Thursday


3
Sep 26

The 1926 Glomerata, part two

We return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. This is a quick tour, where we are spending just two weeks on this particular year. The photography is a bit limited, but there are great stories, so we’ll wrap up 1926 in this large batch before moving on to another book next week. Enjoy a few pretty pictures from the Plains. (See part one here.)

These were, as we learned last week, troublesome days on campus. The university president, a man named Spright Dowell, wasn’t viewed as particularly effective. The university was about to celebrate its 70th anniversary, but the buildings needed work, the faculty needed raises, the sports programs were all struggling. and the university needed some actual respect from the state. It’s a persistent tale, particularly in those early years. The students hanged him in effigy.

Curiously, people seemed to like him as an individual, but didn’t seem to think much of his job performance. The newspaper editorials were unsparing, and they took turns at pointing at all of these problems and more. Of course, one of the newspaper bigwigs was on the board of the university. The ties and tendrils were everywhere, as they always are. Dowell knew the score, at least somewhat. He pointed to the athletics issues. He mentioned, the next fall, that perhaps he could have spent some more time being a man of the people. Perhaps he had in mind here his predecessor, who was well liked. Instead, Dowell said, he chose to spend his time focusing on the money problems. Certainly, when he said that, he had a lot of influential people in mind. Weeks after he said it, and before this book was terribly out of date, he would resign from the university. His tenure would end after seven trying years. He became the president of Mercer University the next year, where he’d stay for 15 years. But this isn’t about him. It’s about what’s inside this book, a handsomely produced, 375-page piece of history.

We wrapped up last week with the athletics section of the century-old book. The next few pages showed the “Beauties.” These women don’t always show up in other areas of the annual. In some editions they seem to just be local people. They were selected for this by Florenz Ziegfield Jr., the director of the Ziegfield Follies, which was still a cultural high water mark for the country.

I’ve not yet found the rhyme or reason for how all of that worked, other than Ziegfield liked the photos they sent him. Also, these women can sometimes be difficult to trace if they took their husband’s name in public mentions. If nothing else, we can get a glimpse of the hair and some of the clothing styles of the day.

Nell Thomas, for instance. I believe she was from Montgomery. She might have been the daughter of a prominent appellate judge. (But even there following her digital trail gets fuzzy.)

Bertrice Black was from Birmingham. She would get married in 1927 or thereabouts. Her husband would become an accountant, and served as a captain in the army during WW2. They had one daughter. Bertrice, sometimes, or at least later, it was Beatrice, died in 1977 at age 73.

Eula Martin is a name that feels so incredibly familiar I’ve spent the last few minutes trying to figure out if I’ve ever written about her before. I have not. Clearly, though, she had a thing for flappers and fur. Also this is one of the most soft-focused photos in the book. (I happen to be an expert on fuzzy focus.) She attended Howard College, the modern Samford University. She was a dancer. And this seems to be a photo that became her promotional headshot. Martin, or someone with the same name, was quite active in the social pages of the late 1920s. She came from a family that had lived in the state when it was still a territory. She wrote poetry. Throughout her long life she would join all of the important social and community organizations that a woman of her stature should maintain. She would marry — 99 years ago today — a man that we’ll meet in just a moment. They had a son. She passed away at 90, in 1995.

Martha Porter likewise doesn’t show up elsewhere in the Glom. She was from Tuscumbia, in the northwestern corner of the state. She became a teacher in a little town on the Tennessee River. She got married the next year to a Bama grad. He was a roofer and would eventually become the president of that local firm. He died in 1970, she lived until 1993. She lived in Florida for several decades. They had one daughter, a woman who passed away just a few years ago, who has a lovely obituary.

Elizabeth Chester just looks here like a silent movie starlet. She’s from Atlanta. She’s not otherwise in the Glom. I can’t find anything about her for certain.

And this is Margaret Whittle. She’s from Atlanta. If you know anything about her, pass it on.

Good as it is, the problem with books of this particular vintage is that the casual photos are almost always small. Usually they are of spotty quality. The equipment available to a poor college campus might not have been the best. Or maybe its the photographs. Perhaps my limited digitization. Whoever we blame, and blame me, the few pages of casual campus life all look like this, and if you get cutlines they are usually short on details that help us find out more about the people in them.

You see some fans here, some sort of band thing, a line where students wait patiently in line to register for classes, and two shots of the Wreck Tech parade, which was part of the festivities before the Georgia Tech football game. (It was the final game of the year, in November, in Atlanta. The good guys lost.)

There’s a section called Death, and it’s filled with poems and prose and jokes that probably made sense to the 21-year-olds who were already feeling nostalgic, but most of it is lost to us as personal reference. There’s some fun art in there, filling up the space, though. This took up a full page. Some of it looks like campus, some of it doesn’t seem familiar at all.

We have a rule that we always show the bikes that wind up in the Glom. Apparently that applies to the ones that are drawn, as well.

They look almost as cool as the real thing, anyway.

Here’s another one of those little marginalia doodles that is destined to become some sort of clip art around here.

This is the staff that put together the book. The business manager is Ben Screws Gilmer, of Montgomery, who was a senior studying electrical engineering. He’d worked on the Glom for two years. The blurb by his portrait in the class section recalls him as a gentleman, a conscientious student, and “As to him being a ladies man, we take great pleasure in referring you to Atlanta.”

Perhaps he was legendary.

