AUBURN MAGAZINE For Alumni & Friends of Auburn University Spring 2005
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Auburn Alumni Center 317 South College Street Auburn University, AL 36849-5150 www.aualum.org
4/12/05 8:17:53 AM
Armed with a saxophone and an urge to play, Jimmie Robbins wanted Alabama Polytechnic Institute to have a dance band, an orchestra of the best players available at the land-grant school nestled in tiny Auburn. So, in the fall of 1930, the Selma junior recruited Otho “Goof” Robinson, a tuba player from Atmore. The two young men spent a few weeks making personal pitches and successfully enlisted eight others, all but one of them from among API’s 2,000 students and most already members of the school’s only organized band.
By the following spring, the f ledgling Auburn Knights—the name the group chose during one of its practice sessions— had played its first few shows, headlining the A- Club dance and A PI’s annual military ball on its way to becoming a fixture at campus events for the rest of the decade.
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harles “Red” Blackledge ’34 remembers the time from his singular perspective as a freshman trombonist with “wide eyes.” The last living original Knight, Blackledge says the group “just got together and committed to practice and stay with it” for at least one semester. “We would practice a long enough time until we felt like we were good enough to face the public,” he recalls. “I guess we sounded pretty good.” Seventy-five years later, through 400-plus musicians, the continual change of the musical landscape and the emergence of a 23,000-student university from that little land-grant campus, Robbins’ effort lives—proof that music is the universal language connecting people from distant corners, unchecked by superficial barriers of geography, culture and time.
L ouis Barne
tt ’82
says Jana Burns ‘05, a Knights trumpeter since she arrived at Auburn University from Opelika High School four years ago. “We realize that it’s bigger than all of us.” Knights past and present speak of the 18-piece orchestra as a living testament to the power of Auburn tradition and to the vitality of groups, musical and otherwise, that weave a common thread through students of varying interests and experiences. “The Auburn Knights is a strong and viable organization, taking pride in performing quality music to a variety of audiences, young and old,” says Knights alumnus Charlie Higgins ’41. Adds Burns, simply: “It’s just legendary.”
Toni Tennille ’62
Lisa Ray ’84 with student Knight Daniel Tidwell
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Paying tribute to the past For bass saxophonist Jeremy Leff ’07, the Knights salute a time when courtship rituals were implied rather than spoken, and popular music lent itself to romance. “The biggest impact on me after I joined the band was going back to my granddad and hearing him talking about my great-grandparents, who met at Auburn in the 1930s,” says Leff, a Fairhope native who has played with the Knights off-and-on since 1999. “He remembers them talking about the Knights and going to Knights dances. And he remembers the Knights when he was at Auburn. “It’s really neat to look back to all the archives and see a time when there was no Velcro Pygmies at the frat and sorority parties,” Leff adds, referring to the popular rock cover band that has frequented the War Eagle Supper Club and campus parties in recent years. “It was the Auburn Knights. That’s what they danced to then. To be part of that history—to carry that torch—is a neat experience.” An independent organization that survives on its fees, album sales and donations, the Auburn Knights band has never been affiliated officially with Auburn University, though many of its players over the years have been drawn from the school’s music department and band programs. The group is not exclusive to music majors, however. Blackledge earned a business degree from API, and Burns will finish with a bachelor’s degree in business administration as well. Leff is majoring in computer science.
Reunion concert open to all This summer, the Auburn Knights Alumni Association, numbering hundreds of living Knights and associates of the group, will host its annual reunion marking the 75th anniversary of the band’s formation. Following the tradition of Knights reunions, which began in the 1950s and are open to the public, the July 29-30 affair at the Auburn Marriott Opelika Hotel and Conference Center at Grand National will feature a series of “decades bands,” which consist of Knights alumni playing musical sets from their time with the group. The current players will conclude the event, complete with an arrangement written by a Knights alumnus who has tied together the sounds of the last seven decades.
