I ran across a couple of full contact sheets of pictures taken at Rupp’s inauguration and with a heart full of hope I started to scan them to get a good look. But it turned out to be a sad disappointment. They were very fuzzy:
As I slipped them back into the folder, though, my hand hit something else: the negatives! The day is saved. Here’s the same shot scanned from the negative. Is it just me or does that look like someone might be hanging out a window at the far left?
Quite a few of them are worth a close look but for today here’s the most eye-catching. It must have been taken from somewhere in the Physics Building:
Which is where a photographer would have gone if he’d wanted to get the classic shot of the event from the roof of the arcade that connects Physics to Lovett Hall:
Bonus: Chosen at random, the 1931 commencement ceremony from the same vantage point.
There were trumpet players in the little balconies of Sewall and Physics. The late Paul Cooper, Professor of Composition and Theory and Composer-In-Residence wrote a fanfare for a bunch of trumpets (twelve? ten?) for the inauguration of President Rupp.