Sometimes there's gold. And while I didn't want to do a lot of headshots and posed photographs, this is the ag club and the FFA, which is important for me. Look how the farmers were dressing in the 1940s.

One of these young men is Buris Boshell, president of the ag club. I believe that's him on the front row, fourth from the left. Boshell studied veterinary medicine at Auburn, went to med school at Alabama, but finished his studies at Harvard. He became an endocrinologist and, back in Alabama, built an absolutely world class diabetes research and treatment program at UAB. He died, aged 69, in 1995.

Bob Scofield was a north Alabama farmer and business man. He owned a radio station for a time. Everyone in town knew him as the owner of the Ford dealership. He made it to 90, and died in 2016.

Ralph Hartzog started out as a teacher, went back to school, studied agriculture and became a county extension agent. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in 2006, just shy of 87, and his name is now on a memorial plaque at the state's 4H Center. When they remember you as fondly as they did that man, who'd retired 28 years earlier, you were living right.

There's another guy in that group photo who I met, a lifetime later. Dr. Claude Moore graduated from the College of Agriculture and eventually returned to Auburn in 1956 (almost everyone goes home again). He became head of the poultry department in 1959, and stayed in that seat until he moved over to the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station in 1986. He retired from there a few years later. And after another decade or so, I would intern there. He was a deacon at a church we attended, and a Sunday School teacher. When he passed away he was survived by his wife, five children and 13 grandchildren. He was a good man.

His headstone has a rooster on it. It says "A steady man." He was an Auburn man.

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