For roughly the last year I’ve had two pictures stuck right next to each other on the desktop of my computer. About once a week I look at them intently and ponder. Here’s the first one, undated but found in the Bud Morehead collection which suggests early 1980s:

And the second, taken myself in July of 2015 while on a lovely tour of Autry House and Palmer Church with Patrick Hall and Michael LaRue:

That’s quite a photogenic little owl, isn’t it? And that’s exactly what I was aiming to capture. It was only when I got back and had a better look at all the pictures from that day that I noticed the Texas Historical Commission plaque. This is just the sort of niggling little detail that tends to drive me nuts but I never had enough spare time to track down when the thing went up. (Yes, I know that somewhere somehow there’s a simple way to find the answer but I have no interest whatsoever in simple answers.)

Then last week while searching for something else I stumbled upon the very thing that links the before and after pictures:

I wasn’t even surprised to see our own Stephen Fox and the late, lamented Ray Watkin Hoagland Strange mixed up in this affair. Now I can file those pictures away.

Bonus: For one of the more startling coincidences I’ve come across at the Rice History Corner take a look at this post about the predecessor to Autry House and in particular check out Reverend Hall’s comment.

Extra Bonus: