Monthly Archives: March 2011

Pictures from the “Unidentified” Pile

I spent yet another day today working through the pile of unidentified pictures from Public Affairs. I’m getting close to the bottom of the pile, but I’m nearly cross-eyed from trying to sort all these out–most of them are slides … Continue reading

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1920s Football and a Folly of My Own

I was looking for something in an early scrapbook this afternoon and I got caught up in some serious strangeness. The scrapbook belonged to a guy who played football at Rice in the middle of the 1920s–the John Heisman era, … Continue reading

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This Week in 1950

I had a few minutes today in between bouts of struggling to identify some of the thousands of images that came from the Public Affairs storage room. (That is to say, I had to do something else before I completely … Continue reading

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Friday Afternoon Follies

I noticed that I neglected to include a good picture of a young(ish) H.A. Wilson in yesterday’s post, so here he is chaperoning a picnic in 1916 0r 1917. The students loved to go in groups to the bay or … Continue reading

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The Physics Building and H.A. Wilson

I’ve been out of commission for a few days with some kind of bug. I’m still feeling a bit wobbly, but I didn’t want to let today pass without a mention of H.A. Wilson, Rice’s first professor of physics. They’re … Continue reading

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Ray Watkin Hoagland Strange, 1915-2011

I got word today that Ray Strange died peacefully at home this morning. She was just shy of her 96th birthday. The daughter of Rice’s first architecture professor, William Ward Watkin, Ray grew up on the Rice campus with the … Continue reading

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Friday Afternoon Follies

These follies are actually left over from yesterday, the feast day of St. Patrick, Bishop of Armagh and Enlightener of Ireland, which as we know is traditionally celebrated in the United States by the consumption of beer. Here are a … Continue reading

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An Aviation Question

Does anyone know what the heck this thing is? It could hardly look any weirder–it’s no wonder it drew a crowd. The picture is probably roughly 1933-35, and it’s right in the middle of campus, about where the new physics … Continue reading

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Willy Wrapped

I’m sure a lot of you have heard about the Willy Week jacks on campus last week. My favorite–and I think the favorite of most people on campus–was the wrapping up of the statue of William Marsh Rice for delivery … Continue reading

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Two aerial views from 1947-48

I had a comment on yesterday’s post about crops being planted on campus. It reminded me of these two pictures, which I recently scanned to use as illustrations of the explosive growth on campus in the wake of the Second … Continue reading

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