After cancelations due to COVID-19 in 2020 and a torrential rainstorm in 2021, the Welcome Back Festival returned to College Avenue in downtown Clemson on August 22^nd kicking of the Fall semester and raising a record $23,000 toward student scholarships.

For 32 years in August, the Clemson Alumni Association and the Student Alumni Council (SAC) have sponsored the Welcome Back Festival, the premier kick-off event of the academic year at Clemson University. Each year, the festival features local vendors offering a variety of merchandise and food in exchange for purchased festival tickets. The money raised during the festival supports the Student Alumni Council Scholarship Endowment Fund supporting student scholarships.

Jim Clements, president of Clemson University, and Mayor of Clemson, Robert Halfacre opened the festival which is held in partnership with the City of Clemson and the Clemson City Police Department. Following the welcome the Clemson University Pep Band, Cheerleaders and Rally Cats performed for the festival crowd. Closing out the evening was local band, Risky Business, featuring current Clemson students Austin Allen, Sam Buchanan, Robert Farmer, Thomas Love, Egan Purnell and Whit Long.

SAC President, Lane Josey was thrilled about the record funds raised stating, “the impact that we can have on current and future Clemson students with the proceeds from the Welcome Back Festival will be life changing. Thank you to all the students, alumni and community members who helped make this possible.”

Alumni Association Executive Director, Wil Brasington, echoed Josey’s sentiments and commended the SAC, the City of Clemson and the Clemson City Police Department on their role in the festival. “We could not ask for better partners,” said Brasington. “The Welcome Back Festival would not have been this successful after a three-year hiatus without the planning and implementation by SAC as well as the support of the City of Clemson and its police department.

If you are interested in supporting the Student Alumni Council Scholarship Endowment Fund, visit https://iamatiger.clemson.edu/giving and use the “Search for a Fund” feature typing “Student Alumni Council (S.A.C.) Scholarship Endowment” as the search criteria. A gift of any amount can help make a difference in the lives of Clemson students.

For details about future Welcome Back Festivals and other Clemson Alumni Association events, visit alumni.clemson.edu.

Calling All Teachers, Counselors, Coaches and Educational Leaders! 

As the time draws near for a new and uncertain academic year, we want to salute all of our alumni who work in the PK-12 education field – teachers, principals, school and district administrators, counselors, coaches, anyone who works to make schools happen. Please complete the form below and send us photos of you at work or with your families, and we will share some of your stories on our social accounts in the coming weeks. 

Calling All Healthcare Heroes and Essential Workers

Thank you for joining the Clemson Alumni Association and IPTAY at the College Football Playoff National Championship! Complete the form below to register to win a Dabo Swinney autographed football.

Clemson needs your help!

We are creating a very special video for the ring ceremony that highlights the moments our Alumni have celebrated while wearing their Clemson ring.

We need your help. If you have video or photos of celebrations that you would like to share with the world, we would love to see them and perhaps use them on the video!

We’re currently compiling all of the best of the best content to show on the video.

Here’s what we are looking for:

• Weddings
• Anniversaries
• Birthdays
• Vacations
• Special moments in your life
• Clemson events
• Generations of Clemson graduates with rings

We prefer scenes where the people in the video are prominently wearing their Clemson ring.

It can be as rough and “amateurish” as possible. The only thing we ask is that all videos be horizontal.

Please upload the highest resolution possible with no compression or resizing. Complete the form below to submit your Clemson Ring Moments Videos! 

Accidents
Written by Kelly Durham

By the beginning of his senior year, Gus Groce must have known that his choices about how he would spend his immediate future were limited.  If he was lucky, he might get to pick the color he would wear, but he would almost certainly be wearing a uniform of the United States military.