He went to work at Bell System right after graduation, starting as an installer. Phones, wires, poles, I don’t know, but he did that for a month and then went into the company’s leadership training course. That was a wise choice by the company and him. He found his way into marketing and development, and then into regulatory work. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War 2, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He returned to Southern Bell, became an assistant vice president and, before long, was running much of the phone company’s business in nine states. He also worked for Northwestern Bell, Pacific Telephone, and, eventually AT&T, where in 1967, he became the president of the company. He also served as either director, chairman of the board, or trustee of more than thirty civic and charitable organizations. The university gave him an honorary doctorate in the 1950s. In 1975, he was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor by the state legislature. He is similarly honored in the Alabama Business Hall of Fame and the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame. His industry peers in Georgia would likewise honor him. All of that started right here. He and his wife had a daughter. When he died, at 98 in 2004, he also had two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

The editor was Charles Snook, a senior architecture major from Birmingham. Snook was in all of the leadership organizations on campus, it seems. He was also an ROTC captain. Who knows when he had time to attend class. Later, he served as a commander in the Navy. In his professional life he went to back to the Birmingham suburbs and worked as an architect. Snook was vice president of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects and worked on at least one of those downtown revitalization projects that are necessary from time to time. I can’t readily find a list of his projects, to confirm it, but the odds are very, very good I know of some of his work, if I’ve not been in the actual buildings he designed — albeit decades later, of course. He had one son, who became a reverend, as did one of his five grandchildren. He died in 1973.

The art editor is William Sandifer, a senior from Mississippi who was also studying architecture. He was another prominent campus leader. Part of his yearbook blurb jokes that he majored in letter writing and minored in sleeping during class hours. And this was one of the men who helped design the Empire State Building, the World’s Fair, and several U.S. embassies. He’d served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the war, mustered out as a colonel, with Manila as his last duty station. In 1947 he and his wife purchased a huge, renowned ranch in Colorado, Greystone. He died in 1986, at 85.

Here’s the campus paper. I’d work there decades later, and didn’t give the first thought to the existence of any of these people, because I was 19 or 20 at the time, just like some of these people. They turned a post-game extra 15 minutes after the game was over using 1920s technology. That’s impressive in any era.

Jasper F. Thompson was another electrical engineering major from Birmingham. “Fritz,” it says here, “is a likeable cuss — always jolly, never worries and has a good word for everyone. The best ‘ain’t’ too good for him.” He worked as an executive with the Red Cross, pretty much running things across the southeast. He’d lived in Georgia for almost two decades, while his brother and his father were judges in Alabama. When he died, of a heart attack, in 1960 he and his wife had two adult children, a daughter and son.

Edward Donald Ball was the managing editor. Apparently he dosed off in classes. He caught on at the old Birmingham Age-Herald after school. He worked around the southeast, and in New York before the war. E.D., as he was known, would become a significant European war correspondent. Back home, he ran the Tennessee bureau of the Associated Press office. He worked for the AP for 31 years. He lost a young son, aged 18, in 1951. In 1959 he became editor of the Nashville Tennessean. He died in Georgia, at 88, in 1992. He was survived by his wife and a daughter.

William Horton was an engineering major from Virginia. He played football for three years, and was the sports editor of the paper. He was also an editor of a specialty engineering publication. They called him “the preacher, the philosopher, and the journalist of the Civil Engineers.” He’s difficult to trace definitively after college, however.

I’m assuming this was just yearbook art, but it also looks like a great poster. Illustrators could make some lovely work given the styles of the day.

Here’s the radio club, which is part of a fascinating little history at Auburn. I’ve written about it several times in a few places over the years. It was the early days of the technology, and these were days of important transitions with the technology on campus. By this point they had a handful of radio telegraph sets, and a radio phone. They could send a signal a good distance at night, but it was especially limited during the daytime. The hand-me-down gear was still serving the farmers who could hear the signal. The university had been a pioneer in the field in 1912 and 1913, but decisions had to be made about the future. And these guys were watching.

In 1925 WMAV would close its doors. This was a part of necessary upgrades. They built a 200-foot transmitter tower just south of campus. There were actually two stations working from campus after that. In February of 1926, probably just before this yearbook was released, WAPI took to the air for the first time. Many decades later, I broadcast on WAPI early in my professional broadcasting career.

One of these 1926 guys, as we learned last week, went to work for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. He was a natural. Louis Howle was sending messages to stations in California so rapidly they couldn’t decipher his dots and dashes. J.M. Wilder ran the old WMAV when it came back to the students, from Birmingham, in the year prior.

John McCaa had a great live broadcast moment earlier this year.

(O)ne night we had a request for a popular number. Everyone could play it, but no one knew the words . I was selected to sing the words, so 1 propped the music up in a chair where I could read the words while playing. Everything was going fine till, when about half through, a strong breeze came through the windows and blew the music across the room. I just broke out laughing as did the others. The confusion lasted for about five minutes before we got back to playing again. Our mail from that program was more than usual, and of all things, people asked us to repeat that program as they had enjoyed our “skit.”

A few years after this someone conducted a a survey of land-grant schools that had gotten into broadcasting. A lot of them got out — poor financing, poor gear, low power, programming and technical difficulties. Auburn was one of those that stuck with it, though the people working in this area would do it with some miseries. By the end of the decades the second boom period of broadcasting at Auburn was waning. Sports were proving to be the only thing that could keep and captivate listeners. There were also all sorts of problems with frequency hopping. And then came the rise of the networks.

I’m glad they stuck with it. The radio that I knew, which would be all but unrecognizable to all of those men in the photo above, was one important part of my student experience.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.


