There’s been a campus store for a very long time. I knew it had moved around and that the business model had changed over time but there really isn’t any single collection or file I could go to in order to sort it out. So I never tried–just too messy and time consuming for not much reward.
It turns out that that was a wise decisions because out of the clear blue sky the other day I came upon this nice little history of the enterprise written by long-time accounting professor Verne Simons:
The notes at the bottom are in President Pitzer’s handwriting so my best guess is that this was written near the beginning of his tenure in 1961, as he worked to understand Rice’s operations.
I have a couple of good images of the bookstore too. This first one was taken in 1951 when the store was in the basement of Fondren:
Nothing creepy about those heads at all.
And the second is undated (though it looks like the height of the crewcut era in the early ’60s). It’s clearly in the RMC but I’m having trouble understanding exactly where in the RMC. Any thoughts are welcome.
Bonus: An unusually alert faculty member sends this sad shot of the aftermath of last week’s cold snap. I walked over there today and it looks even more pitiful in person.
