I found this photo of some Rice engineering students on a group outing several years ago in Carl Knapp’s scrapbook. (That’s him second from left in the middle row.) I liked the image but didn’t really know what it was all about:
This morning I was looking for something in an early issue of the Thresher and I bumped into the explanation:
I didn’t know that there had been an assembly plant here and I had no idea that Ford assembly plants had sociologists in them. I’m pretty sure, by the way, that this plant later became the Maxwell House Coffee plant that you could see straight up Texas Avenue.
Bonus: The sight of Edgar Odell Lovett wearing Mardi Gras beads was so perfectly incongruous it made me laugh out loud.
Yes, the Maxwell House plant is what originally was the Ford assembly plant.
Story Sloanes Gallery on Facebook has some pictures of that plant.
When the wind was just right, you could smell the coffee plant and the Nabisco factory on Almeda at the same time from the sixth floor of Lovett.