27
Aug 26

The 1926 Glomerata, part one

After a long time away from this feature, we return to the dusty old pages of old yearbooks. Enjoy a few pretty pictures from the Plains.

We go now to the 1920s, right in the middle of what might be the tumultuous era in the old alma mater’s history. Spright Dowell, who never enjoyed support as the president, was coming to the end of his time on the plains. He’d come over from the state department of education, which even, back then, referred to itself as The Department. Dowell replaced Charles Thach, an alumnus who’d been on campus for decades until 1920, just before his death the next year. They were engaged in political warfare with their cross-state university rival (with cloak-room maneuvering that went far beyond athletics.) State funds were low, there were charges of ethics problems through the Cooperative Extension Service. The university also had to survive a proposal that would move the campus 50 miles west, to the capitol city. Dowell wasn’t exactly against that idea, and that cost him in the eyes of his faculty and students. Also, the Great Depression was on the horizon. No one knew that in 1926.

Dowell knew, however, that he replaced a beloved man, and sometimes blamed that for his lot in life, because the real issues — disrepair of buildings, outdated equipment, debt, underpaid faculty — weren’t enough to blame. He wanted more money from the state, which often looked at the university as a secondary concern, despite its land grant status and importance to the region. People seemed to like him, there was a complimentary note about his welcoming style of conversation in this annual, but didn’t think he was equal to the job. He’d lost the alumni, the faculty were over him. Enrollment wasn’t keeping up with regional competition. Dowell might have been too much of a holistic bureaucrat for the moment, and didn’t bring the requisite passion for the place, but there was also the problems in athletics, particularly football. After the 1924 season the team was 4-4-1, and alumni wanted Dowell to be brought before the board of trustees, with students called to testify. This was the lever that moved alumni, but statewide politics that had nothing to do with sports were also at play. The students hanged him in effigy.

This is the cover of the 1926 yearbook.

The book was dedicated to Maj. John Everard Hatch, “who has been an inspiration to us throughout our four years of college life … in token of our love for him as a man, our admiration for him as a solider and our devotion to him as a leader.” Hatch retired as a colonel. He and his wife, Helen, are buried at West Point. They had a daughter and two sons, both of whom served as officers in the Army. They would have all been 10 or younger here. His father was a brigadier general, buried at Arlington.

Sometimes it is easy to think of the way-back-then as a monochrome moment, a sepia-toned, yellowed piece of paper is what we’ve got. That’s what we see, after all. But this book is here to show you, they knew about color. There are several plates like this marking the different sections of the book. Though, to my knowledge, we didn’t often have tigers walking a path to Samford Hall.

Nevertheless, it is the 1920s. The photos here are large shots of buildings, which we’ve discussed before, and small headshots, like these, of the senior and junior class officers.

Vice president of the senior class was Leon Nelson, who was from Gadsden. He went to Florida to coach and then to coach in south Alabama. A decade hence, he was the head football coach back home in Gadsden, and had a legendary decade-long run there. He went back to Florida in 1948, where he stayed until 1964. The stadium there is named in his honor. He died at 67, in 1970, in Miami.

Owen Frederick Wise return to Auburn in 1970 to receive an honorary doctorate. He was the director of the state’s Vocational Rehabilitation Service where he worked for more than 40 years, started in 1928. He died in Montgomery, in 1973. He had his wife, Louise, had two daughters, and at least one of them went to Auburn and would be listed as one of the Glomerata‘s favorites — a fact which was mentioned in her obituary, at 88, in 2023.

Louis Howle left school and signed on with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, where he worked for 43 years. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in Atlanta, in 1983.

Robert Young Brown went into the foreign service. He was stationed in Baghdad, Cairo, Bogota, and Panama in the 1930s. He would also serve in Montevideo, Manila, and Athens. He was named consul general in Jamaica in 1950. He retired in 1957, and served in the National Defense Executive Reserve. He died in 1964.

Dorothy Duggar was from Auburn, hers was one of those reasonably prominent families. She would become the first woman to graduate from the university with a degree in architecture. She stayed in town, and became well-known herself. She died in 1975 and is buried at Pine Hill.

Did these juniors do much? Eldon Pruett got married in the fall of 1926 and graduated in May of 1927. His wife became a teacher. He did too, becoming a coach at neighboring Opelika High. He stayed in the Army reserves, left OHS to serve in the war. At some point he did a stint in Korea. He became a lieutenant colonel, and a business manager when he returned to civilian life. He was active in local society, ran for the county school board, married off two daughters. His nickname in college was Dizzy, and people still called him that three decades later. He died in 1968.

S.H. Lynne was a track star at Auburn and was hired as a coach at Alabama. He also studied the law there, and then became a county judge in 1934. He was named to the federal bench in 1946 by Harry Truman. When he died, at 93, in 2000, he was the longest serving jurist. His obituary recalls that his order kept George Wallace from barring two black students from attending the University of Alabama, though he wasn’t known as a proponent of integration.

His classmate and fellow class officer Moreland G. Smith was a civil rights activist, and architect. He joined a Nashville firm, studied at MIT, and then put out his own shingle. He designed a city hall, and an apartment complex where Rosa Parks would later live. He served in the Army Corps of Engineers. He later designed Montgomery’s Garrett Coliseum, served on the board of trustees at Tuskegee. He also worked on a church, a library and three county courthouses. He sold most of his interest in the architectural firm Sherlock, Smith & Adams because the very racist governor was threatening a bank with which they did business. He moved to Atlanta and joined the Southern Regional Council. He and his wife, Marjorie, had three children. He died in 1989.

