The other day I was looking for something in a scrapbook I’d used many times before and I noticed a photograph that had somehow escaped my attention. (No man ever steps in the same scrapbook twice!) It is very early, probably taken in either 1914 or 1915, and it shows Philosophy Professor Radoslav Tsanoff and his wife Corinne, newly arrived at the newly opened Rice Institute:

That’s an unpaved Main Street behind them.

They had married in 1912 after meeting at Cornell, where Corinne Stephenson was an undergraduate and Tsanoff had studied for his Ph.D. And now they were off together on the adventure of their lives in this raw, rapidly growing city.

I’ve never written enough about him, mainly because it’s such a daunting task. I’ll try to do something about that soon. But there is also something to be said about them. They seem to have been one of those couples that were vividly engaged in the whole world around them–in educational institutions, civic institutions, and cultural institutions– always with great energy and together.

I remembered later that Konnie Kolenda, Tsanoff’s long time colleague in the Philosophy Department, spoke at an event in their honor in 1973 and I was able to track down a copy of his remarks:

Here they are at the dedication of Lovett College in 1971: