Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

Just 83 years ago …

I have next to nothing today, but there’s always the weather! Before I woke up, some rodent had doomed us to more winter. The high here today was 39 degrees. The low was 19. It was sunny.

Why is it that some creature elsewhere determines my weather? Don’t I have any agency here? Of course, I don’t. The weather is a part of a global meteorological system barely within our understanding, and certainly beyond my control. But, really, the lack of agency is galling. Not me, but some critter that’d just as soon stay in his hole, honestly.

I know how he feels. As soon as I read about the shadow, I wanted to climb into a hole, or at least back into the blankets.

Groundhogs. What a silly, successful bit of marketing. We persist in this because it is fun, right?

And also tourism.

We haven’t looked back at the old college paper in a month. When last we had a look, we poked around in 1929. We’re jumping forward a bit today, to 1940. On this day, 82 years ago, there was a new committee that was formed to think about cheating. I wonder what they thought.

Oddly enough, this guy was on the same front page. R. Temple Greystoke was a man named Ray Price.

He started in the magic business in 1921, and can’t you imagine that was a challenging lifestyle. It begain with kids shows, a dog act and he eventually developed what is called a Spook Show, and became a famous and popular act through the 1930s. Soon after he played at Auburn he returned to a more conventional stage show. He moved home to Alabama when his health began to fail him in 1955. He passed away in 1973.

Dawson Mullen here, he was a BMOC. He was an electrical engineering manager, honor society member, he was on the mysterious leadership council of his time, president of something called the engineer’s council, colonel in the ROTC, captain of the rifle team. And, in this same issue, we learned he was on that cheating committee.

I’ll have to look ahead and see what, if anything, that august panel resolved. Anyway, Mullen, I believe, found his way to Georgia. If I have the right one, he died in 2001. There’s not a lot on him, however.

This bit of copy is a hoot.

The building being referenced here is, I assume, the Auburn Sports Arena. We called it The Barn. It housed basketball starting in 1946. Likely a project put on hold during the war?) The basketball team moved one block over in 1968. The Barn was right across the street from the football stadium. It housed the gymnastics team, it was old and scheduled for demolition. And then it burned to the ground during the LSU football game in 1996. (A different, better, story.) There’s a parking deck in that spot now.

We like to think of the 1940s as being a fully modern time and, in many respects, it was. They were still trying to get driveways paved and sidewalks pour on campus. The depression, in-state politics, and subsequent decades of inattention were just starting to be remedied.

Scandal! Bottom of page one! Oh … never mind.

Grady Young graduated from Georgia and then studied to be a vet, like his father before him. He had three kids and seven grandchildren, and he ran Young’s Veterinary Clinic in Georgia for 42 years before his retirement. He died in 2021, at 82.

Here’s a man that made an impression, and you get the feeling the multi-sport coach (they all coached more than one thing back then) was well liked and would be missed.

Dell Morgan died in a car accident, in Texas, in 1962. He’d spent the day watching his Rice players practice, and was headed out to go fishing with a buddy when another car crossed the center line. Four people were killed.

(I wonder if that tweed jacket ever turned up. That’s one of those mysteries that will stick with you the rest of the week.)

I love the old phone numbers. Dial 611 for flowers. Cracks me up. I don’t know anything about the florist. This isn’t the sort of history anyone on the Plains is good at making readily available, and contemporary florists using SEO has basically ruined any searches of this sort. H. L. Welsted, based on the ads, was around for at least four years, but, again, he falls in the analog canyon, but he is interred in Virgina. He passed away in 1961. The Welsteds had two children, Harry Lee, junior, and Mittie, who had just graduated from AU the year before. Harry the younger became a chemical engineer, and worked in New York and Charlotte. He passed away in 2010. Mittie studied dietetics, got married and died in 2002.

Here are the Welsted kids, from the 1939 Glom. They had long, and hopefully, full and complete lives.

