studying mechanical engineering, and he was another big shot. But he’s our friend because no one liked him. Or they just weren’t on campus the day this shot was taken. Else they would have stopped him from posing with a pipe.

Billy was a captain in the war. It seems he got married, and he and his wife had at least one child, a daughter. He died in 1999, at 77.

Shannon Raphael Hollinger was a senior, a vet student. He looks like he was friendly to everyone, doesn’t he?

He graduated in August of 1944 and went home to Camden, population 900 back then. He worked in private practice. For the next 10 years he appears in the papers as a part of dances, balls and other people’s weddings. In 1955, he married a social worker. The parties, apparently, went on for weeks and weeks. They bought a big spread and had a daughter the next year. They had a son, Junior, in 1959. Hollinger died in 1987, at just 64.

Then we met Roy Brakeman, he was the president of two social groups on campus and, the cutline here says, a member of everything else. He was a junior mechanical engineering major from Gadsden.

Brakeman was born in Ohio, but was raised in Alabama. He took a commission in the Navy after graduation, and served until the war ended. Then he went to grad school at MIT. In 1948 he took a job at Chevron in San Francisco and worked there for almost 40 decades. He met a woman out there and they got married and raised a family of three children and eight grandchildren. He lived to see 96, dying in 2021.

Hey, look, there’s our old friend Bob Sharman, from earlier in the post. He works for his Uncle Sam.

Sharman, you’ll recall, was a veterinarian and high ranking member of the USDA.

And, of course, in this feature we’re sharing every picture with a bicycle in it. This was one is ridden by Tutter Thrasher. I can’t get enough of the nicknames.

That’s Annie Catherine Thrasher, a junior studying business administration, it says here. She was a local girl. A member of society, it seems. She was quiet the student all through high school and college. Honors this, cheerleader that. And when this yearbook went to press, they already knew that she was going to be the president of the senior class, and the first woman to have such a position, for whatever that’s worth.

Also in 1944 she got engaged to, and married a Florida boy, an Auburn Man, William Wallace Allen, of Jacksonville. He graduated the year before. He was working at the Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington D.C., and so they set up house there. At some point they moved back to William’s hometown, and he started a sheet metal fabrications business in 1964. Still going strong today. He died in 2013, and she passed away in 2002. They had two kids, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. There was a lot of orange and blue in those kids lives.

That’s plenty for now, in next week’s installment we’ll meet one of the most impressive members of the class of 1943, see a lot of candid photos, another bicycle and learn about the Army’s Specialized Training Program that was on campus in the mid-40s. It’ll be a lot of fun, and not quite this long!

The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.

After several weeks away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Pretty pictures from the Plains, incoming.

That’s the 1944 edition of The Glomerata, the yearbook of my alma mater. I collect the yearbooks. For one, they look great. For another, it’s a unique, and contained, hobby. I like that it was a finite thing. 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.

I’m sharing some of the interesting images here as I digitize them, you can find them all here.

While war was raging abroad, at home, on the college campuses, a different battle was being played out. Funding was always the question, always the fight. The University of Alabama was in a near-blood feud with Auburn, and the University of Montevallo. The legislature created the Alabama Educational Survey Commission to prepare recommendations for the 1945 legislative session. The people running the campus in Tuscaloosa sent a contemptuous report to that commission, which got Auburn president Luther N. Duncan’s attention. He said he’d never seen “a bolder, more deliberate, more vicious, or more deceptive document.” Duncan turned to his alumni base and said that if supporters of Auburn and Montevallo did not rise up to combat “this evil monster,” it would consume them “just like the doctrine of Hitler.”

It would be a mistake to think the tension between the two schools was about football.

And if the war rhetoric was overcooked between state-level officials, war was almost omnipresent for the people.

Just before school started, a young John Kennedy had his PT boat rammed and destroyed in the Pacific, the Allies conquered Sicily. In September, Dwight Eisenhower announced the surrender of Italy. That fall, Americans were looking for places like Bougainville, Tawara and the Gilbert Islands on maps. Stalin, Churchill and FDR met in Tehran that November. The following month, listeners heard Edward R. Murrow’s classic report, “Orchestrated Hell.”

At the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944, The Great Depression ended, the Allied slog up against dug-in Germans through Italy dragged on. The Marshall Islands, Monte Cassino, Leipzig, the Mariana Islands began to enter into the newspapers in February. By mid-March, the war talk was about the bombing of Vienna, the Russian army reaching Romania and Germany occupying Hungary. In the spring of 1944, everything was still uncertain, and this is how some young people got up and went to school each day.

In 1944, the war shadowed everything, and its all over this yearbook, too, as we’ll see.

The book I have is signed Mrs. Joe H. Page. She, or someone else, helpfully told me where to find Joe’s photo. It’s in the Army’s Specialized Training Program. We’ll talk more about that program in a week or two, but the ASTP was prompted by General George C. Marshall’s recognizing that the U.S. Army had to overcome a shortage of soldiers trained in a variety of professional and technical capacities. Most of the people that went into ASTP were active duty soldiers, and they were enrolling for up to two years of engineering, languages, dentistry and more.

