Al Povall follows up his popular Ole Miss sports oral history book with an inside look at the culture and social mores of the day in A Time Remembered, Ole Miss 1945-1970. Over 100 contributors tell us a wider story of Ole Miss during the same period, an era roughly embracing the tenures at Ole Miss of football coach John Howard Vaught and Chancellor J. D. Williams. More than an oral history, this book is a social history of a time long-past that begins with the returning World War II veterans and their lives in the newly thrown-together Vet Village and ends in 1970 with the Vietnam War raging, the miasmal cloud of pot smoke drifting about campus, and the sounds of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez echoing through dormitory and fraternity house halls. In between were Miss Americas, the Meredith Riot, Rhodes Scholars, fraternity and sorority formal dances, whiskey smuggled onto campus from Johnny's Shack in Marshall County, Papagallos shoes, Villager skirts and sweaters, khaki pants, Gant shirts, Weejun loafers and the advent of rock-and-roll, all great and small components of a important era in the history of Ole Miss. Rebels and non-Rebels alike will not want to miss these stirring accounts of that time period.
A native of Lexington, Mississippi, Al Povall graduated from Ole Miss in 1963 with a B.A. Subsequently, he served as a Naval Officer, including two combat tours in Vietnam, and then earned a J. D. from the Ole Miss Law School and a Master of Laws from the Yale Law School. Povall practiced law for 21 years, much of it representing BellSouth Corporation. Retired since 1998, he and his wife Janet live in Oxford, Mississippi. Povall is the author of The Time of Eddie Noel, which was a nominee for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters best nonfiction award in 2011.