Their parents ran a boarding house. Moved to Auburn and set that up, specifically, so the kids could get an education. That’s what Harry Lee Welsted’s obituary said. And while I learned one or two more things about the Welsteds, but not many, it is important that we don’t stray too far afield. Because that image above is really about the Grille.

I remember the Grille. Dined in it, frequently. One night a week they did a spaghetti plate dinner. If you finished it, they’d give you a second plate free. You could get in there, stuff yourself with two plates of spaghetti, a soft drink and a brownie for about five bucks, and that was one of the better, cheap meals in town. The walls were covered in local lore and history. And in that one particular booth is where the legendary football coach sat.

And then the rent got too high, and the Grille closed in the late 1990s and it still feels like one of the saddest things that could possibly happen in a place like that. We kicked ourselves that we didn’t eat there more — maybe we could have helped save it — but we are all starving and broke college kids and downtown was changing. Downtown was always changing, every so often.

My time was more than a half-century latter, of course, but I don’t have any knowledge of these places, either. Ball’s Bakery was in the neighboring town, but clearly everyone knew of it.

They stayed in business through the mid-1950s. Reed’s? Absolutely no idea. But with a “stay out of the cold” you have to think they had their moments. Winter moments.

The Martin Theatre was still relatively new. It opened in Opelika in 1938, with 1,600 seats, and lasted until 1970 or so. Martin replaced it with one in the strip mall. That joint was the barely-hanging-on dollar theater a quarter century later. I remember watching a few movies there.

The movie they were showing? Wonderful pre-war propaganda. The film highlights the real (and dramatized) exploits of a New York unit during World War 1. Also, the picture was just released the week before. In a time when movies weren’t in theaters everywhere simultaneously, it is amazing that this was on a screen in little Opelika, Alabama, six days later.

The Martin must have truly been the place to go.

Olin Hill? The man with the tape? He’s buried in nearby Notasulga. The headline in the (Mobile) Press-Register obituary was “Auburn clothier Hill dies.” Imagine all the things he saw from 1907 until 2003.

memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
26
Jan 23

The color fits, see

I had a meeting this morning, and there were doughnuts. The doughnuts were from a craft bakery, which means they put non-traditional toppings on them so they can charge you 36 bucks for a dozen. Also, they seem to be croissants covered in non-traditional toppings. Tasty, sticks with you throughout the day. Makes you think of doughnuts all day. They also ensure you don’t need to eat anything else all day.

The rest of the day was the rest of the day. A few meetings here and there. A lot of emailing and some phone calls. The usual stuff. And then into the studio in the evening. The late night host was interviewing an expert on M&Ms. As a part of the bit, she was doing so in an awkward British accent. The expert was not actually an expert. But she new many things about the hard-shelled candy, despite not being old enough to have spent 33 years researching them. Also, some of the information might not have been perfectly accurate. Wikipedia might need some updating.

Very usual stuff.

Here’s a photo from Wednesday I forgot to share. I like this one. A monochromatic skylight seems just right for the moment, somehow.

Three long days in a row. Just a regular 8-hour day tomorrow. It’ll feel like a half-day, I’m sure.

That recent weather has meant slower driving. My commute — a normally mysterious 20-minute, 4.5 mile adventure — has been longer. I guess that’s why I’m working through discs in the Re-Listening project so quickly in the last few days. So we return once more to revisit old music. I’m playing all the old discs, in the order that I picked them up.

Did you know I have some photographs in the Museum of Alabama. I used to, anyway. It’s been a long time. I’m sure they’ve been archived and warehoused or destroyed by now.

In the summer of 1997 I was commissioned to drive around much of Alabama and photograph the old covered bridges. I think they were doing a series of these in different seasons, and also some paintings. But traipsing through woods and creeks in the heat of an Alabama summer seemed like the perfect job for a college student, and someone knew me and that’s how I got the job.