It looks as though Rodney G. Carter became a teacher, and then a principal. He’s difficult to pin down, however.

All of the senior headshots look like this, though Sarah Frances Blackman is the only one smiling.

If I have the right woman, it seems that she got married in 1953. It’s possible she lived in Florida. And, if I found the right one I think I’ve just stumbled upon my favorite newspaper mention in this long-running project. In 1983, Blackman was demonstrating the microwave. No wonder she was smiling, decades and decades earlier.

The next woman is Mrs. Margaret H. Blair. She would go on to work at the Georgia Teachers College and the University of Georgia. By the mid-1940s she becomes nationally renowned in clothing and textiles. She’s in her 30s here, but she’s difficult to trace. She died in Savannah, Georgia, in 1973. Her sister, Agnes Harris, was at this time the dean of women at Auburn. The next year she went over to Alabama.

I only included the third guy because he was easy to find. Samuel Bonifay studied electrical engineering, became a meter tester, and eventually settled in Anniston, working for Alabama Power for almost 40 years. He served as a captain in the reserves, retired in 1966 and had a daughter and two grandchildren when died at 75 in 1977.

On that same page, at the bottom of the column, is Margaret Brown. She was studying education and, if you’ll read her blurb, was a total jock.

The varsity team didn’t form until 1971, of course, but women were doing things prior to that. And this, in 1926, is the first time I recall the yearbook bragging about it. Unfortunately, the athletic department doesn’t record or recognize those earlier teams. And Brown, of course, is quite the common name.

This is Wiliam Alton Goode, he was studying agriculture, livestock in particular. He’d eventually own a dairy concern. He died in 1979, age 75, the father of a son and two daughters. He is from one of my ancestral haunts and I bet someone in my family knew him.

I don’t profess to being an expert on the photography or portraiture of the era, but I bet this woman, Oriel Nevada McGinty, was desperately ready to be done with the 1920s.

She was the oldest of five from nearby Camp Hill. She was to become a teacher. She died at 86 in 1976.

It is a shame the photo isn’t bigger, but you can tell that the band is awfully proud of those capes. I bet they were new.

“They weren’t good, but they had rifles, and so we’ll say whatever nice things they want us to.”

Earlier we learned that the athletics were struggling. The solution was a rebuild. The university brought in David Morey, center. He was an All-American football player for Dartmouth College and a pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics. Auburn was his third stop, where he stayed for three years. He went 10–10–1 in football, with the high water mark being a 2–0 win against Tulane in the first game of New Orleans’ Sugar Bowl. In 1927 his quarterback was expelled for sneaking into a women’s dorm after a night of drinking. (Could you imagine that headline today?) His team started 0–3 and he resigned. he went back north to coach again.

Some of these other guys would have distinguished careers on the plains. Red Brown, who coached the freshmen, Boozer Pitts, Morey, Mike Papke, and the great Wilbur Hutsell.

Pitts was a local boy, and was a standout player at Auburn in the glory days. He was a center at 190 pounds. He’d coached the team in ’23 and ’24, and would step in for Morey in 1927. Aside from World War II, when he served as an army officer, he taught math at the university for more than 30 years. He died in 1971.

Papke would coach the basketball team for three seasons and still has the second-highest winning percentage on campus.

Wilbur Hutsell was fast his whole life, being a conference champion in the 400 when he was in college. He’d been on campus for a few years as the first track and field coach. In his career he sent five athletes to the Olympics. He also coached the basketball team for a time, before Papke came along. He trained the 1924 Olympics wrestling team and was an assistant track coach for the 1928 Games. He was also the athletic director, twice. The track venue on campus was named in his honor and he was inducted into four different halls of fame.

Morey, on the gridiron, had guys like this to work with. No idea who they are, as there’s no caption. The football team began their rebuild, in 1925, going 5-3-1. The yearbook says they were a thin team. As yearbooks must do, they were incredibly optimistic about the future.

They were wrong. The team would go 5-4 in 1926 and wouldn’t see a winning season again until 1931. None of the fans knew that. Some 5,000 fans came out to see the homecoming game, a 19-0 loss to Virginia Tech. It was the largest crowd to ever watch Auburn play. In contrast, the 2026 A-Day game, the spring scrimmage, had 34,276 fans in attendance.

There were quite a few on hand for this game. Not sure where it is, but I want to say Columbus. The sports photography had a long way to go, in the 1920s, and this is the best of the shots assembled here. But, still, look at that referee running in at the end of the play.

This is the captain of the team, Edward “Red” Hawkins. He was a senior from Bessemer, studying civil engineering. He got married in 1928 to Mildred and graduated in 1929. He taught and was the athletics director of a high school for some time. He joined the U.S. Forest Service and then the war came. Overseas for more than two years, he was stationed in Calcutta, India for at least part of that time, where he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Ten days after his 90th birthday, in 1992, he died in south Alabama.

This is the rat football team. The freshman team, and the first one in the university’s history. It says here that some 120 “freshies” came out for the team. Twenty-two of them are listed above this photograph. It looks like a pretty fierce group to me.

Cheerleading was different then. These guys didn’t merit a real mention here, but they did get this photograph. I wonder if they had to supply their own white-on-white cheer uniforms. We do learn the cheer leader is Charles Roberts, a junior from Wadley studying electrical engineering. He’s the guy in the middle.

Roberts worked at Georgia Power, where he was a vice president for a quarter century. He cheered on the Red Cross and the United Givers as chairman of the local fund drives. He’d been president of the Rotary, the chamber of commerce and the Georgia State Fair Association. When he died, at 67 in 1971, he had a son and daughter, and seven grandchildren. His wife died three years prior, almost to the day.

Here’s the captain of the basketball team, which earned a two-page spread. Bill McKinney was from Mobile. He was studying electrical engineering. The season was still underway when the Glom went to print. They finished 5-10, but were looking forward to better days. And the next few seasons were better.

McKinney came from a time before load management. We learn here that he’d played every minute in the last two seasons. He made it to 98, his time at the university and his four varsity letters, his time in ROTC, and his being a team captain are sentences three through seven in his 2003 obituary. But he was more than an Auburn Man — they for sure got that in his obit, as well they should. He was in the Rotary Club. He worked for the American Blower Corporation, which made industrial fans, for two decades. He started McKinney Associates in 1948 and, it says here, he never missed a day of work until he retired at 97.

One of the guys on the team is the great Euil “Snitz” Snyder. Streak was his college nickname for a time, and he came by it honest. He was a three-sport start, but it was the track where he shined. He held the American record for the 300 meter race for a time, at 48 seconds flat. He ran the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds. In two years he would become Auburn’s first Olympian. He would win a heat race in the 400 meters, but didn’t advance past the quarterfinals.

After school, Snyder coached football for 30 years. I grew up near a stadium named in his honor. The mayor said “Everyone didn’t love him — no man can claim that — but everyone respected him. Not many can claim that.” Wilbur Hutsell, who we met above, said “I never played for Snitz. I envy those more fortunate.” The newspaper wrote “He produced so many outstanding athletes for Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech that he was often accused of running a Tech training camp.” He trained at least three All-Americans and one football national champion. He won seven state football championships. His basketball team was a state runner-up. During World War II he ran a physical fitness program on a college campus. The Boston Celtics came to town and his team beat them. He died, at 72, in 1978.

This is Cecil Stewart, captain of the baseball team. The Glom says “his uncanny ability to wield the willow and handle the horsehide is sure to carry him to the top.” Those are both baseball references, though I had to look up the first one. Stewart played seven years of minor league ball as a second baseman. Soon after he hung up his spikes he got married. He and his wife, Catherine, started their lives in Dallas. Geechie, as he was known as a young man, died at 85, in 1988.

Here’s one more baseball shot. The guy on the right is Ben Sankey. They bragged about him here as a shortstop, and they weren’t wrong. He spent three years in the bigs, playing all around the Pittsburgh Pirates’ infield. He died in Georgia in 2001, at 94 years old.

Last one for the day, these are the track and field captains. I’m not sure what the Ts mean on the uniform. Leon Lavert “Nurmi” Nelson has them, but the whole team does not wear them. Nelson was also the vice president of his senior class, we learned about him, above.

The other guy is George Clifford Murrow. He ran cross country. He got a masters degree at Alabama. He became an educator, and then a principal, which was one of his job titles for 32 years. In the summers he worked as a funeral director. He retired in 1971. He died in 1988, survived by his wife, Ola May, and two daughters.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.


20
Aug 26

I strained my toe trying to think of a headline

I spent the day staring at my third class, a presentations class. It’s a great idea, this class. Students have to give presentations. It’s like public speaking, but all online, and you have to prepare and present accompanying slides. It’s not my class, in the sense that I didn’t build it. The person in charge of it is making great strides with dialing it in. I also didn’t have this class initially this term, but things change and merrily we will go through the semester, offering feedback and hoping it is helpful.

It’s useful for students who think they know everything there is to know about computers and using them in these most basic ways. (I should keep count of the technical problem complaints I receive. Some of them are hilarious.) Also, it is a terrifying class for people who have a fear of public speaking. This class substitutes for the public speaking course in everyone’s curriculum, which is nice. It is up to each person to make a choice of which they’d rather do.

I think the public speaking class would be easier for a couple of different reasons, but that’s just me.

When I took public speaking, we were pretty new into the idea that everyone should have the course. They were still explaining it thusly to students: The one thing all of the employers say when we survey them is that their new hires need to be better at giving presentations as in a work meeting or board room, and that’s why everyone must take this class. So, when I did it, we met a few times in this very large lecture hall and you spent most of the semester in a smaller room, a lab, with a grad student running the lab and 12 or 15 nervous people besides. There was, I remember, one guy that was unusual in our lab. He’d spent a career in the Army. He was a paratrooper. He’d just retired. His son was in school and he figured it’d be nice to go back to school with his kid, so here was this dad, this man who talked about how one time his chute failed and the only thing that saved his life was that, at the last second, he remembered his training. He talked about how his body was broken, and the depression he left in the earth when he hit the ground. I don’t recall how high up he said he was on this jump, but it sounded both plausible and unbelievable at the same time. But, you could take one look at that guy and know two things simultaneously: he’d been through some stuff, and he could beat you up if he needed to. Nice fella.

I can’t remember anything about the grad student that ran the class, which is unfortunate. I do remember after the first time we met that person I went downstairs to a payphone and called home. I did not wait to get back to my place. I said: send me that file filing system of all of my speeches. I’m going to use them in this class. And I did.

I think I finished with something like a 114 in that class.

