I have to laugh at you people. I got over a dozen emails begging for a picture of the bad unit. What a bunch of weirdos.
So what the heck, here you go:
What I couldn’t quite capture in this shot is that at some point a piece of the roof at right fell in, allowing rain water to soak the boxes. Blech.
But! The good unit turned out to hold quite a lot of neat things. I was astonished to find papers that belonged to Fred Stancliff ’26. Stancliff became president of the R Association in 1927 and remained in that position for 63 years. One of the things I found today was a thank you note he received from architecture professor Bud Morehead in 1982 for lending him some materials for his book A Walking Tour of Rice University:
There’s also a box of what appears to be some files left behind by football coach Todd Graham when he skittered out of town after the 2006 season. I haven’t had enough time to determine whether they’re of any interest.
And there’s plenty of the usual oddball stuff that’s always scattered through rooms like this:
It’s endlessly entertaining.
That’s not nearly as bad as I had hoped.
Could be worse, but old shoes and a cassette tape at least get it into the “bad” category. The unlabeled boxes are the best part.
If only you could smell it!
The phone is a product of ROLM Corporation, which was founded by Gene Richeson, the late Kenneth Oshman, Walter Loewenstern, and Robert Maxfield. All four men studied electrical engineering at Rice University and earned graduate degrees at Stanford University.
Yep. Used a phone like that for many years. The “Camp-On” feature was nice. If you got a busy signal from a campus extension in those pre-voicemail days, you could “camp” on the extension and it would ring back to you when the person hung up their other call.
I’ve seen offices worse than that. The wonky mini blinds are a nice touch.
A storage shed/unit with windows and a roof weak enough to collapse and leak?
What do they look like from the outside?
Are they commercial units that are designed to be storage units? Or are they, instead, old structures built for some other purpose(s) (if so, what were those purposes?) and later abandoned and repurposed as junk rooms, errrr … storage units?
I’ve been pondering this myself. It looks like it might have originally been something like a temporary construction shed. I think it was once just one thing and at some point they divided it into two with sheetrock. I have some bad history with this same structure, by the way, dating back to the renovation of the gym a decade or so ago.
Do tell about that decade-old bad history. 🙂
“…football coach Todd Graham”
Was that the coach who declared on one day he was going to be at Rice forever, but the next day signed with Tulsa (I think), because he just had to return to his “Alma Mater”?
However, he left “Alma Mater” a year or 2 later to sign with another school.
Come on, John Wolda, bring us up to date on this: I know you recall all the details, even though you are in 26th place on the RUBPA Trivia Quiz.