I drove over a third or more of the state listening to Tigerlily. It came out in 1995, went platinum five times in the United States and peaked at 13 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Somewhere in late 1996 or early 1997 I bought it. Probably as a bulk deal, but when I got around to listening to it, I listened to it a lot.

The record starts like this.

There’s a lot of interesting texture in this record. There’s a moment in this song, a lament of losing a lifelong spouse, where Merchant’s voice breaks. It’s a syllable, and it is so impactful I remember it years on. I know it is coming. It gets me every time.

She didn’t sing it that way live. On a subsequent re-release (with new instrumentation) it isn’t there, and the song, a powerful ballad, is lesser for it.

Or, if you prefer a different kind of mood.

Music is a funny thing, and if I look at the five or 10 CDs on either side of this one in my collection, it is pretty obvious I wasn’t ready for Natalie Merchant in 1997. But I should say that about a lot of things and 1997 me. Driving on country roads on dirty, sweaty days, listening to this CD spin was a good thing, and a lot of fun. Ready or not.

Wikipedia tells me Natalie Merchant is teaching arts and crafts to kids these days. She has a new record due out in April. Maybe I’ll be ready.

And that’s enough for today. Don’t worry, there will be more tomorrow including, incredibly, another CD in the Re-Listening project.

adventures / cycling / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
19
Jan 23

Standard issue sort of Thursday

Remember, way back when, on the day before yesterday, we touched on the mid-50s weather and blue skies. That was an outlier. Since then, it has looked like this, with variations of wind, rain, flurries and cold.

There was sun in the forecast today, but it was not to be. Give it this, though, late in the day there were at least low clouds, creating some sense of distinctiveness to the sky. Usually it is just … gray.

Ninety-three days until spring arrives.

The day wad full of email. Want to hear about that? I had several running conversations via email. Some of them quite enlightening. Others required multiple drafts, just to get the tone right. The highlight of the day, probably the week, was that The Yankee came by and sat in my office for lunch and typed up notes for her next meeting. An extra hour with the best company on campus. Sure, her office is one floor above mine — directly above it, in fact — but she spent the time with me instead.

I rode 22 miles this evening. At first there were technical difficulties with the Bluetooth. We have two smart trainers. Sometimes, when we’re using them both, they aren’t so smart.

She was doing a precise and measured watts exercise, see, and I wanted to go fast. And between the computer, the iPad and the two Bluetooth connections to the trainers, she went fast and, for the first half of my workout, I went slow. At least I got to see a (virtual) sunset.

When The Yankee finished her workout I continued for another 12 miles before dinner. Still slow. So maybe it was just me, after all. Seems odd, really. I realized last night that I ~~was due a ride~~ really wanted to ride my bike. I hadn’t turned a pedal since Monday. Explains why my legs felt so light and airy yesterday and today — ready to conquer anything! And then, tonight, *comical deflating sound.*

But a slow hour on the trainer is still an hour on the bike.

cycling / Mastodon / movies / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
12
Jan 23

Am assured we’ll maybe see some sunshine this weekend

We had the fog earlier, the snow tomorrow, the rain today. This was the view looking back up the street. I had to wait several seconds to get a shot with the road empty. And then I waited for this guy trudging up the street. You wonder where he’s going, and how he feels about it in the rain. But you only wonder for a moment, because he’s blurry and still something of an abstraction.

You’d think more on it if you could make out details of him and his trudge.

The composition, then, was entirely a choice.

Anyway, I like the way raindrops sit on glass. They both emphasize and distract from what’s going on in their background.

Did a quick bike ride this evening, just ticking off stages on Zwift. (Twenty down, 101 to go.) There’s no point to this, other than to do it, which is the point of everything.

I’m presently working on two cycling goals, both integral to waiting out the winter and rainy weather.

I have made a spreadsheet, you see, to chart my bike riding progress this year. It shows that I am, right now, well ahead of my daily projections, which is to be expected, frankly. It’ll only be later in the year when the daily trendlines become a challenge.

