We once again turn our attention 90 years into the past, because we’ve been spending the last few Fridays looking at my alma mater via the 1934 yearbook. (Part one is here. You can find part two here.) This is about the people living their young lives during the Great Depression.
This is not a complete study, of course, but just the interesting images and names that jump out. And what starts to jump out, at least a bit in 1934, is that there’s was a different, but familiar world.
Let’s take a quick look at just a few more photos about what is inside.
We’re just wrapping up the sports section today, and so we’ll start with this quick look at the 1934 basketball team. They were only 2-11.
It seems that the one interesting note is that the coach of the freshman football team was named the head coach. Sam McAllister had been the coach of the basketball and baseball teams for three years. It was his second job. He was 24-18 on the court, which the yearbook considers a success. “Silent Sam” left the plains, and turned up in Florida a few years later, spending 15 years with the Gators. But that wasn’t immediately useful to this team.
Just two returning players came to the first practice, so the squad was filled out with reserves and newcomers. One of the returning stars was David Ariail, first on the left on the back row. He was from Birmingham, was an All-Southern end on the football team, and was voted an All-American by his peers in that sport. Here, we learn he functioned nobly in every game.
He was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds, the NFL Reds, and played one game for them, and two for the Brooklyn Dodgers, also the football version. He also played a game for the AFL’s Louisville Bourbons, which is a team all but forgotten by everyone. Ariail became a colonel in the army, serving as a company commander in the 846th and the 656th tank destroyer battalions.
Tank Destroyer tells me:
David entered the Army sometime in the mid 30’s and after serving in various units, was assigned to the 846th Tank Destroyer Battalion. The unit was made up of black servicemen with most officers being white. He held the rank of 1st Lieutenant and served as Company C Commander. On December 9, 1942, documents identify that he was now a Captain and became the unit’s Adjutant.
When the 656th Tank Destroyer Battalion was activated on April 3, 1943, Cpt. Ariail was assigned to Headquarters Company, functioning as the unit’s S-4 or Logistics Officer. By February of 1944, he had been promoted to the rank of Major and served as the Executive Officer of the unit, occasionally leading the unit when the Commander was absent.
The 656th shipped out from the New York port on December 16, 1944, and arrived in England on the 28th. After a month of additional training and preparations they boarded ships and sailed for Le Havre, France, disembarking on February 6, 1945. They were equipped with M18 tank destroyers and entered the line near Friesenrath, Germany, on the 28th.
Pushing toward the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany, they crossed into the bridgehead beginning on March 7th. The unit converted to the M36 tank destroyer late that month and supported the 9th Armored Division’s sweep to help encircle the Ruhr River in early April. They then dashed eastward to the Mulde River and turned south, entering Czechoslovakia near St. Sedlo on May 6th.
David was awarded the Bronze Star and also received the EAME ribbon with two campaign stars signifying the unit’s two campaigns of Rhineland and Central Europe. He also received the American Defense, the American Campaign, and WWII Victory Medal.
David stayed in the military for 30 years before his retirement. David Sr. served during the Korean War and at a number of posts including Frankfurt, Germany, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
He and his wife and two daughters and a son. He died in North Carolina, in 2001.
The other returning player was Frank Sindler, a junior architecture major, from Islip, New York. He’s second from the right on the back row, and was considered “an excellent floor man.” I’m not sure what becomes of him, so we’ll leave that alone for now.
Oh, the new basketball coach? Some guy named Ralph Jordan.
There was a new sport on campus in the mid-1930s. Some 37 people turned out to learn and practice the sport of kings. Most of their opponents weren’t schools, because not a lot of schools ran polo programs, I guess. And it was an open question, into the springtime, if the scheduled contests with LSU, Georgia and Florida would take place — if those institutions could find enough students who knew how to sit a horse. With all of that in mind, bright things were expected for Auburn polo, which had apparently earned some sort of championship the year before.
Polo first came to Auburn in 1932, via the the ROTC program and, specifically, Major G. H. Franke, mounted on the left, who led the ROTC program and was a star on the West Point team in his day. Also, the War Department thought polo promoted “skill in horsemanship and daring.” It stayed on campus until 1939. Tanks and war were presumably the reasons it disappeared, despite being a fan favorite.
Gustav Henry Franke was a lifer, an artillery man. Previously, Franke commanded the first US unit to fire on German forces in World War I. When World War II came he found himself commanding the Field Artillery Replacement Center at Fort Bragg in 1941, and then Artillery for the whole 6th Infantry Division. He also led the 81st Infantry Division at Fort Rucker (the modern Fort Novosel) and was largely responsible for the buildup of that installation. He would retire a major general in 1944. Both his son and grandson would later serve as army officers.
Sadly, the book doesn’t tell us who the rest of the ramblers are. Ramblers was never an official name for anything, but it feels like it should have been.
Speaking of names, I included this mostly for the title.
This was just the second year of swimming and diving on campus. They swam in a basement pool and wired their times to other schools, since the facilities were too small for competitions. From humble beginnings. Men’s swimming and diving have eight national championships, women’s swimming and diving counts five. There are 23 conference championships and 30 Olympians among the list of achievements as well, and to think, it all started with tank teams like these.
Marcus McGriff, a junior industrial engineer major from Livingston, Alabama, was captain of the team. He would later serve in the army, as an officer in Africa, where he received a legion of merit award.
It seems he left the army a lieutenant colonel. He died in 1972, just shy of 60.
Senior Lynwood Poole, a commercial art major from Montgomery, was the alternate captain. Probably just because of his name, and he brought his own swim trunks.
Poole, a diver, had to leave the team, a contemporary news account tells us, because of eye trouble. Whatever the problem was must have been minor, or solved, because Poole would also join the army. There’s nothing online about his service, but I know he also retired a lieutenant colonel. He died in 1979, at 68, in Florida, survived by his wife and two children. He and his wife are buried in Hawai’i. Their children are now in their 70s and 80s.
But the real star of the tank men was Howard Morris, a Montgomery junior studying electrical engineering. He was the captain, and the coach. Here, they list him as a conference champion, and I won’t even try to guess how they arrived at that. But was fast at the 440-free. He won all but one of his races that year. He was apparently a diver, as well.
He went into business, banking specifically. He got married in 1943, was showing horses a few years later. By 1950 he was a civic leader, a lieutenant colonel and nationally regarded as a dressage rider and horse trainer.
He became an official in the state banker’s association. At one point he was teaching artillery to Chiang Kai-Shek’s army. (So you can never say nothing interesting happened in the 1950s.) Tall, smiling, balding, he was also a long serving member of a prominent insurance firm. But all of those newspaper mentions about the banking organization end in 1963. He started Pinchona, a horse farm, near Montgomery in 1969. It’s still active today. Also in the 1960s, he served as president of The United States Pony Clubs, which teaches riding and the proper care of horses to children. If I have the right man, he died in 2002, at the age of 89.
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.
