Rice History Corner

It’s raining again but not this much. So far.

Bonus: Before it started raining it was fixing to rain. I just made it to my car.

For many years much of what the alumni association did was help manage the activities of a fairly large number of local Rice Clubs. This commonly took the form of bringing speakers from campus out to other cities or helping organize local events. This idea of sending films of Rice football games around to the chapters, by bus no less, is something different. I admit it’s clever and you can see how there would be demand for it but boy, it sure seems unwieldy:

I don’t know whether it ever got off the ground but I’m entertained by the notion of a reel of Rice game film circling Texas on a Trailways bus.

Bonus: Amanda says “Relax” and I think we should.

Here’s a photograph that left me puzzled for quite some time. A couple of things about it are clear: it shows Rice students protesting at KHOU and it’s pretty early in the 1960s, well before you’d expect to see any real protesting going on. What could have provoked their wrath?

Reading through some old Threshers this weekend (yes, I did that) I found the unlikely answer. It was March, 1960 and they were mad that the local television station wouldn’t carry a national Sunday afternoon broadcast of a College Bowl contest that a Rice team was participating in:

Note that they brought along an eight-piece band:

We lost to Dartmouth, by the way.

Bonus: I spent most of the weekend happily moving my books back into the house after having been separated from them for almost two years. This is how I would up reading bound volumes of the Thresher. The biggest mystery so far is how did I wind up with four copies of Tristam Shandy.

Oh, and here’s a random Rice picture, another one of our magnificent defunct drinking fountains:

There’s always one in every crowd.

Here’s Charles Dana Pennybacker ’20, who doesn’t really look the type:

Looking for something else in an old scrapbook I discovered this newspaper article attached to a small piece of paper that had come loose and lodged inside the back cover. This is quite a good story, a vibrant contemporaneous account of a really stupid incident. You can almost hear the chaos:

I’m not surprised at all by the harsh discipline but I was a bit taken aback by the idea that they would let the homeless students camp out in the woods on the west side of campus.

Bonus: Yesterday I found myself umbrella-less, waiting out a thunderstorm in Keck Hall. For the first time I noticed that the little medallion on the defunct drinking fountain in the main hallway on the first floor matches the medallions on the front doors. That’s nice.

These came off a contact sheet I was looking at today. (I won’t say why I was looking at it in order to protect the guilty.) They are simply images of a random day at Rice in 1974. I think they’re charming:

I’ve been considering running away from home lately but I can’t because my car in is in the shop. An airbag blew up. It was  . . . impressive.

It seems my only option is to hitch a ride with the Rice basketball team, headed north in December of 1957, dressed to thrill the Yankees:

This was a mediocre 13-11 season for the Owls and we lost all three games on this trip, falling to Wisconsin, Illinois, and St. Johns. I’m confident we had the best hats though.

Bonus: Everything has a tag now. I almost wonder when they’ll start tattooing the staff.