Glomfire

When I informed Fred Denton ’55 that in 1970, that year’s Glomerata was burned in protest of the book’s portrayal of Auburn student life, he was surprised.

He thought it had only happened in 1955.

He remembers it like it was yesterday. Whenever it’s time to reminisce about college days at old Auburn, it’s the first story he tells—the story of May 18, 1955. The day the Glomerata came out, the night the boys grabbed the matches and the night he told them to put them down.

At first, his fraternity brothers found that very frustrating. Because if anyone had grounds for being ticked off, it was Fred Denton, the president of the “Lonesome Polecat Society of the Plains.”

That’s what the Glom dubbed the Theta Chi Fraternity that year.

The musical “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” had been a huge hit the previous summer. In March, it took home the Oscar for Best Score; the song “Lonesome Polecat” was one of the reasons why. The sad little song featured seven backwoods brothers quietly lamenting their lack of ladies while felling trees in the Oregon wilderness, singing “I’m a lonesome polecat, lonesome, sad and blue, ’cause I ain’t got no feminine polecat vowin’ to be true.”

A bunch of lonely boys out in the sticks? It was, so the Glom said, Theta Chi to a tee. Why, their new house was so far away they had to get to class by Greyhound! But what they lacked in proximity to campus, and to romance and brains, they made up for in courage. “Because who else,” the Glom said, “would have the nerve to wear a Theta Chi pin?”

The Lonesome Polecats were not amused.

“It was a Wednesday night,” Denton says—chapter night. “As soon as I called the meeting to order, one of the boys jumped up, motioning to adjourn, immediately.” Denton was confused.

“They said, have you not seen the Glomerata? I said, ‘no, I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been busy preparing for this meeting—what’s in it?’”

They said terrible things about people—about us.

Denton looked. He saw the Lonesome Polecat stuff. He saw stuff about Pi Kappa Phi’s favorite charity being the ABC Store, the disparaging rhymes about certain sororities. Then he saw the boys’ faces. He heard them talking about something happening in Ross Square. He heard the word “bonfire.” He got the idea. And, in no uncertain terms, he told them it was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard.

“I said ‘y’all want to throw a book as good as this in the fire? No, we’re going to sit here and discuss this until everybody’s tempers cool down.’” They’d paid for their books, Denton told the group. They could do what they wanted with them.

“But I said, ‘wait a week, see how you feel then.’”

Tempers cooled. The meeting continued. The Lonesome Polecats stayed put. Others, however, did not.

The headline in the next day’s edition of the Nashville Banner—“2,000 Students Protest New Yearbook”—had one too many zeroes. In the end, witnesses said most of the maybe 200 people gathered around the small fire in the heart of campus were only there for the spectacle, and that ultimately only six copies of the Glomerata were tossed in.

Still, word of Auburn students taking Zippos to their yearbooks was sensational enough to make papers across the south in less than 24 hours.

“Some 250 Auburn students staged a book-burning demonstration on the API campus last night in protest of the newly issued yearbook which many said contained objectionable material,” the Birmingham News reported. “An API official today said the material in question was ‘an attempt to be humorous that wound up in bad taste’.”

That the would-be humorist was the Glomerata editor himself seemed to make matters even worse.

Occasional suggestive inside jokes were nothing new for the Glom. But John Sellers ’55, a senior art major from Montgomery, had wanted to truly spice things up. He’d been pitching his fresh vision for the book’s content in Plainsman articles since fall. Every new editor promised better layouts, more pages and more pictures. But Sellers promised even more—better, more entertaining content, particularly in the Greek section. He wanted each page to be a must read. No more skimming. No more flipping to your fraternity just to see which photos of which formals made the cut. He wanted the Alphas and the Omegas to get their money’s worth. After all, the pages cost each fraternity and sorority $150.

And they nearly cost Sellers a beating.

Thank God for future Alabama governor Fob James.

Once the smoke settled, 25 or so students chanting “Down with Sellers” marched to the Pi Kappa Alpha house where Sellers, the fraternity’s social chairman, was thought to be holed up. After a panicked Sellers called Dean of Students James E. Foy, Foy summoned James for muscle.

The sophomore running back rushed to the Pike house, stood in the doorway, and told the crowd that no one was touching John Sellers. The story of the rescue mission was included in a 1990 biography of James.

“Foy said James reminded the students everybody had exams the next day and said he knew they had to study like he did and why didn’t they go on home and let the publications board take care of the yearbook editor.”

Which is what happened. An apologetic Sellers was reprimanded by the board, on which sat his Plainsman counterpart, Ronnie Owen, who insisted the Sellers had shown “extremely poor judgment.” Of course, the same might have been said of Owen.

Unmentioned in the news coverage was that Owen’s editorial preview of the book published that morning under the headline “Glom Edited In Poor Taste” had practically chummed the waters for protest—and even the flames themselves.

Predicting student reaction to the book, Owen wrote that the book would “find its way into the nearest trash can, or more appropriately be saved for fuel.”

Fifteen years later, history repeated itself in a slightly lesser-publicized but even more dramatic demonstration for nearly identical reasons—new editor, new vision. But whereas the issue in 1955 may have been the content hitting too close to home, the opposite was true in 1970.

Editor Liz Sauber ’70, an idealistic senior from Pennsylvania wanting to play a part in the nation’s cultural shift, painted a picture of Auburn more Kent State than Loveliest Village. On the country’s revolutionary Richter scale, events at Auburn in the late ’60s and early ’70s barely registered as tremors. Yet the book’s opening section practically reads like a Weather Underground manifesto: “Cold war children we seek to establish a New world…America must change. Auburn, too. Or both will crumble.”

Over the next week, patriotic outrage over the book’s distorted image of one of the most conservative campuses in the country was palpable. A protest was planned. Pages from the edition began showing up on a bulletin board in Haley Center, tacked beneath a sign that read: “Fuel For Thursday’s Fire.”

On a rainy Thursday night in late May, a crowd of approximately 100 people watched a handful of students gleefully set their Gloms ablaze in two metal drum-sized trash cans in the parking lot of Auburn’s baseball field. Marshmallows were roasted. Sauber was even burned in effigy.

Fred Denton is proud that it never came to that in 1955. He hates things even went as far as they did.

“I told the Theta Chis, when you go back and read it again, you’re going to realize that guy had a right smart ability at writing humor,” Denton says. “He didn’t really mean any harm. He was just trying to get people to read it.”

By Jeremy Henderson ’04