We are once again jumping in the time machine, heading back 90 years, to see what the ol’ alma mater was like in 1934. (Part one is here.) By that, of course, I mean the people as much as anything. It was an exciting young time for a bunch of young people in the middle of the Great Depression. There’s was a different world — but some of this does look familiar.
I’m flipping through, avoiding most of the posed photographs in favor of the more interesting images and names that jump out me. While isn’t a complete look, we’ll get another week or two out of 1934. So let’s see what is inside.
This page is titled “With the young journalists,” so, of course, I insist we stop and linger here. And if you saw the first installment of our look at the 1934 Glomerata last week you might recall a room that looks like this. It is, in fact, the same room.
It isn’t uncommon for the campus paper and the yearbook to be closely related, sometimes sharing staff and resources, so this isn’t too much of a surprise. A few people worked on each of these publications, in fact.
Do we know what issue of the newspaper they are looking at? Yes we do. The biggest stories in the Jan. 31, 1934 edition of the paper were about an upcoming drama tournament, the conferral of honorary degrees, and approval of new concrete stands from the Civil Works Administration (the first, public employment experiment of the New Deal and the predecessor of the WPA) “for the building of a stadium.”
The project as approved calls for the building of stands on the east and west sides of the field suitable for the seating of nine thousand four hundred persons and the filling in of the south end with 75,000 cubic yards of dirt so that wooden stands may be erected thereon to seat three thousand more persons, thereby increasing the seating capacity of the stadium to twelve thousand four hundred. It is hoped that at some future time the bowl may be completed in its entirety, but for the present no such plans are being made.
The total cost of the project has been estimated at nearly one hundred twenty-six thousand dollars, not including the cost of the grading and draining project which is at present under way. Of this total amount it will be necessary for the school to raise approximately thirty-two thousand dollars according to CWA regulations and various plans are at present being formulated for the procuring of this amount.
[…]
Provided Congress approves the President’s request for the necessary funds to continue CWA work and provided the school will be able to raise the thirty-two thousand dollars necessary on this project, which at present seems almost assured, Auburn will have a new stadium before May first.
As people read that particular issue, things were still a bit up in the air, but the plans solidified in the next few weeks. This was the beginning of a big shift for the campus, and the community. But a lot of places were about to start seeing changes. In Auburn, it was the start of a dream that would finally be realized in 1989. Prior to this project, the school played almost all of their home football games in bigger cities nearby, Birmingham, Montgomery, Columbus, and so on. They played one game at home each year and fans sat on temporary stands that allowed 700 people to watch a game. The casual version of history goes like this: getting the stadium built, getting the interstate to pass through town (I-85 was built in stages in the 1960s, including, sadly, redlining a vibrant African-American community in nearby Montgomery.) and getting Bo Jackson on campus made the place all grown up. And it started with what was going on around these guys in that photo, right there.
The Glom said The Plainsman had a circulation of 2,000. I suppose that was a reasonable number for the time. They also shipped copies around the country to subscribers, which is a tradition that would die around the turn of the century. In 1933-1934, the paper was led by this young man, Horace Shepard. He was a senior from Mobile, a member of Spades — the senior leadership organization — and studying aeronautical engineering.
Horace would go on to become Brigadier General Horace Shepard. Born in Mississippi, he became a flying cadet after college, becoming a second lieutenant in the Air Reserve in late 1935. He taught flying to others until 1940, along the way earning his regular Army commission as a 2nd lieutenant in the Air Corps. He was transferred to Hickam Field, Hawai’i, in 1940, where he served as the chief engineering officer until a 1943 transfer to Ohio. He was a colonel when the war ended, and resigned his commission in 1951.
He moved on to run a firm called Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, TRW, spending 26 years with that company. They made automative, aerospace and military products. In 1976 he donated some land to Mississippi, and they named it as a park in his honor. He retired in 1977. He and his wife had three children and, when he died at home in Georgia in 2002, he had eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. He’s buried in Mobile.
There are a few collages like this in the book, “Around and about the campus.”
Click here for the larger version.
