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Poor rickshaw guy. They made him carry six people and their cooler. Hope they gave him a nice tip.
The professionals now clean Toomer’s Corner by hand:
Sunset over Montgomery.
Clouds over the Samford campus.
For more pictures, including all of Catember, go to the September photo gallery, which is now live.
Even my deadlines have deadlines. And those deadlines aren’t very patient. So things will be brief. Very brief.
Class today, based on the same lecture I taught to another section last week. The laughs weren’t there this time. And some of the jokes were even better! It happens. Small group dynamics are interesting things. Maybe they’ll find the next class more to their liking.
Saw this on the morning drive:
Some octagons get all the luck. Some just get to see all the sites. Good thing it picked up the truck. Those many flat sides to an octagon make rolling around a difficult proposition.
Geometry puns! Free of charge!
Updated a page I wrote in July. Last winter I did a piece on Dean Hallmark, Texas boy turned Auburn man turned World War II hero and prisoner of war. I’ve been corresponding with his fourth-cousin, the family historian. Last month he and I had the chance to meet in person. Today he sent me an email containing the update. Interesting echoes from the 1930s.
That’s enough for now. Back to newspapering.
Oh the things you can get done on a Monday!
Set some hours. Wrote a lot of emails. Volunteered myself onto a panel. Worked on my car. Read and tinkered with two papers. Watched some television. Washed my car. Vacuumed the floor mats.
The floor mats, people.
Sure, when you throw it down into one fast list it doesn’t seem like much, but there’s some heft to that list.
At least three of those things involved Microsoft Word, after all.
And since you’re not interested in any of those things in the slightest, have some pictures. I found this quilt hanging at the city library yesterday:
The quilt was sponsored by American Field Service of Auburn, which now has a different name, I believe, but is a youth organization. Each panel is a little bit of the local history — and judging by the content, somewhere from the mid-late 1970s — so this safely fits into the realm of folk art. Here’s Old Main:
Old Main, built in 1859, was the first building on Auburn’s campus. Classes were held there. It served as a hospital during the Civil War (when the university was closed). It was destroyed by fire in 1887 and replaced by the iconic Samford Hall.
Here’s the lathe, which has now remarkably been mentioned here twice in the span of eight days:
Built in Selma, Ala. during the early part of the Civil War it was intended to make military supplies for the Confederates. They tried to move it to Georgia to keep it from being captured, and it was ultimately buried in Irondale, near modern Birmingham. It later was moved to Columbus, Ga. and worked through the end of the war boring cannons. After the war it was used in the coal iron industry. In the 1950s it was presented to Auburn. Also, the legend goes, if you stand in front of it under a full moon and say some random thing or another it will move three times and make all your dreams come true. Or something.
People don’t talk about it much anymore, I guess most everyone who can relate to it are all gone now, but the rail depot was a vital part of the community. It even figures into the football lore. The depot still stands. It was a realty office for three decades after the trains stopped rumbling through. Now it is empty and is considered a state sight in peril.
Reading that link you’ll learn it was the third one in town, designed by a student in 1904. The last passenger ticket was sold in 1970. Here it is today.
Condensed and reprinted, for the final time I think, from notes I wrote in 2003.
It was my first week working in a new newsroom Little Rock. The top local story of the day was the Little Rock Zoo regaining its accreditation. The anchors there could not pronounce “accreditation” correctly, but that was the big story for the day.
A phone call from our traffic reporter, just landed from his morning flight, started like this “You might want to tell the (people on air) to turn on a TV, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center and they are talking about the zoo.”
I made my way into the studio to announce that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.
As they got up to speed the second plane hit the opposite tower. Bryant Gumbel was interviewing an eye witness. A camera was pointed up into the sky. The eye witness broadcast the second plane crashing. It could no longer be an accident.
My producer later told me that I was so surprised, watching it happen in real time, that I just announced it out loud. He could hear me two rooms away.
I called for New York on one phone, dialing the NYC area codes and pushing random numbers hoping for a connection. Because so much communications equipment was tied into the Towers, seemingly the whole borough was down. I wanted to say “Stick your head outside and tell me what you see.”
In my other ear I was on a phone call with the Pentagon. They aren’t confirming it was a terrorist attack, but they are looking into it, a spokesman says. Moments later I tried to reach my Pentagon source again, but there was no answer. We find out a moment later that a plane has crashed there.
I learned about a year later that the office of the guy I was talking to was located not very far from the impact site at the Pentagon.
We started calling local officials to try and make a local angle on the story, it’s what you do on a huge story far removed from your location. There was a bomb threat called in to a prominent Little Rock building. An announcement was made that planes nationwide are being pulled out of the sky. They all land at the first airport that has an appropriate runway. This is unprecedented in the nation’s history of flight. (And a remarkable feat of logistics, looking back.)
I dashed across town to the airport. I’m to talk to people getting off planes. I get to ask these people “What have you heard? What did they tell you on the plane? How does it feel to know that, but for the grace of God, ‘there go I’?”
As I arrive at the airport, the first building collapsed on itself. ABC’s Peter Jennings, now being simulcast on radio, very somberly says, “Oh my God.”
The airport was packed. I’ve lived here for less than a week and have already been in the airport five times. Now there’s confusion. Tears. Cell phones and scrambling for rental cars and hotels. I talked to dozens of people. They all had stories.
Some were travelling across country, heading to the northeast. One flight was told they were having mechanical difficulties and had to land. It wasn’t until they could called their loved ones that they knew. One man wasn’t sure he could find Arkansas on a map. A Sikh was there alone. In his eyes, he knew. He seemed to already understand what had happened on a level the rest of us would come to grasp in the coming days. He was afraid. I still wonder about him.
We did great work for the next 10 hours, about 15 in total for the day. I was proud to be a part of that product. I finally made it home in time to watch the Congressional leadership and the still-stirring end to their press conference.
Mississippi State tried, but they couldn’t get the job done. Auburn held on late — this was the final play and if Chris Relf, the upside down guy, landed on the other side of that line we’d be in overtime — to extend the nation’s longest winning streak to 17 games.
War Eagle forever. 41-34*
*Auburn has won 67 straight games when scoring 30 or more points, a streak dating back to 1996.
