Friday Afternoon Follies, With A 1954 Mystery

This unlabeled piece of architectural criticism emerged from a large bunch of boxes that I dragged out of the RMC this summer:

Ley Center gas station copy

 

There’s no date but it was from before the time of Photoshop, as the gas pumps were actually cut out of another photo and glued onto this one. In those days mischief required more manual skill.

Bonus: Here’s another image from the fall of 1954. Does anyone know where it was taken?

1954 bulletin board

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9 Responses to Friday Afternoon Follies, With A 1954 Mystery

  1. C Kelly says:

    I would bet that first photo comes from ’74 or ’79 when we had the oil embargoes. If I knew car models better, I could date it more accurately.

  2. almadenmike says:

    I’m going to guess that the bulletin board was somewhere in the Fondren Library. The two rooms mentioned in signs large enough to be read in the photo — Exam Room and B-17 (Lost articles) — were located there, and the signs don’t indicate that the rooms are in some other building, so I’m thinking they’d be in the same one. Perhaps alums of that era would recall the specific location.

    BTW, the March 16, 1956, Thresher had an article about B-17 on page 6 (scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/66140/thr19560316.pdf).

  3. marmer01 says:

    B-17 is where you go to inquire about lost articles of any nature. And the Christian group apparently met in the “Exam Room,” which sounds like it belongs in a doctor’s office. The car is a 1986-88 Nissan Sentra coupe. Like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/86-88_Nissan_Sentra_coupe.jpg/800px-86-88_Nissan_Sentra_coupe.jpg

  4. Karl Benson says:

    I think “B” means basement. This may be outside the bookstore/snackbar that was in Fondren basement. Wasn’t it called the Owls’ Nest?

  5. George Webb '88, '91 says:

    Before the Ley Student Center (shown in the first picture) was built in the mid-1980s, the north entrance to the Rice Memorial Center also had a semicircular drive and carport. As a freshman in 1984-84, I recall some upperclassmen referring to that area as “the gas station”.

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