So I’m not usual in that sense. Just hammy enough, just desperate enough to be perceived as credible, and I stumnbled and walked and bumbled through four years of public speaking with Douglas Caddell. I hung out with some of the best young speech-makers in the state, dated a state champion, and competed in just about every contest I could get into.

Anyway, that unusual lane in high school left me well prepared for a basic public speaking class, and was probably helpful, eventually, in broadcasting career.

The best thing about public speaking back in the dark ages was that we didn’t have to make presentations. There was no PowerPoint back then. Some rooms didn’t have power. My slides today are nothing great. I built and use a university-branded template, and try not to put too many words on the slides. What you put on your slides isn’t where the game is won, but it can be where the game is lost.

I can’t give all of the good advice away for free here. If you want to know more, enroll in my class.

This is what should be on all of my slides, I’m told. The cats say if they have a weekly check-in here they should be in every slide deck I make, too. Phoebe would make great points about any topic from her hammock.

She lately went through a kitteh noir period.

You can almost hear her thinking in hard-boiled cat detective narration.

“You tell some tall tales, kid. But my tail is taller. A cat’s greatest weapon, though, is a keen eye, and her greatest ally is the dark. That’s how I came to find your man, lingering in the shadows. He’s been singing to me for weeks. If he was any more of a rat he’d sprout whiskers and a tail, but his info’s always good and it brought me here, to you. And I know you’ve been thinking that while the cat’s away, the mice will play, but the cat’s back. Playtime’s over. Hands up. I can say it with a smile, sure, the smile is free of charge. You need a smile in my line of work. The smile says ‘hello’ while your trigger finger waves goodbye … ”

Poseidon is more of a chaos comedy fan. He’s been working on his Will Ferrell impression.

“Hey mom! The meatloaf! We want it now. The meatloaf! Ma, the meatloaf!”

A few days ago he changed up our mid-day routine. I have a little bite to eat and he waits patiently. Then, I grab a protein bar and a glass and sit in a corner in the living room. He waits patiently for this. As soon as I sit down he’s in motion, and then on my lap, or curled up beside me, or climbing up my chest for a snooze. But on this particular afternoon, he insisted I would not spend those few minutes reading.

And so I did not.

Storms blew through this evening. The forecast was for rush hour. They arrived at about 7 p.m. Weather forecasting, it ain’t what it used to be. That was a choice. Apparently there was a tornado to our west and a waterspout or tornado to our southeast. Here, it just rained. We had some lightening, but the wind never really picked up. It was an oddly timed thing, as the clouds on the back end of the system lingered, the sun started it’s regular dive to the horizon. This is the view from my office just now, looking off to the north-northwest.

And now I’ll get back to work. Because there is always work.


13
Aug 26

Commitment to topicality

I have now locked down the prep for one half of one of my classes. Unless I am forgetting something, every concept will be less than 50 years old and almost every example will be from the 21st century. It is this commitment to topicality for which I am known.

Doing this part of the work was fairly easy, owing to the class already being in place and some of the work I’ve already done to set up today’s effort. Easy enough that, maybe I should just go ahead and finish the thing right now.

Naaaaaaah.

OK, fine. You’ve convinced me. Be right back.

[…]

[Some two hours elapse]

I did it. I blame you, and appreciate the nudge, because of which my org comm class’ structural prep is now complete. Now I must simply refine the lectures which I’ll do as we move through the term, staying eight days ahead of the class, if I am lucky.

But that nudge, that guilt-tripping nudge, that rolling-your-eyes glare, has done the hardest thing to do this time of year: build momentum.

Now I must complete the work for two other courses. One of them has a To Do list with seven items (some of them still require some thought and decision-making on my part). But there’s always tomorrow, this weekend, and next week. The other class has one item on the To List. It reads: Everything. Tomorrow, this weekend, next week.

This morning I made the mistake of looking out a window. I was prepared, as I had prepared myself in sliding out of bed, readying myself to meet the day, and going downstairs, to look out of one of the kitchen windows to admire yesterday’s handiwork. Weeding was done. Two hours, much sweat, and still sore hands, but the weeding was done. And so I looked and realized that, in the patch directly below this window, I’d only concentrated on the truly obnoxious stuff. Where I should see a big patch of deep and rich browns and blacks, there are still some offending sprinkles of green undesirables.

Well, Saturday. Maybe Friday. Those two days we’ll only get up to about 87 degrees, if the forecast is anything which can be believed anymore. (Some days are more questionable than others, thanks to rank policy changes that will in no way impact us on a daily basis.) I will go back out there, do the shuffle-bend-and-squat, and pull up some more stuff. Also, I will deploy the weed eater to work around some of the features of the yard. We purchased a battery-powered trimmer last year. The guy said the battery would run about 45 minutes. I figured that, given a few experiments, I could figure out a way to get all of my trimming done in under 45 minutes. And, if not, that’s just a sign to go inside and rest charge up the battery anyway. If there’s one thing we all know about weeds, they are patiently persistent. No second expensive battery needed.

I figured I’d use it twice a year, but you know what? I’ve enjoyed breaking out the trimmer this year. Also, I have found it necessary. It is efficient, it works fast, and it helps.

I will also deploy the hedge trimmer. There’s one shrub in particular that has gotten out of control. I might also need to haul the ladder into the mix for this task. There’s nothing as safe as using electric-powered dual-action shearing blades while leaning well out from a six-foot rung on a ladder.

Guaranteed, doing that will take less time than the set up and tear down.

