I’ve been on the road today so I don’t have too much to say. I do want to show you something, though. Here’s another image from Pender Turnbull’s papers. I believe this is the kind of thing that the kids today refer to as “random.”
The problem here is obvious: I count five ladies hats. If forced to guess, I’d bet it’s the black one but I really don’t know. I feel pretty sure that it’s possible to figure this out by looking at pictures of the Garden Party after Commencement.
Speaking of random, here’s another one. Remember the post about the weird “Kid Parties” in the late teens? There were a bunch of pictures from one of them in the Turnbull collection, most of which I’d seen before. The thing is, though, these were all labeled. The most interesting label was on this one:
It identifies the party as being held at Lel Red’s house at 817 Caroline. (Here‘s another, quite different, post about her.) Most interestingly, it also identifies the house in the background as the home of Caesar Lombardi, one of Rice’s first trustees. There’s probably a way to figure that out as well, but I’m on vacation and won’t be getting to that any time soon.
Bonus: 
Hmmmm . . . . .
Such interesting design choices.
Swap the foreground and background colors, keep the inverted “W”s, add serifs and fix the kerning.
The new one looks good.
Now, who gets to keep the old one?
That’s an excellent question.
On houstonhistory.com there USED to be a spectacular slideshow of turn-of-the-century downtown mansions. There were dozens of them and they were almost all gone by 1920, lost to commercial development and “wealth flight” to places like Shadyside, Broadacres, and, slightly later, River Oaks. I’ll do a little more checking and see if I can find anything about the Lombardi house.