This page is titled "With the young journalists," so we linger. If you'll recall, just two pages back, you'll remember a room that looks like this. It is, in fact, the same room. Then, as now, you'll commonly see shared some staff and resources between the periodicals.

Do we know what issue of the newspaper they are looking at? Yes we do. The biggest story in the Jan. 31, 1934 edition of the paper was the approval of new concrete stands from the Civil Works Administration (the first, public employment experiment of the New Deal and the predecessor of the WPA) "for the building of a stadium."

People read that particular issue were reading about the beginning of a big shift for the campus, and the community. In Auburn, it was the start of a dream that would finally be realized in 1989. Prior to this project, the school played almost all of their home football games in bigger cities nearby, Birmingham, Montgomery, Columbus, and so on. They played one game at home each year and fans sat on temporary stands that allowed 700 people to watch a game.

The casual version of history goes like this: getting the stadium built, getting the interstate to pass through town (I-85 was built in stages in the 1960s, including, sadly, redlining a vibrant African-American community in nearby Montgomery.) and getting Bo Jackson on campus made the place all grown up. And it started with what was going on around these guys in that photo, right there.

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