I’m rushing off to a class right now, so I have little to offer but a story from today in the archives. I was looking for a picture of Bill Topazio, who was Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found several in the old files from News and Publications, each one a variation so subtle that the passage of time could only be judged by the width of his ties. Here’s the one I picked:
Well, once I have a box off the shelf I’m not going to just put it back because I found what I was looking for. This particular box had all the faculty whose names started with “T” and I was curious to see what photos there might be of Radoslav Tsanoff, the long serving philosophy professor who was one of Rice’s most legendary teachers. It turned out that there were some good ones, indeed. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now.
There was a whole sheet of pictures in Tsanoff’s file that were in the wrong place. They were photos of a completely different philosophy professor, Konstantin Kolenda. Kolenda, like Tsanoff, was a much loved teacher as well as a scholar and admininstrator. But his pictures were misfiled. Here’s one of him in his office:
Looking at the beautiful windows over his shoulder I realized what an odd image it is–it’s from when the Philosophy Department was housed in Lovett Hall. There aren’t many pictures of this around. The next one was even better. You can see Fondren through the window!
After I finished enjoying these, I put Professor Kolenda back in his own file.
Bonus: Lee Pecht, head of Special Collections, and Mary Bixby, director of Friends of Fondren Library, have just finished putting in a new exhibit at the front of the library. It’s a look at the early construction of the Rice campus and it is really, really good. If you have a chance, stop by and check it out. There are some great pictures and a couple of really unusual items. Here’s one example–this is a sketch from Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson of a door plate for the Administration Building. Both a copy of the sketch and the door plate itself are on display.
