I’m afraid I’m not quite ready to give up on commencement yet. A long, uneventful summer stretches in front of me so I’d might as well use up each and every picture that I dug out this year. In an earlier post about the 1968 ceremony I mentioned some interesting photos of a reception that was held either just before or after the ceremony. Here are a couple of them. (There are ten different images of this group on the contact sheet, by the way, so I’m not the only one who finds them fascinating. It took some restraint not to post all of them.)
They are, of course, the dean, Holmes Richter, President Ken Pitzer, and William Masterson, at this moment president of the University of Chattanooga.
Richter was last seen on this blog in a photo taken the following winter, eight months after the reception pictured above, at the faculty meeting where Masterson was announced as Pitzer’s replacement as Rice president. Just a few minutes before that photo was taken Richter had prematurely moved for adjournment, a motion that most decidedly did not find a second.
Bonus: This was also on the contact sheet, right in the middle of all the images of these three guys. It has to be Richter’s hand, right?
Update: An alert reader with a failing memory asks somewhere in the comments whether commencement wasn’t moved to the quad in the early 80s. So rather than relying on my own often faulty memory I went and checked the programs. It turns out I was right–it moved from the east lawn to the quad and from evening to morning in 1986. I think things may have been getting a bit out of hand in the evening ceremonies.
My Commencement in 1985 was the last one on the east lawn and in the evening. At the time there was a lot of concern about people bringing coolers and showing up after having been drinking all day. That, plus the heat, was the biggest reason they moved it to the morning.
I also graduated in 1985. I remember an exasperated Dr. Hackerman, at his last commencement as President, saying something to the effect of “If you’ll just quiet down, we can get on with this!”
Now that you mention it, I remember that, too.
Better chance of isolated thunderstorms most afternoons. Of course, that didn’t apply on Saturday. I was all set to participate in my second commencement in the gym!