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Previous Issue-fall 2007

Our First Time
Fifty years ago, the Tigers unleashed a roar heard ’round the South
by Paul Hemphill ’59

Though we didn’t know it at the time, a cultural revolution was brewing in 1957 that would affect the nation’s social and political fabric for the next five decades: That year, the Soviets fired the starting pistol for the space race with the launch of its Sputnik 1 satellite; President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas’ Central High School; and two British teenagers who shared a love of music—John Lennon and Paul McCartney—met for the first time at a parish church in Liverpool. But the biggest news at Alabama Polytechnic Institute that year was the Tigers’ first undefeated football season, which clinched the 1957 national championship. Early in the season, though, the idea that the Tigers would top every other college team in the nation amounted to little more than a sublime sports fantasy.

That summer, given the team’s inexperience and a schedule that began in Knoxville with mighty Tennessee, picked by most to win the SEC that year after finishing second in the nation in ’56, the idea of an undefeated season appeared to be a stretch; wishful thinking. AU head football coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan—worried about a lack of offensive punch—had dispatched several of his coaches to Norman, Okla., to observe Bud Wilkinson’s flashy Oklahoma Sooners during their spring practices. Behind the running of sensational halfback Tommy McDonald out of the smoothly synchronized quarterbackoption offense, Oklahoma had won 40 straight games while taking back-to-back national championships. Auburn was in good shape at halfback, with returnees Tommy Lorino and Bobby Hoppe, and the hope was that maybe the coaches could pick up some tips to help quarterback Jimmy Cook and fullback Donnie May add spunk to the Tigers’ offense. The A-Day game, after all, had turned out to be a sluggish affair: a 12-9 score revealing hard-nosed defense, lots of punting and a skittish offense.

Down in the Valley, Things are Looking Up
by Katie M. Wilder '00
Photography by Jeff Etheridge and Melissa Humble

Once upon a time, there was a small town named Valley. It was barely located in the state of Alabama; with a strong sidearm sling, a person could skip a rock across the Chattahoochee River and hit Georgia's bank on the other side. After the Civil War, people came to Valley to work together in the textile mills that kept the town's four villages ticking. Then one day, the clock stopped: The factories closed, and time wore the town down. But eventually, with the help of some Auburn University architecture students, the people of Valley began to see their city in a different ligtht-and together they're writing a happy ending.

Jean Williams recalls the day she was driving through her Valley neighborhood and looked up to fi nd her former Girl Scout hut had been destroyed.

“It was such a shock. I remember driving around the corner, and my Girl Scout house was gone. It had been completely demolished, and the lot was cleaned off,” says the 81- year-old lifelong Valley resident (pictured left). “And I just stopped the car and cried, because I was so heartbroken that it was gone.”

That hut, along with many of Valley’s other buildings, had been built by West Point Manufacturing Co., which brought large textile mills to this small eastern Alabama town following the Civil War. For the next century, life centered around the area’s four prominent mill villages—Langdale, Riverview, Fairfax and Shawmut—each with its own “picture show,” post offi ce, general store, churches, schools and parks, all built and maintained by the mill. Like spokes on a wheel, bungalow- style homes formed neighborhoods radiating from the factories, and, over time, residents traded their agricultural roots for shift work and spinning machines.

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