Hoyt Harwell

Published on June 14, 2017

Hoyt-Harwell "We stayed in what had been Navy barracks during the war."

Transcript

JEREMY HORTON: I am here with Mr. Harwell. Starting out, tell me about your
early life. When and where were you born and where did you grow up?

HOYT HARWELL: I was born in Jacksonville, Florida. And at three weeks old I
moved to Whistler, Alabama which is a suburb Mobile because my daddy had taken a
pastorate there so I grew up in Mobile. He pastored that church five years and
then another church in Mobile twenty year. And then in his later years he
pastored a country church up the road. So I grew up in Mobile. I went to Murphy
High School, which then was biggest high school in Alabama and then came to
Samford in 1948. At Murphy I played football for two year and at Samford my
first year we played with what we called the Sportsman’s Club which was not
officially endorsed by the school. So we could get an ‘H’, letter ‘H’
for playing but we had to have an SC in the middle of it—“Sportsman’s
Club” so sort of independent of the school.  We were sort of half way
representing the school and halfway not. Anyway I went two years and then
dropped out and worked a year to get enough money to finish up. Came back and
finished in ‘53. Meanwhile, I had three siblings in college at the same time.
I’m the oldest so I had to, sort of, help them also. But during my junior
year, I got on with the Associated Press in Birmingham as a teletype operator.
That means the other people would write stories and I would put them in tape and
send them out to newspapers and broadcast stations and things like that. Then
when I graduated I moved to Mobile and also into the news writing part of
Associated Press. Worked there a few years and then worked in Atlanta a few
years and then came back to Birmingham. They had the AP office in ‘66, I think
it was. Headed that office until I retired in ‘92.  I have been retired since then.

JEREMY HORTON: Awesome. Okay, so what were your parents’ names and what did
they do for a living?

HOYT HARWELL: My father was Hoyt Harris Harwell. He was from Georgia originally
and he was a Baptist pastor all his life. And my mother was Eleanor Upchurch,
originally, and she was from North Carolina and raised in Central Florida. And
she was excellent on the piano and the organ; musician, so everywhere daddy was
a pastor she was the accompanist and he lead the music. He was a musician as
well as a preacher. So that’s their names.

JEREMY HORTON: Excellent. So what was your childhood like? You mentioned you had
siblings, talk about your siblings a little bit.

HOYT HARWELL: Well, we all, we all grew up in Mobile and, interesting, my
daddy’s church, West End Baptist at the time and was two blocks from a
Catholic Church. Father Burns was the priest there. So all the children in that
neighborhood all played together and Father Burns let us use his little gym to
play basketball and so forth and we just had a normal, fun life. We played
baseball all summer and basketball in that little gym and then pick up football
games in the colder weather. And didn’t, didn’t have any big problems. We
just had fun. Every time we cleared off a lot for baseball they would start
building houses on it so we would have to clear another place to play. We were
on the edge of town then so there was room, not like it was downtown. In our
pickup games we had kids from six years old to sixteen or seventeen, same game.
All the kids would make allowances, of course, for the younger kids, pitch them
underhanded and so forth and there were no coaches. Coaches would have ruined
our game, you know, and we just had fun. I don’t know what else you need to
know. I had what I consider a happy childhood.

JEREMY HORTON: And were all your siblings brothers or did you have any sisters?

HOYT HARWELL: I had four brothers, they are still living, they are all younger.
I’m the oldest and then I had two sisters. One of them died two weeks old.
Barely remember her. And the other one died, Eleanor Ann Harwell, she was a
church musician and a denominational musician in Georgia and Arkansas and
Alabama and she died about five years ago. So just five brothers left now.

JEREMY HORTON: I am sorry to hear that. So how did you end up at Howard College?

HOYT HARWELL: Well my father was a pastor as I mentioned and Howard had an
allowance to help preachers’ kids financially and that was one reason: money.
And of course daddy wanted me to go to a Baptist school, a small school and I
think he felt as a pastor he ought to support Baptist education and Baptist
schools. I think that was it also.

JEREMY HORTON: What did you study?

HOYT HARWELL: I studied, after my first two years I went into journalism.
Majored in journalism and minored in business. And I wrote for the Crimson. And
my last year, I edited, I was editor of the Crimson. And it is still happening,
the Crimson. Still call it...

JEREMY HORTON: So what were some of the hobbies and leisurely activities
observed by the students while you were at Howard? So you, mentioned, you were
obviously a sportsman, so what kind of other things did y’all do?