Trimming hedges is an oddly satisfying chore, perhaps because I’ve never hurt myself on the thing. Bringing something into a desired shape is fun. Removing the cuttings are less so. For may years I have used the tarp-as-drop-cloth technique, where you tried to land most of the branches and leaves on the tarp and then pour them into a yard bag. Earlier this year I tried landing them into an oversized plastic bin. That worked somewhat. The cleanup depends on the type of shrub, and that should absolutely figure into your next shrubbery purchase: How much of a problem is this going to be next year? Species, I’ve got thoughts on all of ’em.

We watched Thunderbolts last night. Did it the old fashioned way, turned out all the lights and peered into a TV screen that doesn’t show blacks very well and wondered why so many movies have dark scenes. (I’m pretty sure it is a budget-saving, drama-heightening concept.) This was a deliberately unbalanced movie. Delightful in places. Halting and evocative of “What Dreams May Come” in other places. All of that fits in with the overarching theme. It suffers, however, in the antagonist area. Any action movie that needs an abstraction as an antagonist is going to have a struggle.

From IMDB:

The fifth lowest-grossing MCU film worldwide, after The Marvels (2023), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and Black Widow (2021). These are the only five MCU films to gross under $400 million worldwide.

The web tells me today, because I looked it up, that a sequel is in the works. The Marvels is an overlooked film. (Iman Vellani is brilliant.) Of course, you can’t have much of what follows (this was the 32nd movie in the MCU) without a long bet on the supposedly underperforming Captain America. The movie business is a weird business like that.

Then again, they’re just following the music business, which is even more demanding with its bottom line repercussions. This is not a new realization, of course, but you can be reminded of it with literally any followup album or musician’s story. And, as luck would have it, we watched the first installment of the two-part Billy Joel documentary this evening.

Imagine having a guy under contract that had produced The Piano Man and not being certain, for six more years, that you had a hit maker on your hands. That’s the record business. Seems obvious in retrospect, but the first half of this documentary has been “I do stupid stuff a lot, my childhood, my early career … and finally we all realized I was a star.”

So we saw the first 15 years of the five-album overnight success in part one. We’ll meet Christie Brinkley in part two, I’m sure.

Two years ago we saw Joel’s 101st concert at Madison Square Garden. (She was there, too.) The year prior he announced that he would end that historic run on his 104th show. And so my thought was that this was an important opportunity to see an event, one of the last few remaining. It was a happening that broke out into a pretty great show.

We sat way up high, well off to the side, and had a great time watching him mug for the camera.

Appreciating longevity is the gift of the moment. No one listening to “You May Be Right” and “It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me” in 1980 would have counted on concluding an MSG run 45 years later. (They’d only just discovered nostalgia in 1972, after all.) We’ve all been a part of a different kind of topical commitment, really.


6
Aug 26

You know, those kinds of days

You know how, some days, you get a lot of work done? Yesterday wasn’t one of those days. You know how, though, on some days, you get some stuff done and you figure it’ll pay off later on? Maybe yesterday was one of those days. You know how, some days, you just wind up cleaning things instead of doing work. Yesterday was one of those days.

You know how, sometimes, you think “I am going to do this chore tomorrow,” and you go to bed feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting yourself on the back for the work you’re going to do tomorrow, but then you don’t really feel the same way about that the next day?

Just me? OK then.

Yesterday I cleaned my desk, which was threatening to encircle and collapse upon me. A few small things got thrown away. Momentum builders, I thought, with a handful of short runs to toss things into a garbage can. Also, I had some cords and cables which have been vexxing me. Vexxing me, I say. I am vexxed. Two Xs. Or, I have been. Now some of them are out of site, and I am merely vexed.

Also, I cleaned my phone off, which desperately needed some attention, moving some videos to an external drive gave me almost 40 GB of space back. Now my phone feels lighter, somehow?

While those files were transferring, and while I was moving cables, I cleaned beneath part of my desk, too. Beneath my desk is a tennis ball, which I bat around with the cats occasionally, and a stool I made in a 7th grade shop class. I wonder if any of my old classmates still have theirs.

We also had some weather, which turned into threats of threatening weather, which turned into another realization that we’ve done terrible damage to our weather forecasting abilities in the last 20 months. Meanwhile, we had our first generator test yesterday. It fired up and ran for five minutes and then turned itself off, exactly as intended. You can hear it in the house. It isn’t overbearing, but you know it is running. Given the number of lawn mowers and leaf blowers we have around us, it’ll blend in soon enough.

By the time all of that was done, and I was ready to work, it was time to knock off for the day. So I did. Tomorrow, then, I thought to myself, feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting myself on the back for work I’ll be doing tomorrow. Tomorrow was today. Those pats were unearned.

I had a meeting scheduled this morning, my first official work thing of the new school year, but it was canceled and will be rescheduled for September. I like how this is starting off.

Anyway, let’s return to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the regular check in with the kitties.

Despite the cleaning, I can never get ride of this box. It has been claimed by the management of this domicile. (Though we do need to hang the cool thing that is inside the box. Let me add that back to the list …)

There’s a ledge on our stairs, and I love it when the cats remember it is there. This week it has been a spot for Phoebe.

Last night my lovely bride moved an empty laundry basket, just so it wouldn’t be underfoot. This simple effort stirred Poseidon and brought him across the room to inspect the procedure. The baskets are his, I guess. Especially when they have laundry in them.

Those towels were fresh out of the dryer, so you can understand. (As I write this he is sitting in my closet, on a pile of clothes. They, too, were clean before he found them. I found this out because I was doing laundry at the time.) So he likes clothes.