Current and former Knights will gather for a concert this summer at the Auburn Marriott Opelika Hotel and Conference Center at Grand National. Shown here on the terrace of the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, clockwise from front: Fritz Siler ’73, Joe Watson ’81, and student Knights Daniel Tidwell and Jeremy Leff. Auburn Magazine
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he music at this summer’s reunion will trumpet both the development of the group and the vitality of the Big Band era, which has endured through the evolution of jazz, blues, rock, pop and hip-hop. The gathering will be a time not only to relive seven decades of music but also to remember the group’s experiences playing it, says Charlie Kinzer ’83, historian for Knights alumni and a music professor at Longwood University in Virginia. Kinzer is assembling a book to commemorate the highlights—and lowlights —of the group. “People love to tell the stories,” he says. Blackledge, a Montgomery retiree, fondly remembers how the Auburn Knights took off in the 1930s, from performing a few encouraging shows to traveling around the Southeast to country and dinner clubs. The pinnacle, he recalls, was being broadcast nationally on CBS radio after an Auburn-Georgia Tech football game one fall Saturday in Atlanta. “It had rained during the day and everybody was soaking wet,” he remembers. “The vocalist had caught laryngitis and couldn’t sing. We had two or three who would sing and we got by with it—I was one of them. We were a trio singing ‘Hell’s Bells.’ We thought that was a pretty big deal.”
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Blackledge brought home around $2 per appearance—far less than the $75 to $100 that today’s players command. But by the beginning of the 1940s, the Knights were playing daily, including lunch and dinner gigs at Auburn’s College Inn, a hotel and restaurant on College Street across from Langdon Hall. The era also included a 1941 summer tour to Virginia Beach, a hotbed for dance bands, where the Knights were joined during some sets by the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, Ziggy Elman and Frank Sinatra.
The group also emerged as one of the mostrecognized dance bands in the South, recording an album that received frequent air time from New Orleans to Atlanta. The 1960s saw a decline in the Knights’ visibility as music moved away from the Big Band sound toward hallucinogenic rock, pop and folk strains. Kinzer describes the Woodstock years through much of the 1970s as “the dark ages” for the group, though it survived when few people were listening—largely through the musicians’ own determination.
The war years quieted the band. Auburn entrepreneur Shel Toomer stored the equipment and uniforms until the core of the group returned from overseas. Four Knights players got the band going again after World War II. Influenced by the tunes of Glenn Miller, the post-war Knights grew quickly into its current 18-piece Big Band format. Its musicians spent the next 10 years dominating the Auburn social scene, playing at the student union for fraternities and sororities. “We would set up on a Friday night and just leave it up for a Saturday night,” says Tommy Goff ’56, a former Knight and retired Auburn High School band director.
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Members of today's Auburn Knights jazz band include, left to right: David Zuwiyya on snare drum, Jeremy Leff on bass saxophone, vocalist Dorsey Tippett, and pianist Daniel Tidwell (holding bass).
Hitting the high notes n 1979, the band experienced a revival after it played for the inaugural ball of AU alumnus and Alabama Gov. Forrest H. “Fob” James ’57, jump-starting a modern era that has carried forward and blossomed in recent years. One secret to the group’s longevity is its inclination to embroider its swing sound with current musical trends—and to capitalize on any Big Band revival that popular culture might rouse, says Kinzer and Burns.
Knights of the past Laura Self ’72 (left) and Kyle Caldwell ’83 (right), shown here in an archival shot with former Alabama Gov. Forrest H. “Fob” James ’57
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But whatever the score, the Knights’ notes remain true across generations and time. “From what I hear on the radio there’s not much out there today but hollering and screaming,” says Blackledge. “But the Big Band —I don’t know, it’s more understandable…I can still see it, when we were playing at Auburn or any place else, the couples would just breeze by, go back and forth while they danced. There was no hiphopping or jumping around. It was sort of dream-like. “They could feel the Big Band. It’s just a different type of music.” And, for those who play it, a life-defining experience. “There are two things in my life that will always be a factor,” says Leff. “Seven Saturdays a year I’ll be in Jordan-Hare Stadium, and one weekend in July I’ll be at a hotel for the Auburn Knights reunion.”