HOYT HARWELL: Well I played ping pong. My daddy built a ping pong table for us
to play on when I was growing up so I got to be pretty good at it and came in
2nd at the school tournament at ping pong. We had what they used to call,
something call called an H-Day and a bunch of games on the campus, different
kind of games we played and that kind of thing. But I didn’t have a whole lot
of time to play while I was in college. I was working virtually all four years
one way or the other, so. But it was fun, I had fun. I was in the Army Reserve
and had a meeting once, one night a week and I worked two to three different
type jobs so I stayed pretty busy.

JEREMY HORTON: So H-Day, was that just a bunch of games kind of in the quad,
having fun? Or was that, were there other things that happened on H-Day? Can you
talk about that a little bit? Do you remember?

HOYT HARWELL: No, well games mainly, and all male (?) type things, you
know, and just fun games, yeah. Softball. . .

JEREMY HORTON: Okay and you mentioned the Army Reserve, they just met 1 time a
week and nothing else?

HOYT HARWELL: Yes just one night a week.

JEREMY HORTON: Where would you go to eat when you were in college?

HOYT HARWELL: Well there was a place called Andrew’s Barbecue which was within
walking distance and then there was a little sandwich shop on campus and I ate a
lot, most meals probably there. It was very small. There was also a bookstore. A
combination bookstore and sandwich shop.

JEREMY HORTON: Alright, so my next question is kind of funny. Where would you
take girls on dates when you were in school?

HOYT HARWELL: That’s a funny thing. I, when I started my senior, junior year I
had to have a car because I working downtown. But my brother Jack who was in
school same time, a year behind me to start with although he caught up with me
when I dropped out, he took my car more than I did with that issue. We would go
to mainly campus functions. Every once in a while we would go to a movie but
there were a lot of things on campus: the basketball games and the school choir
had some concerts and thing like that.

JEREMY HORTON: Awesome. That’s a big help. So what was the East Lake campus
like? You mentioned in your article that it was small.

HOYT HARWELL: It was small and it was old and we stayed in what had been Navy
Barracks during the war, the Second World War. The Navy had their program out
there so they put some barracks out there. A lot, most of the boys lived in
those barracks. Which were not, they were not the Taj Mahal--they had one big
bath, shower room and they sat on the back side of the campus so. And, that is
where we lived, those barracks.

JEREMY HORTON: Did it change? Did the campus change at all while you were there?

HOYT HARWELL: No, I wrote one editorial critical of the school. And that was, we
had a lot of potholes around those Navy barracks and the people who had cars had
to dodge all the . . . That resulted in them, they brought some trucks and
filled in the holes but what was the question? I am sorry.

JEREMY HORTON: I asked if it had changed, the campus, while you were there.

HOYT HARWELL: Oh no, no major changes while I was there. Now, when I was there
they made the decision to move the campus to Homewood, but that move and the new
campus came after I left. So I was sad they changed the campus and changed the
name so it left me high and dry. Although Howard College is still a part of
Samford University.

JEREMY HORTON: Right, the arts school. So during your two years when you dropped
out what were you doing?

HOYT HARWELL: One year I worked at the Mobile Press Register. Copyboy. Did some
writing, news writing down there for them. Got ink in my blood as they say.

JEREMY HORTON: Alright so, moving on to maybe a little more serious questions.
Just say what you know or what you remember if you don’t, it’s totally fine.
What were some of the racial attitudes at Howard during your time as a student?

HOYT HARWELL: Racial?

JEREMY HORTON: Yeah, student, faculty, administration.

HOYT HARWELL: Well we had no black students at all, to start with. And, as far
as any overt attitudes there weren’t any. It wasn’t an issue that I recall.
The Civil Rights movement really didn’t start until the late 50’s and 60’s
and I was out of there by, in ‘53 so. I recall no, nothing along that line.
That’s not a good answer but that’s the way it was.

JEREMY HORTON: Did you know Major Davis and did you like him?

HOYT HARWELL: Yeah. And I liked him real well and he had and he and I had
conversations because his first name was the same as my last name, Harwell G.
Davis, but we could never make any connection between the two. But yeah, I knew
Major Davis real well.

JEREMY HORTON: So tell me about your impression of him.

HOYT HARWELL: Well he was a, had been a legal man. He had been a State Attorney
General I think, years earlier, so he ran a pretty tight ship. Didn’t condone
anything that was untoward as far as students were concerned. But I think he did
a good job. He was very visionary in planning that new campus. Getting people to
back it, especially Samford families from other families. He knew that that
campus in East Lake would not do over many more years so. Here’s an
interesting thing that I don’t know if it means anything or not but at Marion,
Alabama, where Howard began is also where Judson began, and Judson is still
there, and also where Marion Military Institute began and it’s still there.
All three of them started there at that same time. And then Howard moved to East Lake.

