I came in today to a glorious surprise:
Thanks to the efforts of my colleague, Norie, a couple of generations worth of Brown College coordinators and an untold number of students, we have received safely into our care a large number of Brown scrapbooks. They’re all good but a handful are really stunning–not merely labeled but actually annotated, with explanations that are understandable to an outsider forty years later. My head is swimming from all the new information and it’s going to be a while before I can integrate it into my mental picture of Rice.
In the meantime, there’s this. Kids in a dorm, goofing around with a bunch of stuffed animals in 1977:
Of all the pictures in all these scrapbooks, these are the ones that jumped out at me. That’s because the goofball with Snoopy on her hat is my dear friend from the graduate program in Southern History here at Rice. She was Patti Bellis in these photos; now Dr. Patricia Bellis Bixel, Professor of History and Associate Academic Dean at Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine. She’s a fine historian and a really wonderful writer, mostly on topics in the history of Galveston and southern maritime history as well as on historical southern photography. I suspect some of you would be quite interested in her work. Take a look.