Just a few tidbits today.

First, for all you commencement fans out there, check out this link to the Woodson Research Center blog. There’s a brand new on-line collection of Rice commencement programs and ephemera where you can get your fill of all kinds of graduation-related materials. Go have a look! I promise you won’t be sorry.

Next, I was looking around inside my laptop and I discovered that at some point I had scanned a picture of the Physics lecture hall taken circa 1916. The room remains remarkably unchanged today, but zoom in and you’ll see that the chalk holder I talked about in a recent post was not there! I had assumed it was original, but it must have been installed later to deal with some sort of insufficient chalk storage situation. I guess they run through a lot of it over there.

Next, one day last week, in classic fashion, I was looking for something but I found something else. Here is the first page of the contract for the organ in the chapel. I was surprised that it was so short: the whole thing is just over two pages long. The organ was built and installed for just over $19,000. It was Newton Rayzor who chose the builder.

Finally, Mike Ross sent me a link to the obituary of Louis Girard, who I featured in a post this week about Rice hockey. I’m passing it along here. Go look at this too. Girard passed away only last December, at the age of 92. He came from Spokane, Washington, which was also the birthplace of my wonderful son-in-law. A lot of the hockey players at Rice in were transplanted northerners–one year U of H dominated the city league after two kids from Montreal enrolled there.