JEREMY HORTON: Awesome, excellent. So as a newspaper editor during, was it
‘52-‘53 you were a newspaper editor?

HOYT HARWELL: I edited, I edited the paper ‘52-‘53, yeah.

JEREMY HORTON: Do you remember any major events, or just things you reported on,
that happened to the student body or anything like that?

HOYT HARWELL: No nothing out of the ordinary. Let me, I will tell you one thing
I wanted to point out to you would be, which would be horrible now, our main
source of revenue for the student paper was cigarette ads.

JEREMY HORTON: Really? That’s very interesting.

HOYT HARWELL: I’m trying to find some. The whole last page were just cigarette
ads. Of course they wouldn’t let that happen now. Oh there is an Air force ad.
Anyway I don’t see any right now but we had a lot of them.

JEREMY HORTON: So cigarettes were the main revenue for the newspaper?

HOYT HARWELL: Yeah, yeah one of the main ones. That was before the Attorney
General said it wasn’t good for you and a lot of people smoked without
thinking anything about it. That’s just the way it was.

JEREMY HORTON: That’s very interesting. So what other student activities or
groups did you participate in?

HOYT HARWELL: I was in the Omicron Delta Kappa. I was inducted into that and
then also Trident, do they still have Trident out there? Trident was a
scholarship society. Which I think evolved, don’t they have Phi Beta Kappa now
or do they? I don’t, don’t know. It would be equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa
except Samford didn’t have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter because some reason it
didn’t qualify. It was very hard to get one in a college. But I was, my grades
were such that I got into that scholastic society. And my other activity was
that I got into the ODK which was the leadership scholarship I guess.

JEREMY HORTON: So what was it like working for the Associated Press during the
Civil Rights Movement?

HOYT HARWELL: Well, that’s a whole other chapter. I covered a lot of those
things. I covered the Freedom Riders, from when they went from Montgomery to
Jackson, Mississippi. I followed them in my car. We went through Selma at 80
miles an hour with a highway patrol escort. I think Alabama was having trouble
and wanted to get them on in to Mississippi. So I covered that and then the
church bombing, the Birmingham church bombing. I worked in Atlanta when that
happened and I flew over that Sunday morning right after it happened and spent a
week here covering that story. That’s the two big ones.

JEREMY HORTON: Those are huge, yeah.

HOYT HARWELL: I went to Chicago in ‘68 to cover the Democratic National
Convention for Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina
newspapers. That was a wild week when the hippies tangled with Mayor Daley and
his people. I didn’t sleep much that week.

JEREMY HORTON: Yeah, I bet. Wow.

HOYT HARWELL: Got back to the Palmer House (where we were staying) finally late
at night and it was filled up with stink bombs and stuff like that. It was
horrible. That was a bad week. But other than that it was... That was a sort of,
indirectly racial story because there was a big dispute over whether they would
seat Alabama delegates who were white or black. That was ‘68. That was right
in the middle . . . they finally worked out a compromise where they gave half
and half and each one of them had half a vote as I recall.

JEREMY HORTON: Alright so one last question for you then I would love to look
through that with you a little bit: what is your most fond memory while
attending Howard?

HOYT HARWELL: Of Howard?

JEREMY HORTON: Yeah.

HOYT HARWELL: I think the working on this paper and also the friends that you
meet and still have some of them. A lot of them are gone now, of course, but you
meet a lot of them. But in working with the paper I was able to deal with a lot
of different people, writing stories about their organizations and their
activities and so forth so I pretty well had a good feel for everything that was
going on, on campus because of working on the paper, yeah. I enjoyed that.

JEREMY HORTON: Awesome. I am actually going to add one more question, were there
a lot of student, like, activities and social events on campus on a regular basis?

HOYT HARWELL: Oh yeah. A lot of things. The, the Greek societies had a lot of
things. Parties and dances.

JEREMY HORTON: Dances?

HOYT HARWELL: But they had all of those off campus.

JEREMY HORTON: I was going to say, there’s no dancing on campus.

HOYT HARWELL: They had those off campus. I was not a fraternity member. I
didn’t have the time to start with nor the money, but then they had what were
called the independents who didn’t belong to any of the great groups and we
had a lot of intramural basketball playing and the independents would play the
fraternities teams and that kind of thing. Yeah so there were always some things
going on.

JEREMY HORTON: Excellent. Well thank you very much for your time Mr. Harwell.

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Date	2014-01-23
Interviewer	Jeremy Horton
Interviewee	Hoyt Harwell
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Collection	STORI Collection
Accession	SUHist/SamfordHistory/006