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Alumnus Leads Drive to Measure Pollution Impact of 9/11
Like most of his fellow Americans, Paul Lioy ’71 says he will never forget the horror he witnessed at ground zero. Unlike most of his fellow Americans, he saw it up close. Days after the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City’s World Trade Center sent more than a million tons of scorched rubble crashing to earth, Lioy, a Rutgers University environmental sciences professor, arrived on the scene to begin studying one of the disaster’s most frequently overlooked aftereffects: the huge amount of air pollution left behind. Lioy, who specializes in measuring human exposure to pollutants, spent the next two years trying to assess the health effects of the 2001 catastrophe along with a hand-picked team of federal scientists.
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“The attack at the World Trade Center took place on a Tuesday, and our team of investigators arrived on Sunday morning,” says Lioy, 58, who’s often credited with having invented the rapidly expanding field of “environmental forensics.” He also created many of the tools now used to measure the impact of disaster-related air and water pollution on people. “I felt the sheer horror of it, of course—the destruction everywhere and the realization that there were human beings buried beneath that vast pile of dust and rubble. But I also experienced a lot of anger that day. I’d seen the devastation on television, but it was shocking to stand there and look at the magnitude of the crimes that had been committed at ground zero.” Still, he had a job to do. “The first challenge we faced was simply finding a way to deal with our emotional reactions to the tragedy,” Lioy says. “And it was really amazing to see how quickly everyone involved in the environmental assessment went to work on the problems we faced.” Even as rescue teams searched for survivors, and those touched most immediately by the tragedy dealt with the fallout of losing family members, Lioy and his team tried to discover how to keep the disaster from injuring the rest of the city’s population. “When the twin towers collapsed that day, they created an enormous plume of toxic pol-
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lutants that would hang over parts of New York City for several months. And that plume contained thousands of different chemicals and building materials—everything from unburned jet fuel to asbestos fibers to microscopic glass fragments from thousands of smashed windows—that were now combined in staggeringly complex compounds which had probably never even existed before,” Lioy recalls. “Our job was to try and figure out how harmful these airborne pollutants really were —and also to make recommendations as to how the nation could better prepare for the air pollution effects of such terrorist-related events in the future.”
‘We weren’t prepared’ Funded by both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, Lioy’s two-year study of the 9/11 disaster included numerous chemical analyses of materials taken from ground zero. The results were mixed. After exhaustive testing, the New Jersey expert and his investigative team found that the short-term health effects of pollution on the city’s people were limited to an upper respiratory irritation from ingested dust
particles and—especially among the firemen who responded—a chronic respiratory condition that became known as “World Trade Center cough.” “That’s an unpleasant outcome, of course, but thankfully it hasn’t produced a second tragedy for people who live and work near ground zero,” Lioy says. Another key finding was more ominous: the fact that both local and federal authorities were almost completely unprepared to assess how the air pollution caused by the disaster might affect surrounding communities. Lacking reliable information, officials couldn’t properly advise the public what to do. “The bad news from this disaster is that we simply don’t have the public health tools we need right now to protect American communities from a wide array of pollution effects that could result from terrorism, or from natural disasters such as earthquakes,” says Lioy. “Why are these tools lacking? In our view, it’s because we haven’t included environmental assays and monitoring systems for postdisaster pollution in our overall planning for homeland security.” He and his colleagues have recommended the government develop an emergency-response procedure for evacuation of disaster areas, as well as a plan for workers and residents to re-enter such sites.
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In the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Lioy and a colleague noted: “We found that the only agency authorized for indoor cleanup and re-entry was the local health department, which did not have the resources to conduct or facilitate cleanup…A lead agency must be identified to implement the program so that cleanup can proceed without delay... Our government must expeditiously assess its response to community-wide indoor air and settled-dust issues during post-disaster emergencies.”
