One of the major themes in the hit Broadway play Hamilton is creating and leaving a legacy after you have passed on so that you will always be remembered.
Unfortunately, the name Harvey Updyke will always be remembered in the city of Auburn, state of Alabama and everywhere college football fans reside. Fortunately, his legacy is exactly the opposite of what he was probably wishing for. In fact, it stands for everything that he despised.
The man that poisoned the beloved Toomer’s Corner oaks was, in so many ways, a sad man. He received his 15 minutes of fame in 2010 after calling into The Paul Finebaum Show and stupidly confessing to using herbicide to hopefully kill the trees after being angry of the result of the most recent Iron Bowl, one in which Auburn came back from a 24-0 deficit to win 28-27 and go on to win the national title.
In hoping to gain popularity and a fame status with Alabama fans, he responded to why he did it with that he just had “too much ‘Bama in me.”
His mission had failed epically. He and that quote became a running joke, even with followers of the Crimson Tide. He was banned from Tuscaloosa’s campus. No one at the university wanted anything to do with him. He had angered the people he wanted to endear himself to the most.
In 2014 as a reporter for The Auburn Plainsman, my professor John Carvalho and I sat in his office one day discussing if the tree poisoner had made his payments. Intrigued, I set out to find out. When my story broke that, out of the $796,731 he owed to Auburn, he had only paid $99 of it, the news went national. Updyke was appalled. He went on a Twitter rant saying that the news was false, that Finebaum was a liar and blaming every person that he could.
Somehow, his reputation soured even more.
But it isn’t about what Updyke did to the trees. It is the fact that what he was trying to accomplish, adding even more fuel to the fire that is the Auburn-Alabama rivalry that was already scorching hot, went the opposite direction. It made people question the nature of the rivalry and if it had gone too far. In April 2011, a horrific tornado hit the Tuscaloosa area resulting in 64-plus fatalities and more than 1,500 injuries. The Auburn community stepped up, including the athletics department, and went to the area to help out in any way possible.
It was payback for the Alabama community helping out after the Updyke news had first come out.
This had to be the last thing the tree poisoner wanted to see: his beloved Tide and despised Tigers working together. He didn’t kill those trees for this.
As the years passed and Auburn replaced the oaks and were able to start rolling the corner again after football victories, Updyke seemingly hated the fact that the attention wasn’t on him anymore. This resulted in a strange moment in November 2019 when, during a live airing of The Paul Finebaum Show, the tree poisoner called again.
“I didn’t mean it,” he said. “They’re were only trees.” God bless the few idiotic Alabama fans in the background that applauded such a statement.
Finebaum wasn’t going to have any of the tree poisoner’s spiel.
“You still don’t get it, do you,” Finebaum asked. “You destroyed something that is near and dear to an entire university and its fanbase and you’re coming on this program right now and laughing about it, joking about it … Frankly, I don’t know any Alabama fans who thought it was a good idea either.”
Finebaum then called the tree poisoner an idiot and lunatic and broke it down with, “Harvey, is this how you want to be remembered when you pass away?”
Updyke doesn’t have that decision anymore.
The final song in Hamilton talks about how you can’t control who lives, who dies and who tells the story of your life. No one needs to say anything about the tree poisoner because he did it all for us. He was someone who sought attention through the most drastic possible ways and, in doing so, brought the Auburn and Alabama communities a little closer together.
He will be remembered not for his dedication to the Crimson Tide, but as a criminal who never understood why he wasn’t being praised for his actions.
That’s the sad legacy of Harvey Updyke.