Lethco Augustus Groce, Jr. of Lyman was a member of Clemson College’s Class of 1941.  Gus was an architecture major, an honor student and a member of Minaret, the architecture honor fraternity on campus.  Although serving his senior year as a cadet private, Gus had demonstrated military aptitude, having been selected as the best drilled sergeant in his battalion during his junior year and having marched with the Pershing Rifles drill team and the Sophomore, Junior and Senior Platoons.  In addition, like so many of his classmates, Gus had completed ROTC summer training at Fort McClellan, Alabama where he had qualified as a marksman on the rifle range.  He was a young man of varied talents, displaying interests in music and art as well.  Following his graduation, Gus was commissioned and then transferred from the infantry into the Army Air Forces.

Scrambling to prepare America to face the perils threatening from Europe and in the Pacific, Army chief of staff George Marshall and Army Air Forces chief Hap Arnold had embarked on an unprecedented peacetime expansion of the Army, to include its air arm.  When the war in Europe started in September 1939, the Army Air Corps consisted of only eight hundred first-line combat aircraft and less than 25,000 personnel.  By the time Gus Groce earned his pilot’s wings at Valdosta, Georgia, the Army Air Forces was in the midst of an expansion that would carry it to more than 2.4 million members and nearly 80,000 aircraft.

Tens of thousands of young men had to be taught to pilot the most complex aircraft of the day and they had to be taught quickly.  Young men, many of them on their own for the first time, combined with the pressures of war, rigid military organizations, complicated equipment and accelerated training regimens, invariably led to accidents.

Gus Groce had been assigned to the 16^th Bomb Squadron at Hattiesburg Air Base in Mississippi.  The 16^th was training on the A-20 Havoc, a twin-engine light bomber.  Part of the training called for formation flying.

On Saturday, September 5, 1942, Gus was dispatched as the copilot in an A-20 piloted by Second Lieutenant George Pritchard.  Sergeants George Kaiser and Floyd Lones rounded out the crew.  Their aircraft would be flying in a two-ship formation with another A-20 piloted by Lieutenant Lawrence Bever.  About 1400 hours, approximately seven miles north of New Augusta, Mississippi, the left wing of Bever’s aircraft struck Gus’s airplane, tearing away the right elevator and the horizontal stabilizer and rendering the aircraft uncontrollable.  Gus’s airplane went into a spin and crashed killing all aboard.  Bever’s aircraft was able to return to base, but was significantly damaged.

The accident that claimed the lives of Groce, Pritchard, Kaiser and Lones was one of thirty-nine involving stateside Army Air Forces’ aircraft that day.  Five of these including fatalities.  For that first week of September 1942, the Army Air Forces averaged more than thirty-six accidents per day, most of them relatively minor—but not all. On average, nearly five accidents per day resulted in fatalities.

Such was the cruel arithmetic of America’s rapid military build-up, an expansion that would, along with American industrial production, sound the death knell for the Axis dictators and result in an Allied victory three years later.

Lethco Augustus Groce, Jr. is buried at the Wellford Baptist Church Cemetery.

For more information about Second Lieutenant Lethco Augustus Groce, Jr., see:

http://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/lethco-augustus-groce-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor see:

http://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

http://www.aviationarchaeology.com/src/AARmonthly/Sep1942S.htm

Germ Warfare

The biggest killer in 1918 wasn’t the Great War, as the First World War was known at the time. In fact, the war, with all of its attending miseries, was a distant second—a very distant second.

James Goldsmith was a Greenville boy who enrolled at Clemson College as a member of the Class of 1914. Goldsmith and his fellow cadets lived in the original barracks lined up behind the Main Building and its clock tower. Johnstone, Lever, Tillman, Donaldson, Wannamaker, Bradley and Manning were the College’s life trustees. The youthful Walter Merritt Riggs was the College president and taught a Bible class, as did English professor D. W. Daniel. We don’t know much about Goldsmith’s campus experience, but we do know that by 1918, he had enlisted in the Army and was training at the officer training school at Camp Hancock in Augusta, Georgia.
Before Goldsmith could complete his training, the war ended with the November 11 armistice and the doughboys began returning home—but they were not alone.