Professor to pollution fighter Lioy’s passion for pollution began as a natural outgrowth of his interest in public health. An AU graduate physics and applied math major, he carved his own niche in environmental science by performing autopsies on polluted air. “I think I was very fortunate early on in my career,” he says with a chuckle, “because I wound up spending a lot of time out in the field, talking to ordinary working people who lived in places like Newark and Passaic, N.J., which is where I happened to grow up. “As a younger scientist, I found myself caught up in a number of projects that involved such community-health aspects as determining the presence of airborne pollutants inside people’s homes and workplaces. As a result, I became very interested in the problem of how to better measure personal exposure to what we call ‘environmental insults.’ After a while, it became clear to me that there was a missing component in environmental health sciences —and that component consisted of tools that could determine how air and water pollution actually affect public health.” In some cases, Lioy’s research led to the creation of high-tech devices for measuring airborne particles (he holds several patents) that would allow investigators to precisely gauge the connections between, say, toxic smoke from an urban trash incinerator and increases in respiratory ailments among nearby residents. Other situations simply called for using common sense. During the early 1990s, Lioy and several Rutgers colleagues began bringing national recognition to the problem of increasing asthma rates among urban children. But while the data showed clearly that more
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Paul Lioy ’71
and more city kids were suffering from the ailment, linking the outbreaks to urban pollution proved an immensely complex task. Lioy’s solution: After gathering authoritative pollution data from the EPA, he compared urban emergency-room visits by asthmatic children during “high ozone” periods of summer with similar ER visits in other months. He observed a clear connection. “What we found was that the rate of ER asthma-emissions was fully 25 percent higher during the ‘high-ozone’ periods,” says Lioy. “How can you quibble with numbers like those? That was a significant breakthrough in understanding how pollution can affect public health—and it happened as a result of simply applying common sense to a complicated problem.” His unique penchant for linking pollution with illness in American cities may stem from Lioy’s habit of “listening hard” to urban residents. “Paul Lioy was my Ph.D. advisor at Rutgers, and the work we did together really changed my life,” says Timothy J. Buckley, an environmental health scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Our research into assessing pollution impacts took us into the local community almost daily, and we were able to begin asking some fundamental questions about the relationship between public health and the environment. It was all very challenging and very exciting.
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“For me and a lot of other grad students like me, Paul was the inspiration for a lifelong interest in finding new ways to connect environmental pollution with public health.”
Love in the age of quantum mechanics More than 30 years have passed since Lioy attended classes at Auburn, but he hasn’t forgotten the intellectual excitement he felt— and the lifelong romance he found—during his two-year sojourn in Alabama.
“I studied theoretical mechanics under [professor] Raymond Askew, who was then the chair of the physics department,” he says. “To this day, I can remember sitting up late every night, working on these wonderfully complex equations he gave us. Of course, I also had a great time studying quantum mechanics with Jay Kinser…and I suspect that my lifelong interest in analyzing particulate matter got its start in his classroom. “It was an exciting couple of years—and I’m also grateful to Auburn for introducing me to a wonderful biologist named Jeanie. We got engaged at Auburn, and we’ve spent the past 35 years celebrating that fact. Really, when I look back today, it seems like so many of the good things in my life got started on the Auburn campus.” These days, the peripatetic Lioy finds himself traveling frequently back and forth across the country while directing several federally funded projects aimed at finding new ways to fend off the threat of disaster-related airborne pollution. “Right now I’m working on designing a new kind of ‘portable triage’ facility that can be taken out into the field within minutes of a disaster and then used to monitor airborne toxins,” he says. “And of course I’m also continuing my work on children’s exposure to environmental pollutants in America’s cities. “Another project calls for assembling a new type of respirator that can be used by firefighters and will be far more effective than any other respirator out there on the market right now. I find challenges like these very exciting—and I feel very privileged to be able to work on them, day in and day out.” AM
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