We are once again jumping in the time machine, heading back 90 years, to see what the ol’ alma mater was like in 1936. (Part one is here.) By that, of course, I mean the people as much as anything. It was an exciting young time for a bunch of young people in the middle of the Great Depression. There’s was a different world — but some of this does look familiar.
I’m flipping through, avoiding most of the posed photographs in favor of the more interesting images and names that jump out me. This is hardly a complete look, but there’s a lot to find in 1936. Let’s see what is inside.
In the senior class we have 336 students featured. Standard headshots. The text includes their name, their hometowns, their majors and some of their extracurricular activities. In the margins, we get some vertical photos of some of the student leaders. Those are the photos we’ll look at today. The pictures include a little too much negative space, because the people who designed this 90-year-old yearbook didn’t consider the format I’d be using on this site generations later. We’ll meet the editor in a bit, below. I’m sure his photo will be chagrined about the lack of foresight overlooking my eventual needs. We’ll muddle through it, though, because the format matters little, the photos a bit more, and their stories matter most of all.
But, first, here’s the cover.
First let’s meet Woodrow Barnes. He was from just up the road in Alexander City, but today’s 40-minute commute wouldn’t have been as easy for the business major in his days. They called him “Country.” We should call him the honorable Woodrow Barnes. He was with an artillery unit in North Africa and Europe during the war, and returned to civilian life as a a major. He served three terms as sheriff before becoming a probate judge in his childhood home county. He got the job for a second six-year term. Then, one day in 1972, he developed chest pains while working. A few days later, he died at just 58. He was survived by his wife (who finished his term on the bench), two sons and a grandson.
His wife, Melba Peters Barnes, was also an Auburn grad, and a teacher and court reporter. (She’s a few years younger than Country, but she’s not in this Glom. She took those six months of on-the-bench experience and a Democratic party nod and won her own election for the position, by a 3-1 margin to fill the final four years of her husband’s second term. She was the first female judge in the county, and the papers started using her name, not her husband’s name. She won a second term of her own in 1976. And then she had a heart attack in 1979. She died at 62.
Claes Albert George Blomquist, Jr. was from Savannah, Georgia. He was studying mechanical engineering, and continued his studies in the graduate program at the University of Georgia. Al, as he would be known in later years, was in the Army Corps of Engineers, becoming a colonel before spending a long civilian career with Monsanto in Alabama and then Chemstrand, in Florida and South Carolina.
Blomquist lost his first wife pretty young, and his second wife much later in life. Then, when he turned 89, he married his college sweetheart, Doris. They had about eight years together before she passed. Al Blomquist made it to 102, dying in 2016. He was survived by three children, eight-grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. I hope he talked about his old college days a lot, but I hope those later years were full of great memories, too.
Blake Campbell looks straight out of central casting for one of those “When will my wife finally learn to buy the right coffee?” ads that typified the middle of the century. He got married in 1941. Served during the war. They had their first kid in 1945. That first daughter would follow him to Auburn a generation later. She got married in the mid-60s, the younger daughter soon after. There’s nothing in the newspapers beyond the engagement and the wedding mentions until he passes away at 65 in 1976.
Hardie Deer was from south Alabama and studying chemical engineering. His first name was John, but Hardie is better. If I rattled off all of the things he did in college you’d think he was a young man going places. He’d become a successful Chicago industrialist. He retired young to Louisiana. The governor of that state tabbed him to run the Louisiana Sovereignty Commission, which was empowered to combat desegregation in that state. (I was going to run across one of these guys, eventually. Probably I’ve seen several, but none that had it listed in their obituaries like this one.) When he left that job he bought a motel in Louisiana. He died there, at 54, in 1965. He was survived by his wife and two children.
Helen Franke was a local girl. But not really. She was born at Corregidor, Philippines. If you’ve been paying attention, her name will seem familiar. Her father had previously commanded the ROTC unit on campus. He was an artilleryman and had the honor of commanding the first American unit to fire on German forces in World War I. She was studying business. A few years after this Helen was living with her parents in Panama.
Her headshot is a better photo. She got married at some point. She shows up in one society page mention in the 1950s with both her married and maiden names. At some point she moved to Maryland. She volunteered with the Red Cross. When she died in 1992, aged 77, she was survived by four children, 11 grandkids and one great-grandchild.
This man’s name was apparently Philip Philips Gilchrist. He’s from a small town you’ve never heard of. A place so small, some 400 people lived there back then and just a few more today, that I used to drive through it all the time and I had to look it up just now to be sure. If you took away the airport the town would lose half its landmass. He was studying chemistry. He was from a long line of Philip Philips, it seems, and a lot of them are buried right there in that same town. Our man, however, broke the mold.