They have cutlines that made sense to the people in the photos, fragments of sentences that the people putting the yearbook together assumed would be memorable for forever. And maybe a few of them were, to someone, but most of them are meaningless to you and me.
Click here for the larger version.
Here’s another wood engraving, just because they are beautiful.
As I’ve said, we’re not too concerned with the posed studio portraits. And I’m even less interested in making fun of fashions and styles. But I just want to point out this guy’s hair, because he had a tremendous coif in his day.
Ben Hutson was born in New Orleans, but he always called Mobile home. He studied electrical engineering in school, and he’s a senior here. His interest in electricity earned him the nickname “Juicey.”
He served in the army, first at Ft. Knox and then at Brookley Field in Mobile and Hickam in Hawai’i during World War II. He left the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel, and went to work for Alabama Power for 35 years, retiring from the company as division manager. He and his wife — she was a nurse, a Vanderbilt grad, who served as a flight nurse during the war — were married for 63 years, until she passed away in 2008. He died the next year. Together, they had two sons and a daughter, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
The athletics wood engraving. Again, none of the buildings here are relevant to the Auburn campus.
On the subject of football games, this was a parade prior to a game in Columbus, the annual fistfight with Georgia.
Do we know where this photo was taken? We certainly do. The main building opposite the photographer is still standing.
In the Atlanta Constitution, No less than the great Ralph McGill wrote about that game.
Until the last bitter moment, as Georgia’s championship dream shattered against the force of an Auburn drive in the ist of a dark November day, a child’s hurt, shrill voice kept shouting, “Come on Georgia, you can hold them Georgia.”
But who can hold the thunderbolt? And who can shackle a flitting sunbeam? And who can catch a brown leaf tossing in an autumn gale?
And so it came about that Georgia’s string of seven straight games was broken here this afternoon, snipped clean by a 14-to-6 score.
McGill was the publisher of the Atlanta paper. He would go on to write syndicated columns, become a Peabody jurist and later win a Pulitzer.
Here’s one of the quality action shots. The cutline says “Tally makes short gain against Tulane Greenies.”
Tally was Marion Talley, a senior from Decatur, Georgia. He studied textile engineering and was an all-around jock. In addition to football he was a pitcher on the baseball team, and basketball, and was on the track team. He married soon after college, had a daughter in 1941 and lost his wife in 1978. He got remarried sometime after that, and died in Georgia in 1995. The web doesn’t tell me a lot more about him, but Marion Talley’s stiff arm should live forever.
I believe that’s Harold Memtsas, a 167-pound end he’s about to pie face. He was something of a legend in Louisiana sports. But 167 pounds! Tulane’s smallest defensive end last year was 230 pounds. (And that’s undersized.)
The leaders of cheer. Still just the guys. I wonder if, in the next few years, they felt shortchanged. Four years hence, the first women would join the cheer squad. But these guys wouldn’t see it.
Ralph Sargent was a freshman from Birmingham, studying aeronautical engineering. Next to him is Bill McTyeire, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. He married Katherine, served as an engineer in World War II in Germany and the PTO. He spent much of his career after that at the Birmingham Ornamental Iron Company, where he established Meadowcraft, a furniture division that would, one-day, be one of the successful casual furniture makers in the country. He served as a general chairman of the United Way, was very active in many of the prominent civic and social organizations in his hometown. (I’d list them, but it is excessive.) He was also on the board of some of the largest business concerns in the state. He died, at 90, in 2003. He was survived by his wife of 61 years. They had five children and eight grand-children.
Third from the left is Ed Prewitt, a junior electrical engineering major from Mobile. He was the captain of the squad, but what he did after school escapes us. Next to him is Billy H. Morrison, a Memphis boy, a senior, studying civil engineering. He married a Missouri girl and went to work for the Portland Cement Association, which has poured cement we’ve all stood on or stared at, seems like. He died in 1980 at 68.
I think my favorite things about that photo are the hand-painted megaphones and those sweaters. A lot of the old looks should come back every so often, and that’s definitely one of them.
That’s enough for now. In next week’s look at the 1934 Glomerata, we’ll check out the basketball squad, the new sports of polo, swimming and diving, and more.
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.
