While I was looking through all that band stuff a few weeks ago I came across a photo of a rehearsal in 1927 that puzzled me for a bit:

Everything about the room said Rice to me but I couldn’t place it until about 3:00 in the morning when I abruptly knew that it was Autry House, designed by Rice architecture professor William Ward Watkin. Here’s the same room a couple of years ago:

I thought about it again today because I accidentally found another image of the room in a scrapbook that belonged to a student in the late 1940s:

You can get something of a sense from all this of how much use Rice students got from Autry House, which really was in all but official name the Student Center until the RMC was built. Sadly, almost all of the Autry House records were discarded in a cleanup some years ago but there still exist a handful of documents that shed light on its central role. Here, for example, is a usage report for eight months in the early 1920s, not all that long after the facility opened:

I do wonder about the difference between a church club and a church guild . . .

Bonus: Drat!