An outbreak of influenza had occurred in the spring of that year. It was first identified at Army posts around the country. The movements of large formations of soldiers across the country and across the sea helped spread the flu virus, but it was a second, more virulent wave of the disease that struck the hardest. The first outbreaks were noted in September, in Boston, where shipments of men and war supplies kept the harbor full of traffic. Soldiers, sailors and merchant seamen packed into the tight confines of ships carried the flu germs into the city and to wherever their cargo was bound. Within weeks, the illness was spreading across the United States and with devastating effect.

It was often referred to as the Spanish Flu, but its origins in Spain are doubtful. Spain, a neutral in the war, had no press censorship and so cases of the flu—including the illness of the King—were widely reported. The United States, Great Britain, France and Germany, as belligerents, suppressed reports of the growing pandemic due to fears of the effect such news would have on the morale of peoples at war.

In October, more than 200,000 Americans died from the flu. The end of the war on November 11 led to widespread celebrations—parades, parties, worship services—that brought thousands of people into close proximity creating ideal conditions for the disease to spread. In stark contrast to earlier strains of the flu, the segment of the population hardest hit was those between the ages of 24 and 35 years of age. Researches hypothesized that the flu triggered an overreaction of the body’s immune system. Ironically, the stronger defensive reactions of young adults ravaged their bodies. The weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths.

The pandemic, which would rage across the globe into 1919, killed between twenty and forty million, far more even than the infamous Black Death Bubonic Plague of the mid-1300s. Twenty-eight percent of Americans fell ill and 675,000 died, including James Goldsmith.
Goldsmith, who just eighteen months earlier had wed, died on November 29, less than three weeks after the end of the War to End All Wars. He is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Piedmont.
The effect of the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 was so severe that it dropped the average life span in the United States by ten years.

For more information on James Goldsmith see:

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

Too Young to be Old

To most of us, 33 doesn’t seem very old.  But, when you’re surrounded by young men in their late teens and early 20s, your perspective might change a bit.  Forrest Hugh Coleman, Jr. of Laurens found himself in just this situation when he was called to active duty in November 1942.

Coleman enrolled in Clemson College just as the Great Depression began to squeeze the momentum from the United States economy.  A member of the Class of 1933, Coleman was selected as the Best Drilled Cadet during his sophomore year of 1930.  Coleman was an electrical engineering major and served as vice president of the Laurens County Club, was a member of the Sabre Club and attended ROTC training at Fort McClellan, Alabama.

Coleman married the former Caroline Burroughs of Augusta, Georgia.  They were the parents of a daughter, Sue, and son, Forrest Hugh III.

In October 1940, the United States implemented its first peace-time draft.  Draftees were called to federal service for a twelve month term to undergo basic military training.  Fearful of the international situation, President Roosevelt in the summer of 1941 asked Congress to extend the draftees’ tours of duty beyond twelve months.  After the United States entered World War II, a new Selective Service Act made men between 18 and 45 eligible for military service and required all men between the ages of 18 and 65 to register.

By April 1942, the Army was inducting young men at the rate of almost 150,000 a month. The supply of 1-A men, those deemed “available for military service,” from the 1940 registration was running out.  Local draft boards began eying slightly older registrants.  Coleman, when called to duty in November, had already passed his 33^rd birthday, making him senior to most of the men with whom he would soon be serving.

Coleman was assigned to the 3^rd Infantry Division which in August of 1944, two months after the D-Day invasion in Normandy, would land across the beaches of southern France as part of General Alexander Patch’s 7^th Army.  By September 11, 7th Army had linked up with Patton’s 3rd Army, and it seemed as if the war was nearly over. The 3^rd Infantry Division reached the Rhine River on November 26, but was ordered to dig in and hold the position due to logistical restraints. Having reached the very border of Hitler’s Third Reich, Coleman was killed in action three days later.

First Lieutenant Coleman was survived by his wife, two children and his sister.  In 1948, his body was returned to the United States.  He was interred at Westview Memorial Park in Laurens.  He is also memorialized on the Laurens War Memorial.

For additional information about Forrest Hugh Coleman, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/forrest-hugh-coleman-jr/

For more information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll-of-honor/