Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio in January. The first nuclear-powered sub, the USS Nautilus, put to sea the next week. President Eisenhower warned against American intervention in some little place no one had ever heard of, Vietnam, he called it. He’d already presided over $785 million dollars in military aid headed that way. The first polio vaccines were distributed, in Pittsburgh. We tested a hydrogen bomb. Joseph McCarthy began his hearings on the Army and communism. The first Boeing 707 was released, and it wasn’t the only thing taking to the air. National Educational Television, renamed PBS, was introduced in May. The very next day Brown v. Board of Education was handed down by the Supreme Court. Those were some of the headlines that filtered through in 1954, and this was how college students were living during that time.

This is the eighth installment of our glance through the 1954 Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six and part seven.) All of them 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. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

I spend hours on these posts, even if it doesn’t look like it. Sometimes these photos and the young faces lead us to great stories, the sort that I am sure to bore friends with. Honestly, I go through these old yearbooks of my alma mater do these because I am interested in these little candid photos. These aren’t the best, being 1954 snapshots and transfers I’ve hastily digitized, but they are the best.

Big laughs before a night on the town. I wonder where they went, if I would have known the place(s) decades later. I wonder if it was a night they looked back on fondly later.

It feels perfectly spontaneous and authentic, that photo. It, and the rest of these sit around the Greek organization’s headshots. And almost all of the rest of them seem to be experimenting with this new concept of arranging people in semi-normal, casual positions, and having them all look up.

The guys dressed up a lot, it seems like. This is the Old South parade, which was stupid then, and remained stupid until the fraternity that ran it finally canceled the stupid thing in 1993.

I’m not sure what these guys were about. Maybe it was a French-themed party, or a play. I wonder where they bought baguettes back then.

Surely they didn’t have to go all the way to the beach for fancy bread. But this bunch went to the beach. Panama City, I think. Perhaps they were skipping class. Anyway, this, kids, is what people did with their photos before Instagram and VSCO. I had to crop it almost as severely as those formats too, oddly enough.

They sure did like their parades, though they didn’t seem to find taking good photographs of them to be too important. This is from the Pajama Parade befor the Georgia Tech game. You can tell because of the pajamas.

The downside of these candid photos is you aren’t always privy to the context of what’s going on. Here’s some sort of pie eating contest, I suppose.

This image doesn’t do the original view justice, I’m sure. Blame me. I’ll have to come back through and try to get a better capture of this image, which is a homecoming float. A group built this steamship, and even from the small photo, it’s obvious a lot of care went into the thing.

One of the things that you begin to notice in these photos is how crowded they can fill. The campus was small, but growing, but not nearly fast enough to meet the needs from this ROTC generation. This looks like some sort of semi-formal dinner, but all these people look packed in. Again, the captions are making some very short pun, and give us no details.

And, to wrap this up, I direct your attention to the fellow on the right.

What is he wearing? What is he wearing in 1954? And why is no one staring at him for it?

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.