I’m at home already and it’s only a quarter to four–we were set loose at 3:00 in anticipation, I guess, of sleet and snow making a mess of the evening commute.
Before I left the Woodson, I went looking for the earliest picture of a snow on campus that I could find. These photos are early indeed. They’re not dated, but judging by the military uniform you’d have to guess they were taken in the winter of 1917. I found them in the scrapbook of a young woman who graduated in 1920, so it all adds up. It looks like it was a pretty good snow for Houston, too.
Since I was in a hurry to get out of the library while the getting was good, I didn’t have time to check and see if there was anything in the Thresher about this. I’ll look tomorrow, assuming we survive.
According to this, 0.2 inches of snow fell in Houston on January 11, 1918:
http://www.wxresearch.com/snowhou.htm
One of the reasons I chose to attend Rice was that I could be assured it wouldn’t snow, unlike some cold place like MIT or Princeton. Of course, my freshman year, January 1973, it snowed. I remember listening to the radio that morning and hearing some DJ giving a traffic report. He reassured listeners not to worry — traffic was moving normally on the highways. Houston drivers going 50-60 mph on snow and no one is worried?
I saw a newspaper clipping with a picture on the wall at Prince’s Hamburgers that showed 4″ of snow on Rice in the 1960’s. That would have been something to see.
We (Rice students) once threw snowballs at a few passing cars on West Alabama – probably in the winter of 1958 … a few drivers returned for more having never been pelted with snow. It wasn’t much but it did actually snow.
1961? 1962?: start of spring term, the “Great Freeze.” Ice AND snow. City water mains frozen, broken, because who expects those temperatures in Houston? No mains, therefore no water for bathing, drinking, cooking, flushing. Construction-site porta-cans
trucked in courtesy Mr. George Brown of Brown & Root (aka Halliburton) , commemorated in cartoon cover of Campanile by the late (?) great Charlie Dent.
I’m going to be out of town the first part of next week, but I’ll see if I can find some pictures of this when I get back.
In the winter of my freshman year (1959-1960), we all traipsed thru snow on our way to Wm Masterson’s Amer History class at 8am. He then berated us for showing up! Said if it had been him, he would have been outside building snowmen or having snowball fights. BTW, the 1960 Campanile has some beautiful pics of that snow day on pp 7, 51, 52 & 53.