We return to the good old days of the alma mater. We’ve been checking out a few of the photos from the 1936 yearbook, The Glomerata. (Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. Part four is right here. Part five is here.) This is hardly a complete look, but there’s a lot to see from 1936.

This is hardly a complete look, but there’s a lot to see from 1936.

By the 1930s the way the yearbooks document the goings on in is starting to feel familiar to modern eyes. There are a lot of very small photos that don’t tell us much, but probably brought a smile, or a frown, to the face of the people that were there. We’ll see a bit of that, and a bit more. We also learn that the highlight of the social season was the Junior Prom.

Joe Sanders brought his band down from Chicago, and they highlighted vocals by Barbara Parks and Jack Swift. Sanders had timed his career just right, surfing to regional and nearly national success with the growth of radio. He went from the midwest to the east coast with the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks, but Carleton Coon died in 1932. Sanders kept the sound alive for decades, touring in a rickety bus, playing, and writing movie scores through the 1950s. In 1936, the students danced the night away to his happy sounds.

Here’s the cover of the 1936 Glom

This is the Activities section of The Glom which is a bit thin owing to layout, photography limitations and/or editorial choices. The yearbook does it gives due to student publications.

This is Doug Wallace, who was editor of The Plainsman. (You can see his 1935-1936 editions.) He helmed the paper that was firmly established in its fourth decade. And the outlet still exists today. Historically, the Plainsman has been honored by 34 Pacemakers since the 1920s, including two during my time there. That’s the most in the nation. In the 1930s The Plainsman was a campus paper in a community served by a few professional publications. In my day, this paper had the largest circulation of any weekly in the state. Today it exists primarily online, of course. These days the campus outlet serves essentially as the local newsroom. All of it builds on the things that men like Wallace built in his day.

Wallace was the ink-stained wretch of Minneapolis, studying science and literature. In addition to running the paper, he was in Spades, ROTC, and a member of the Auburn Players. He served for five years in artillery with the Second Armored. They fought in North Africa, Sicily, and landed in Normandy, crossing into Germany late in 1944. He earned the silver and bronze stars. When peace came, but before he could return home, he ran a division newspaper, the editor of the first ever English language newspaper published in Berlin. When he finally made it home he was destined to become something of a local legend. He worked at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, and prior to their manager he was a big part of both papers. He wrote columns. In 1953, WRBL took to the air in that border town, and Wallace was named their weatherman. (He was not a meteorologist.) There are quite a few photos of him giving forecasts off a chalkboard, peak technology in those days. He stayed in that role until 1985, retiring at 70. He wrote a three-volume history of his church and was a big time gardener. When he died, at 90, in 2005, he was survived by his wife of 63 years, two children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

We’ve met him, and the business manager Herman Harris before. Harris became an Air Force brigadier general. He served in the reserves until, while simultaneously becoming an auditor and inspector for General Motors. He also ran some small businesses, and maintained a farm. He took a job running 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.

Floyd Hurt wasn’t pictured here, but he was the associate editor of the paper. He went to work for Avondale Mills — a large regional textile concern, retiring as a regional sales manager in North Carolina. He was a Rotarian, a country club man, and a Navy veteran.

They had a staff of at least 20 reporters, editors, and contributors, with five people working the business side and five more in circulation. I found a few of the names, one served as a non-commissioned officer during World War II and Korea, and lived to see the end of the 1980s. Another, a man named Clarence Pruet, Jr., went home, took a job at the family department store, which he held for 44 years, interrupted only by World War II. He joined the Army Air Force in October of 1941, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, earned five battle stars and the bronze star. He came home, raised a family, served as a church deacon, bank director and city councilman. Small towns depending on there being men and women like this, and Auburn churned them out by the truckload. Then there was Alvin Vogtle, a freshman working on the circulation side, distributing these papers all over. After school Alvin Jr. flew combat missions in the Army Air Corp. He was captured after crashing in North Africa in 1941, and shipped to Germany as a POW. He tried four times to escape, and succeeded on his fifth time, scaling a tall barbed-wire fence, and getting over the Rhine into Switzerland. If you’ve seen the move The Great Escape, he was a real-life part of what was dramatized there. But he was just getting started. He became a lawyer, and then president of a Southern Co. subsidiary in 1960. He eventually worked is way into the CEO slot of the regional electric utility, where he served from 1969 until 1983. They named a nuclear plant in Georgia after the guy. The region needs people like that, too, and Auburn has certainly churned out its share over the years, including quite a few from this era.

Which brings us to The Glomerata, the book we’ve been reading. The editor was Alton Graves. Born in the northeast corner of the state, an architecture student and memory keeper, he was just 29 years old when he died, in North Carolina, after 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.

He worked alongside Blake Campbell and a crew of 25 editorial and business-side staffers. And I think the desks they’re using for these photos of the paper and the yearbook were in the same room. Nothing written here says that — nothing written here gives any clue to where the work was done, in fact, it was either known or immaterial — but the context clues in other editions have pointed us that way, and the visuals match up.

It looks, here, like maybe Campbell is already married. After his wartime service he and his wife had first kid in 1945. That first daughter would follow him to Auburn a generation later. She got married in the mid-60s, a younger daughter soon after. He became a warehouse manager in his small south Alabama hometown.

One of the associate editors that worked on this yearbook was Gerald Bilbro, who ran his own shop in Georgia. He became a midcentury designer of some renowned. He worked alongside another architecture student, Helen M. Tigner. She found her way into writing dozens of pieces for the Columbus, Georgia, newspaper. She became a registered architect, a pilot, an accomplished horse rider and a talented photographer. (All before she hit 30.) She got married to a Lt. Cameron Knox, of California. This guy had earned a PhD from the University of Washington in oceanography, and was a paratrooper at nearby Ft. Benning. (Presumably that’s how they met.) It looks as though they might have traveled the world and lived in a fair amount of it.

The dance I mentioned above gets a two-page spread. The first has a cliched posed photograph, and then a wide and blurry shot of the dance itself. Opposite that is a collage that looks similar to this.

There are nine pages of these, each page comes with the briefest of cutlines that probably said it all in 1936, but is rather mysterious generations later. There’s a little bit of everything in here, people standing about, outdoor activities, and people with regrettably painted faces. There are exterior shots of Greek houses, a blurry image from the ODK Cake Race, and shots from various parades. There are some bad and indecipherable photos from various games, a few pets, the big stadium in Columbus, and cars.

Two pages are given to ROTC activities, one of which you’ll see here.

“… and those dinky trains. Remember how they could go up those hills. Just a gentle reminder that Sherman was right.”

Dinky might sound too … something … to belong in a book of this era, but we take the word from a 19th century Scottish dialect. And to see these fellows, steeped as they were in Lost Cause mythology, giving Sherman credit for anything. I wonder if they’re referring there to Sherman’s prophecy.

…where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors.You are bound to fail.

In our next installment we’ll check out the Features section.

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.