The other challenge will be in riding all of those Zwift stages. The ones I ticked off the list tonight were the first ones with slight climbs in them. They’ll only get longer, and more challenging from here.

Easy night, otherwise. Just trying to glide into the weekend. There’s only Friday to go!

And I will see you then. Until then, check out my Mastodon count. There’s always something useful there. For example …

Auburn / history / memories / Thursday — Comments Off
5
Jan 23

Filled with 1929 history

Feeling better today, thanks. Dinner, sleep, a light snack for breakfast and some lunch made it everything better. Still a bit fatigued, for some reason I can’t explain, but that’s made the decision for me. Taking it easy today, going to bed early.

The highlight, then, was … laundry. Wow. Can someone punch that up in re-write? (No. — ed.)

We haven’t looked at an old newspaper in a while. (OK, it has been almost a month.) Let’s go back to campus and read the alma mater’s classic rag.

This is from 94 years ago, January, 6, 1929. (I wrote for this same publication many decades later.) These guys have no ideas what’s coming for them the next fall, and I don’t mean the 1929 football season, which would prove dreadful in its own right.

The lead story is to the right, and it goes with this art, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the page, “Thousands greet opening new radio station WAPI.”

I worked at WAPI after college. I was proud to be on that air. It is the direct descendant of WMAV, which is the fourth oldest radio station in Alabama. (Alabama Power launched it, when they got out of the entertainment business, well, that time, they donated the gear to Auburn, which was Alabama Polytechnic Institute, hence WAPI. When it went back up to Birmingham in 1929 the station was co-owned by Auburn, the University of Alabama and the Alabama College for Women — now the University of Alabama. New owners bought it in the 1930s, and they launched the state’s first television station, the modern NBC affiliate in Birmingham, in 1949. Soon after, the company that owns the newspaper, another company I worked for, purchased the broadcast properties.) Today, WAPI is still the most powerful transmitter in that state, and it started right here.

Auburn’s new, powerful radio station WAPI went on the air New Year’s Eve from the studios in Birmingham with its formal opening program, which was heard by thousands of listeners throughout Alabama and the nation. Telegrams and telephone calls from 21 states began to pour in immediately after the new station took the air at eight o’clock, with a magnificent program lasting until four o’clock the next morning. The number of calls and messages amounted to over 900 before the station’s second program was presented.

Promptly at 7:55 KVOO at Tulsa, the station with which WAPI divides time on the same wave length, made an announcement that the air was being turned over to WAPI, and promptly at 8 p. m. the Boy’s Industrial Band of Birmingham opened the program with bugle calls and “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Addresses were made by Gov. Bibb Graves, J. M. Jones, president of the Birmingham city commission; President Bradford Knapp; Dr. L. N. Duncan, director of the extension service, Victor H. Hanson, publisher of the Birmingham News and Age-Herald; Sam F. Claxbaugh, president of the Protective Life Insurance Company; P. O. Davis, director Department of Public Information, and H. C. Smith of the Department of Agriculture at Montgomery.

Three guest radio announcers assisted Walter N. Campbell, manager, and W .A. “Bill” Young, assistant manager, in staging the huge opening program. The visiting announcers were George Dewey Hay, “the solemn old judge” from WSM, of Nashville; G. C. Arnoux, “the man with the musical voice,” of KTHS, Hot Springs, Ark.; Luke Lee Roberts, of WLAC, Nashville, and J. C. “Dud” Connelly of WBRC, Birmingham.

Through the new station, which is among the most powerful of any in the South, Auburn’s influence and instruction may be carried to thousands upon thousands of homes in every section of the State and the South. Reception reports from programs already broadcast indicate that WAPI may be heard clearly in every portion of Alabama. No college in the land has more desirable facilities.

With the abundance of talent available in the city of Birmingham, programs of the highest type will be given over WAPI.

The installation job complete is said to be one of the best and most modern. The power is 5,000 watts. With recent improvements in broadcasting apparatus the actual signal strength is said to be at least ten times as powerful as the old 1,000-watt station at Auburn which was discontinued and sold.