It took up 20 pages of this Glom, and there are 800 headshots of the people who made up this special category of the student body. Joe Page was one of those men.

Joe was born in 1924. At least one branch of his family could trace its lineage in Alabama back to territorial days. He died in 1980. His wife, Betty, lived until 2009. I looked in a few of the other books and I don’t see evidence that she attended Auburn. Her sister did. We’ll meet her in three or four weeks. But this is Joe, and this was his Glom. He and Betty had four children, all still living in Alabama.

The first full page sets the tone. It’s bright, and also subdued. It has playful graphics. And the future they saw was in science.

Then there are a handful of well done, double-truck photos, wide shots, atmospherics, silhouettes of people walking, and buildings. It comes with a ribbon of text that runs across the four pages. Here’s one half, just because the composition was promising.

The non-poem says:

Morning’s mists disappear into the early sun and day is launched in lonely splendor ….. to ripen, then, into a brazen noon — holding its bated breath under a heated sky … and chills into the long limpid shades of evening — to remain as a memory of our loveliest village.

I never know what these passages are meant to mean, or how they come to pass, and time has forgotten the unimportant conversations that came before them. Who supported the prose, and who groaned about it? Doesn’t matter. It’s surely meant to set a tone, that earnest tone we all had at 21.

Part of that passage, the brazen noon part, is over this photo. It’s another nice two-page spread of Ross Hall. It housed chemistry and became home to mechanical, chemical and aerospace engineering in the 1970s. I was always ambivalent about the building, but it’s a lovely composition. There are nine cars in the shot. And though the modern view has lovely landscaping, there are a lot more cars in view if you stand in that exact same spot today.

I wish we knew who these people were. Or where this was. We’ll have some open questions going forward. The 1944 Glomerata, at least in the early pages, is a bit spare in terms of cutlines. I also wonder if that hat was his. I wonder which of the two was more interested in this chat. And what was their relationship? And what did it become? and could either of them imagine we’d be contemplating this one moment, 80 years later?

That page was titled “diversion,” for some reason. The next page was “aversion.” I guess we disliked shop assignments and studying and what not.

All of that comes before the foreword, which reads:

We give you this Glomerata of 1944 as a record of some of your days at Auburn, with the hope that in future years you may open it to recapture in memory the spirit of the fun and the work you knew, and the friends you made and kept here in the “loveliest village.” In a warring world some things wave and fall, succumbing to the tide of change, but those days at Auburn will remain in your mind as a brilliant ray when the dull fog of strife is long forgotten. May this book serve to help keep that memory bright. This, then, is your Glomerata for nineteen hundred and forty-four.

There was always the war. This is Lawrence Cottle and Gibbs Ashley, the presidents of the executive cabinet. This was an undergrad organization that programmed campus activities. They also assisted in the community drives for war bonds, the Red Cross and more.

Cottle was a senior, from Montgomery, studying veterinary medicine. He married a woman who, I think, was a sophomore in 1944. He would live to 86, having run a small animal clinic in Mobile. His wife, a teacher and a tapestry artist, died just a few months before he did, in 2010. They had three children, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Ashley was also a senior, from a small town in Florida that had less than 2,000 people in it when he went to school. He was also studying veterinary medicine. His wife died in 1975,they had two children and four grandchildren. His wife passed away in 1975. He remarried at some point, then retired from his own clinic. He volunteered with the Humane Society and kept playing golf. He passed away in 1991, just 67.

Do you ever see photos of people you don’t know and see people you do know in them? This is Audrey Wilson, president of the women’s student government association in 1944. She was a senior. She also wrote for the campus paper. She was studying home economics, and from Evergreen, a small town in south Alabama that had about 3,000 people living in it back then, and not many more in it today. But I see someone entirely more familiar. It’s startling.

Sometimes we just wind up with mysteries. I haven’t yet found anything else about her.

This is Fred Duggar, the editor of the Glomerata. The page he’s working on here is the first one we saw today. John Frederick Duggar, III, was a senior, an architecture major from the impossibly small Hope Hull, Alabama. Fred’s parents are both buried at Pine Hill, in Auburn, at my favorite cemetery. His grandfather, the namesake, is also buried there. That man was a professor of agriculture and director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service. All told, the original John spent almost 50 years on campus.

Our guy, Fred, lived in Atlanta. He published an architectural book in the 1980s that is still a prominent seller in the genre, according to Amazon. He died in 2008 and is also buried at Pine Hill.

The Glomerata lists 16 people as staff, but says the book was produced in a continual “state of flux due to the war. The guy sitting in the left foreground is Frank Benning, a freshman from Atlanta, who was studying architecture. I assume their common studies will show their influence in some of the layout choices going forward. I believe he designed a movie theater outside of Atlanta. Not sure what else he did.

That guy, standing in the background? We’ll meet him next week.

That’s enough for now. The full collection will live in the Glomerata section, of course. You can see others, here. Or, to just see the beautiful covers, go here.