But he also enjoys his private time, in his cabinet above the refrigerator.

And, yes, I leave a cabinet empty for the cat. I also put a blanket in there so he could be cozy. He sits there, happy as can be, of his own choice or if we are trying to keep him away from dinner.

So the cats are doing just fine, as you can tell. Except Phoebe needs a belly rub right now. I’ll do that, and pat myself on the back, feeling enthusiastic about the effort.

We return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It is such a terrific book and I can’t encourage you enough to get this if you haven’t already. I am into 1778 now and am trying to decide if I want to read more and faster, because it is such a nice read, or if I want to slow down because I’m through the halfway point and I’d like to delay the inevitable end. It’s the kind of book.

Anyway, the Carlisle Peace Commission has landed, and the British are packing up to leave Philadelphia and this one little tidbit gets back to that idea of public sentiment, which, somewhere in 1777, shifted rather demonstrably. And go figure. War at home, difficulties on the domestic economic front, the occasional story or propaganda about a slaughter here or a massacre there. By the time these guys showed up, the only real peace overtures that Lord North and King George offered in the revolution) everyone had picked a side. You were almost certainly a patriot ready for independence or you were strictly a loyalist and, at this point, you might be considering Canada, the islands, or the jolly ol’ isle as a better alternative. Opinions and jaws were set.

In part that’s why the British were leaving Philadelphia. There are a lot of tactical considerations, but everyone that knew what they were looking at and could see it clearly seems to have realized there were difficult days ahead for the redcoats. So it was back to New York. Several thousand loyalists and deserters would take the trek, too. The women and children by see, the rest overland. It was a huge logistical move.

Let’s look at some of the people involved here. Joseph Reed was born into a family of means. He studied law. He becomes a founding father, a soldier, an aide-de-camp to Washington. At one point he was accused of treason in the press. He was also big into Pennsylvania politics, of course. (Those two things are not related.) He was due to be returned to the congress, but his health betrayed him. He died at just 43 years old.

William Henry Drayton gives us that amazing quote. He was a founding father from South Carolina, not to be confused with the later Congressman William Drayton (no Henry as a middle name) who would have been a toddler toddler at the time of the Peace Commission. (The Draytons were cousins.) William Henry Drayton, an ambitious rice plantation owner of South Carolina was a big voice in the lowcountry politics of his time. He gets overlooked a lot, but he was one of the people who thought Independence Day should be marked with fireworks. He also commanded a frigate, served as a judge, wrote part of Carolina’s 1778 constitution and was in the Continental Congress from 1778 until his death the next year at just 37 years old. He was a polemicist, a bomb thrower, and a big, loud, quarrelsome part of that body, which might help explain the attitude that came with that message to Carlisle.

Carlisle is Frederick Howard, the 5th Earl of Carlisle. He ran that particular effort, which found itself ill-informed, ill-timed, and ultimately critical of how the British government was handling this whole thing. And here we can get into the dangerous waters of trying to understand the many attitudes of people who’ve come long before us. But let us just stay general enough and say that King George and his prime minister, Lord North, had their critics at home. While the king was more or less insulated from that, it did exist in some considerable sort of which. For our purposes, it was loud enough to be remembered 250 years later. The British opposition saw France gearing up and worried about the French allies, Spain. The problem with a big empire and a big government is a lot of voices and a lot of needs and a lot of people pulling in different directions and what is a king to do? Well, we’ll send these three guys to try to patch things up.

Dear reader, I hope this does not come as a surprise to you, but they were unsuccessful in those efforts. This reconciliation offering was somewhat comparable to where the colonies started the process, but on this side of the ocean that was now off the table.

Howard was a British statesman, diplomat and author. When this little job failed, he wasn’t blamed, though he thought. In fact, he was made the viceroyalty of Ireland, but that might not have been the most plum assignment given larger global events. William Eden was there, too, a high ranking cabinet member, a member of parliament, a spymaster. Joining them was Commodore George Johnstone, a naval officer who had also served during the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. He was a politician, a member of parliament, a director of the East India Company, and he’d previously been the governor of West Florida from 1763 until 1767. It was Johnstone who was rumored to be offering bribes. Despite these three men, and the British Royal Navy behind them, and the rumors of bribes and whatever else, they could not succeed. They appealed to Congress, but were rebuffed. They appealed to the people, with no more luck.

Some historians point out the value in what the Carlisle Commission was bringing to the peace table, while others have focused on the idea that turning the Congress turning them away was the last obstacle to realizing the American project, even if, as others have argued, Howard, Eden and Johnstone had very little chance of success, as they seemed to think themselves. Perhaps, as some have argued, they were sent, and arrived, too late, to have any real material impact. Soon after, the British efforts in North America ground to a halt for months and the revolutionaries had to interpret that as best they can, perhaps they were leaving, distracted, or done.

Or perhaps, as Andrey Kuchkovskiy wrote in studying the commissioners themselves:

The Carlisle Peace Commission suffered from poor timing and a lack of political and military support. While the public supported their efforts, the officials initially did not, and by the end of their time in the colonies, even the commissioners expressed doubt about achieving peace. Additionally, the expansion of the war after France allied with
the Americans dramatically undercut the commissioners’ efforts. Had the commissioners remained in the colonies to pursue peace, or potentially renewed their conciliatory efforts with a new commission, they could have arguably achieved a possible agreement …

They arrived in the early summer, they departed in early fall. The French were sailing for Boston. The war would continue.

And so does this book. It’s terrific!