The new station occupies the entire 14th floor of the Protective Life Insurance Company building. Three studios, a control room, reception room, and office space are included. The outlay is ideal and up-to-date for radio purposes.

The transmitter—or broadcasting apparatus—is located seven miles from the downtown district of Birmingham. It is on a mountain overlooking the village of Sandusky, which is on the Bankhead highway between Birmingham and Jasper. A building 32 by 48 feet houses the transmitter and other apparatus. Only the input equipment is located at the studios in the Protective Life Building. At an early date regular broadcasting from Montgomery and Auburn will begin. It will be done by remote control. Modern studios and modern input equipment, are being installed at the state capital in Montgomery. It is in the building occupied by the department of agricultural industries. At Auburn the old studio in Comer Hall will be used.

Comer Hall, home of the College of Agriculture, was one of my main buildings in undergrad. I was on WAPI’s air for about a year, and later worked for the newspaper company that (from 1953 to 1981) owned the station. One of the hosts on the debut programming was from WBRC, which is where The Yankee worked when we met. I’ve been on the air in all of the other markets mentioned here, I think. Broadcasting is full of small world callbacks.

If you look at that photo again, the round microphones were an innovation just a year or so before. The shape and the innards did a lot to remove vocal disruption and clean up the transmitted signal. It looks old to us, of course, but this stuff was top-end.

Similarly, this little story puts the lie to the black-and-white images we sometimes get of history. Or maybe that’s just me.

Blakey was from Birmingham, he was senior, studying architecture. Marty was a junior, and he was also studying architecture. Renneker would become a named partner in an architectural firm, and there’s a scholarship in his name today.

Bill Streit lettered in three sports in college. Made sense that he’d work in athletics professionally, and he made a great career of it.

Streit also officiated track and field meets, managed the U.S. Olympic track team in Paris (1924), Amsterdam (1928), Los Angeles (1932) and Berlin (1936). In ’24 he was also the chairman U.S. Olympic wrestling committee — they won four golds. He also did a bunch of other big time things, maybe the Rose Bowl was just for fun. He became a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Olympics from 1948 to 1952. He’s a 1971 inductee into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.

Here’s that Rose Bowl, which is famous for a guy returning a fumble the wrong direction. Streit is in here, somewhere.

And in the 1950s, Streit was the subject of a nice little speech in Congress.

Back on campus, there had been another flu endemic. The local government briefly shut things down as a precautionary measure.

After that small stretch, when the numbers seemed to be easing up, life got back to 1929 normal.

There was this column inside the paper, filled with some prosaic advice. But the remarkable thing is the tone. It is written so matter-of-factly: wash your hands; well, obviously masks work; oh, and stay away from others if you are sick. They knew this back then. Why is some of it contentious for their great-great-great grandchildren?

I know the answer, and you do, too.

Again, 1929. People seeing the first talkie had a better grasp of common understandings of medicine than some of our peers do today. Weird.

Back then, the college kids had to drive across the state line, to Columbus, to see this picture. You can watch it, right now, on your computer or phone.

So glad they resolved all of this in 1929, so it wouldn’t crop up every few years as a silly political debate. This saved us so much time and energy, when you think about it.

No idea what becomes of Benjamin Provost. I halfway suspect it is a nom de plume.

This cartoon is supposed to be funny. Maybe the joke gets lost down through the generations.

I get to the “dog with the plush ears” line and get distracted, thinking of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s dogs playing poker (1894) painting.

One more radio tidbit. If you look at that WAPI copy again, you see where the station was sharing 1140 on the AM dial with KVOO. (That persisted until 1942.) Both sets of call letters are on the FM dial today. WAPI is talk. KVOO, the Tulsa, Oklahoma station, is today a country heritage format. And their morning show is co-hosted by Tige Daniel. I did a morning show with him in college.