The 26th Academy Awards were presented in March of 1954, held simultaneously in Hollywood and New York. It was the second national telecast, and the estimates are that 43 million people watched. As you might expect, all the major winners in this year were black-and-white films.

William Holden won Best Actor, Audrey Hepburn took home the prize for Best Actress. Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed won the supporting awards.

The best film nominees were Julius Caesar, The Robe, Roman Holiday, and Shane.

Cecil B. Demille presented the best film winner, an award he won the previous year. From Here to Eternity, which won seven other Oscars that night, got the statue. That was Demille’s only roll at the Oscars that year, but he also did some very important judging of his own, as you’ll see in a moment.

This is the seventh installment of our glance through the 1954 Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five and part six.) 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.

Now, when you’re presenting at the Oscars, you just walk on stage, read the lines, open an envelope and then head to the afterparty. Nice job, but not too challenging. In the fall of 1954, just 69 years and 50 weeks ago, in fact, he took on a far more demanding role. Somehow, he became the judge for the Miss Glomerata. More than 70 women were nominated, a panel of judges cut that down to 20 and DeMille selected the eight winners. This pageant took place in the fall. To the extent that it mattered, the results were well known by the time the book came out the next spring.

What isn’t known is how they got Cecil B. DeMille involved. The man was from Massachusetts, living in California and, at the time, he was in pre-production for The Ten Commandments. Maybe he took a break from work to leaf through some photos and dictate this letter, which is the only explanation we are offered.

I looked in the campus paper and DeMille gets mentioned, but there’s no explanation as to how they got him to do this.

His letter points out that they didn’t ask him to rank the women — thank goodness. All eight were winners of the Omicron Delta Kappa-Glomerata. Let’s see what we became of them all.

Nancy Dupree was a senior from Athens, Alabama. She was studying education, and she’d already been named Miss Auburn.

She got married and had three kids. One of them went to Alabama, UAB and Florida and became an oncologist. He died after a second fight with cancer, at 55. Another is a business owner. Her daughter became an optometrist. She’s still with us.

Mary Jim Esslinger was a sophomore from Gurley, Alabama. She was studying home economics. She was voted Miss Auburn the next year. She was also a finalist in pageants back home, so this was a thing she did regularly. She married Charles, a man who was a junior agricultural engineering major. He became a successful business man and president of his local chamber of commerce.

They had four children and are the heads of a great big family now. She’s apparently a pretty serious foodie.

I’ve never met anyone named Battle, and that’s been a disappointment for me, ever since I learned the word was used as a name, which was about the time I ran across Battle King in the Glomerata the first time.

The young woman with the disarming smile — who had to be pretty fierce if she choose to use her middle name, Battle — was a freshman from Decatur, Alabama. She would graduate with a degree in education in 1957. She married a guy who was a senior this year. They were both from the same town, so there may be a local backstory. Allen studied agriculture, played in the band. He graduated and flew for the Air Force for three years before returning to civilian life, getting involved in banking, real estate and insurance. When he died in 2008 they’d had been married for 51 years. They had one child and three grandchildren. She still lives in Alabama.

Marilyn Kurtz was a freshman from San Francisco, and how she wound up at Auburn might remain a mystery to you and me. She would marry a man named John in 1957 or so. He spent his first career in the U.S. Army, where he retired a colonel, before taking on two additional careers in the private sector. Marilyn was a military brat, probably that’s how they met, who was used to the lifestyle she and her husband undertook.

They lived in Korea, Louisiana, Japan, Washington, Denver, Texas, southern California and back to Washington. When John died in 2017 they’d been together 60 years. She has two daughters and two grandsons, and is living in the Pacific Northwest.

Barbara Searcy was a senior education major. She was born in Birmingham and lived in Tuscaloosa before settling in Montgomery when she was eight or so. She did the first part of her higher education at Montevallo, before going to Auburn. The year after this, she would be crowned the county Maid of Cotton, which was probably a local pageant that was exactly what it sounded like.

After graduation she became a teacher, and ran English, speech, and drama classes at her high school alma mater, and another of the big schools in Montgomery. Searcy got married, and had five children and four grandchildren. She died in 2011.

This is Pat Pond, a freshman home economics major from Fairhope, population 4,000 back then.

And this is the only Glom in which she appears. A few months after this book was circulated, she was engaged to a classmate, William Bowden — listed as a sophomore architecture student from Memphis in this book — and they would be married that September. There’s a 1956 mention in her hometown paper that the young couple had their first child. Pond’s grandmother came to visit, to meet her newborn great-granddaughter. The older woman was 82, and took a trip that, today, would be 226 miles. It wouldn’t have been an easier journey back then. Pat and William had at least one more kid. William was a Marine captain in Korea, and by the time he met his bride he was in the Marine Reserve. He died in 1980 and is buried in Arlington. Pat remarried, but the circumstances and details are unknown to the web.

Helen Wilson would, I think, be a junior here, but she doesn’t appear in the headshot portion of the book, which gives us that information. She’s from Huntsville, which was at the time growing from 16,437 people in 1950 to an astounding 72,365 people just a decade later — the first boom of the Rocket City.

Helen married Jimmy Caudle, an aeronautical engineering freshman in this book who eventually changed to industrial management. She was a musician, and an elementary school teacher. He served in the Air Force, eventually started a metal finishing business that celebrated their 50th anniversary last year, and became the president of Snapper on the side, turning them into a $250 million multinational while he was at it. Helen and Jimmy were involved in a list of organizations and charities longer than your arm. They had three sons, and nine grandchildren. Sixty years they spent together, until she passed away in 2017; he died in 2018.

Edwina Sims was a junior education major from Florala, Alabama. There were 2,700 people there when she was a child. There are fewer of them now. Sims was the local pageant queen, too.

She was also on the homecoming court — I refuse to believe that these were the only things young women did — but otherwise you won’t find her in the old newspapers. She disappears from the web’s view at about the time she graduated.

That’s enough for now. 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.