I trust you all regularly read the What’s in Woodson blog that my beloved colleagues in the archives put out. It gives an insider’s look into some of the remarkable things in our collections, some Rice related, some not. If you do you will already know that we recently received two early Rice football posters, something we’d never seen before.

Here are the posters, graciously donated by reader Leigh Anderson ’71 (but you really should go look at the blog too!):

It can be really difficult to date things from Rice’s first years because there wasn’t a student newspaper or yearbook until 1916. If you take a look at the comments on the Woodson blog you’ll see that loyal reader Mike Ross helped figure out the date of the A&M game but it wasn’t clear whether the game with Trinity was played in 1915 or 1920. It occurred to me that one of the scrapbooks that were kept by those first students might hold the answer. And sure enough, I discovered that early sports hero Tiny Kalb had saved articles about nearly every game he played in from 1912 to 1916. He wasn’t exactly scrupulous about making sure the dates on the articles were preserved so I had to go through them one by one, carefully unfolding the fragile paper until I found what I was looking for.

And here it is, an account of the thrashing that the Owls administered to Trinity. The date on the back on October 2, 1915:

Note that Trinity was located in Waxahachie in 1915. I’ve wrestled with that before, here.

Bonus: Thursday night 8pm-10pm tune in to the “Chicken Skin Music” radio show on KTRU, featuring the Woodson’s own Norie Guthrie. It will feature music from KTRU’s archives and our collections. Most of it hasn’t been heard for decades.

Here’s a peek: