We turn our attention, one last time, to a time 90 years behind us. We’ve spent the last three Fridays looking at my alma mater via the 1934 yearbook. (Part one is here. You can find part two here and, from last week, part three is right here.) This is about the people living their young lives during the Great Depression.
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.
These are but a few of the photos and the very abbreviated stories that jump out to me, not a complete look at the book. There’s 300 pages and more than 1,400 photographs here, most of them the traditional headshots, which we generally avoid. It was, at that time, the largest yearbook the students had produced, and it’s an interesting glimpse of a familiar world in a different time.
There’s one last engraving, this one is titled features, and the buildings in the lower part of the art have nothing to do with the campus. But I did figure out who the artist, Davis, was.
And it was a real “Of course!” moment. This was Charles F. Davis, Jr. who was in the class of 1932 and still in town. His wife, Helen, was also an architect, the first licensed female architect in Alabama. (She’s a senior in this yearbook!) They would eventually join an architectural firm in Birmingham that would eventually come to be known as Davis Architects. Helen eventually started her own firm. They had three children, who all also went into architecture, and one of them runs Davis today. Charles was also the principal designer of a campus in Birmingham that I knew well.
This is Julia Pace of Anniston, Alabama. She studied business administration and was elected Miss Auburn in her freshman year and then named Miss Anniston. She married John William Mallory Jr. in 1937.
They had three children. He ran a big appliance store, she worked in a bank. Apparently they played golf together well into their golden years. She died in 2002, at 88.
This is Mary Barr Prince, and we know very little about her. She was descendant of an important Carolina family, and was apparently a socialite in her day.
She doesn’t appear elsewhere in this edition of the Glomerata. In her marriage announcement, we learn she went to Converse College, in Spartanburg. Her husband, a man named Henry, also of South Carolina, graduated from UNC. They married in 1937. They had three children — one of them became a prominent attorney and local judge. She died at 79, in 1993. She is buried in her native South Carolina.
Some times you run across a photo that just doesn’t seem to belong in their time frame. I’m not sure if she was mod, or this was as fancy as she could get, but this is Alice O’Donnell of Mobile.
There’s virtually nothing available to us about her, but I presume that’s because she was a time traveler, and has come to our time and is now making making TikTok videos.
My thinking is that not all of this studio portraiture came from the same studio. And that, I figure, is why Theresa Hamby is in such a soft focus. The campus paper, The Plainsman, tells me she’s from Smyrna, Georgia. But that’s the only thing I know about her. She doesn’t seem to appear elsewhere in this yearbook.
And, to show the extent of my searching, I’m using a newspaper database, general searches, looking through the next two editions of the yearbook, and an archive of The Plainsman. And to show that I’m not just including the successful searches, I give you Elizabeth Cryer.
We don’t know anything about her, not even where she was from. I did find a contemporaneous mention of an Elizabeth Cryer who was destined for the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and Dramatic Art. No idea if it is the same student.
This is Jessie Lee Raines, she was from tiny Fyffe, Alabama, which wasn’t even a town in the northeast corner of the state when she was a child. There’s less than 1,000 people there today. She was a senior, but she was at Alabama College, the modern day University of Montevallo. She was the vice president of her class, in an honor society and a speech major.
All of this makes me think they only found themselves in this yearbook because they were someone special to someone on campus. But who else she was, and what she would become, is a mystery.
And with those mysterious still being mysterious, we’ll move to something else we know a tiny bit more about.
Homer Wright was a longtime merchant, and he had one of the first phone numbers in town. Why he never ran an ad that said, “If you’re feeling less than fine, call nine,” escapes me.
All of the intricacies of installing the phone system are beyond me, but I assume the number means he had one of the first phones in town, making him quite the innovator. (Indeed, the first gas pump in town was installed in front of his store, in 1909.) He was also the postmaster general in his later years. He and his wife raised three children, two of which survived well into the 20-teens. Wright lived here. He died in 1943, age 57.
The industry that will be “the feature of tomorrow.” Be familiar with it!
I wonder if any of those engineering majors, or people studying architecture or business read this and then stormed into their professors’ stuffy offices. “You’ve never told us about this!” Let’s assume they were all at least passingly familiar with the concept, even if they had no idea of the ubiquity that was coming.
Unassuming advertisement aside, students of 1934 who got in early could probably do well for themselves.
Birmingham, by then, was easily the largest city in the state. (Strictly by a city’s population, that’s no longer the case.) The Birmingham Electric Company was organized in 1921. (Not to be confused with the 1890 Birmingham Railway Electrical Company, which would become Birmingham Electric Company in 1940.) Both had similar purposes, streetcars, with some electrical distribution on the side. The second one, the 1921 concern, was able to use that electricity side hustle to survive the Depression. Maybe that’s one reason they saw great things in conditioned air. Both companies suffered similar fates.
The 1890 version saw their rider numbers decline after World War II. Cars and buses took the demand away, and the streetcars were sold to Toronto in 1952. Around that time they changed their name to the Birmingham Transit Company. Two decades later, the local transit authority took over. Today, they run 109 buses on 38 routes and see about 6,800 customers per day.
Economics got the 1921 company, too. Alabama Power bought them when it got lean. Their vehicles were sold for scrap.
There must be reasons!
And I want to know why, if they are so popular, the photographer stopped by on the slowest day of the year. Today, the university records 1,510 students were enrolled in 1934. That’d mean everyone was in and out of Benson’s, every day, and this strains credulity.
I would have enjoyed watching an orchestra you could just stroll in and listen to for hours at a time, while meeting friends, getting food and candy and so on. It was probably a small band, but that would have been fine, too.
Benson’s was, primarily, a drug store. (There were three, all clumped together on the same block.) These storefronts are long, narrow shops, and so you see pretty much the whole place in that photo, if you squint. They stayed open late on the weekends to serve students coming and going from dances. A few years later, in 1940, milkshakes cost a dime. Regular sandwiches were 15 cents. A ham and cheese was twenty, or you could splurge for a club sandwich for a quarter.
And here’s our last page of ads, and the last entry for the 1934 collection. I’ve searched all of the names on this page and with the exception of the directors names from the bank, I’ve come up empty.
Now, to a man, all of those bank names are important local people. Most of them are affiliated with the university, the rest are pillars of the local community. It was a big deal putting these names in the ad. You knew these folks, and your money always felt safe with the people you saw every day. And if you can’t trust your neighbors with your money in 1934, there’s always a jar you can bury in the backyard.
Even as you were urged to look to air conditioning, you were still buying the black rock and the frozen water for all your domestic needs. Looking back, the 1930s sometimes seem like a time between times. It didn’t feel that way to them, of course. No one thinks like that in their moment. Apparently Homer Wright, the druggist from above, was also involved in Auburn Ice & Coal. The web tells me it was a company that registered with the state in 1925. Ads a few years later list the Ice & Coal phone number as 118. I wish I knew more about the Auburn Ice & Coal Co. Perhaps I’ll find out more about it in other places.
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.
