Monthly Archives: October 2014

From a Brown College scrapbook, late ’70s, it’s the great Soviet gymnast, Olga Korbut: I never get tired of this picture–the goofball look on her face just slays me. I actually had it as my desktop homepage image for a … Continue reading →

  Ike was here, right before the 1960 election. I know from correspondence in the Oveta Culp Hobby Papers that he was in Houston at her invitation and that she made the arrangements for him to speak at Rice. The … Continue reading →

Remember a couple weeks ago I got my hands on documentation of the oil shipments to the power plant? There were other things in that batch of papers that turned out to be quite intriguing, most notably this innocuous seeming set … Continue reading →

The William Ward Watkin negatives (with indices) that I discovered last week turn out to surpass even my wildest dreams. Here’s just the first example. Some of you will remember this striking photograph, which shows a rail car off to … Continue reading →

“What Would Margaret Think??” You’ve got to squint a little to see it , but that’s the question up on the wall at this Brown College party, sometime during the 1986-87 school year: Judging from the only photo of Margaret … Continue reading →

I had a very big day today. I’m working on a project about the earliest history of the campus, which means we’re back in the pictures that supervising architect William Ward Watkin took to document the construction of the first … Continue reading →

That’s how Arthur Benjamin Cohn signed everything. I’ve mentioned him several times before, always in passing and always in connection with some odd thing that turned up in his papers, but he deserves more respectful treatment. As Rice’s first (and … Continue reading →

I was out of town at the end of last week and when I got back I discovered that the Woodson had acquired a new scrapbook. For reasons that are too dull to go into I  don’t know right this … Continue reading →

One of my colleagues was recently working with some Campanile photos from the 1980s. I had a couple of good laughs (category: facial hair) but then was stopped in my tracks by two shots of the Shepherd School faculty. The … Continue reading →