He attended Tulane Medical, became a doctor and stayed down on the Gulf, in Mobile. He was an ENT doctor, president of the local medical society, a leader in his church. He was on the state board that oversaw the docks, and also served on the board of Home Savings and Loan. He died in 2004, at 90, survived by this wife, three children and two grandchildren.
B.D. is Bryghte Davis Godbold. He was from Selma, and studying electrical engineering. If he looks like the most squared away college student you’ve ever seen, well, you might not be far off.
Godbold graduated with honors and then headed into the Marines. He was in command an antiaircraft battalion at Wake Island in December, 1941. He was captured and held by the Japanese as a POW until 1945. His men mined coal, their officers gardened, with the crops feeding them all. He later received the Legion of Merit for his service at Wake. He was tasked with modernizing the Marine Corps personnel system, and he turned to computers, their first such use in the military. He was trying to figure out their best use when Korea broke out.
He served in Korea in the 1st Marine Division and helped planned the landings at Inchon and fought at the Chosin Reservoir, earning another Legion of Merit award. He retired while in command of the 4th Marine Regiment in Hawaii, putting his uniform away as a brigadier general to start 1958. He went back to school, became the assistant chancellor of NYU, got a doctorate in higher ed. He went to Purdue in 1960 and developed something called the airborne distance education program, which used TV transmitters in aircraft to send signals, because we didn’t have satellites yet. He served as a vice president at what is now the University of Texas at Dallas. After Kennedy was assassinated, Dallas turned to Godbold to run a “Goals for Dallas” rehab program to shape the future. There, he helped start the Dallas International Airport, a new city hall, the city-wide library, and venues for the symphony and art. He was still active locally, and nationally, into the 1980s. Also, everyone was very proud of his berry garden in the backyard. He died at 99, in Dallas, in 2013. The fourth word in his obituary was “service.” Never was the word better placed.
Then we meet Alton Graves, who ran this book. He was from a small town that sat in a valley in the northeast corner of the state, and was studying landscape architecture. He’s another one that died shockingly young.
He was just a week shy of 30 when he passed away in Asheville, N.C., where he’d lived for a few years. The newspaper there said he’d had a long illness. He was married and his parents survived him. He had lived for a time in Birmingham, and that’s where they buried him.
Herman Harris was a business student, and another BMOC. He, too, would become a brigadier general, but of the Air Force. He served in the reserves until retiring in 1971. He was an auditor and inspector for General Motors, ran small businesses in south Alabama and a good-sized farm.
Starting in 1963, he ran a hospital, which is where he died, age 59, in 1974. He’d also run the local Little League, been president of the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary, the Red Cross and Community Chest. He was survived by his wife and three adult children.
Listen here, see, now and again you see a guy what comes straight out of central casting. No jake, smoe people are just so cosmopolitan-like, that they oughta be in pictures. And Harry Hooper here, he’s da man wit’ da hat, he could be a minor league henchman in a Dick Tracy picture, see. Oh, he thinks he’s a tough, but he’s the guy that gets it in the first act to establish our heroes bona fides. Tough enough for Dick, sure, but not too tough for da bullet.
Only that’s not Harry Hooper at all. He was born in Selma, became another big shot on campus, and a few years later went to war. He landed on Utah Beach with the Fourth Infantry Division. He stayed in the ETO, continual combat it says here, until Germany surrendered. If he was with the Fourth the whole time that might mean he was at Sainte-Mère-Église and Cherbourg, before fighting their way to Paris. They fought into Belgium, throwing themselves at the Siegfried Line and worked their way into Germany that October. They took part in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, then moved over to Luxembourg where they got caught up in the Battle of the Bulge. They got across the Sauer River in January, then the Prüm River in February. They saw the Rhine, at Worms, in March. They stayed in the fight until May, almost a full solid year. His obituary says he received the Bronze Star, but it doesn’t tell us any other details of his service. When he got back home he ran the family car dealership, which was in operation for 63 years when he finally stepped away from that. He retired at 73, having also served on the City Council for two terms, and in a handful of other local community roles. He and his wife had three children and two grandchildren when he died, at 75, in 1990. The photo that ran with his obituary is a happy shot, he looks like the kind old man you’d look forward to seeing at church every Sunday morning.
You could find Floyd Hurt down at the Baptist Church. He’d studied science and literature in school and would go on to work for Avondale Mills — a large regional textile concern — for a long time, eventually retiring as a regional sales manager in North Carolina. He was a Rotarian, a country club man, and a Navy veteran. He had a wife and they had a son and daughter. He died at 81 in 1995.
Ed McKenzie was an education major, and a two-year track man. He was a steady hand looking down the runway at the pole vault. I can’t find anything readily available that tells us about what he did in the years that followed, unfortunately.
And that should make this a good place to stop for now.
Next week, we’ll take a look at the last handful of these senior standouts. Do make sure to come check it out. There are a few more impressive stories to tell!
All of this 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.
