I’m out of town at a meeting for a couple of days, so all I have to offer right now is whatever images happen to be on my laptop. These are mostly things that I’ve downloaded to use in various talks and presentations, but there are a few that are just random images that I wanted to keep copies of because they made me laugh. Here are a couple from the Hackerman era:

Norman Hackerman was an avid squash player for his entire adult life. He was also notoriously tight with the university’s money. For years I had heard a story around campus that went like this: when it was announced that Norman was going to be the next president of Rice, the campus squash players were elated. Surely this meant that the sauna-like squash courts in the gym would now be air-conditioned! But not so fast. What happened instead was that he had only a single court air-conditioned, which was the one he played on.

I always suspected that this story was apocryphal–it captures some things about Norman so perfectly that I didn’t see how it could possibly be true. But about a year ago, looking through some old F&E papers I found a bill for installing air-conditioning for one squash court. This picture makes me smile every time I look at it. If you zoom in, you can see that he’s wearing a University of Texas t-shirt. That makes me smile a second time.

This is a Rice University PHT (Putting Husband Through) degree. It was received by one of our Woodson volunteers in a Graduate Wives Commencement ceremony that was held in Cohen House in 1973. That’s really Hackerman’s signature on there. One hardly knows what to say, but I’ll bet that was a heck of a party.