I got an email last night from reader Bill Peebles ’70. It was short and sweet: I don’t know what we were thinking, but one Sunday morning we drove my ’64 Volkswagen through the quad.
I can’t say exactly why this is so funny to me but I had a really good laugh over the pictures. I’m not sure you could get away with it today:
Bonus:
Melissa, when I was an undergraduate back in the mid ’50s I bought a little Fiat 500 from a Rice grad student. It was slightly smaller than a VW Bug. I drove it all over the campus. Campus security at that time consisted of Mr. Valentine (a very nice elderly man) who came on duty around sundown, drove his own car as he patrolled the campus, and left at sunrise. I never drove on campus when he was on duty because I didn’t want to cause him any trouble.
I have heard stories about a VW Beetle having been brought into the Sid Rich Commons and placed on top of two dining room tables. I wonder if this is the same car.
No, it is not.
Great photos, Melissa, except for the one showing those monstrosities in the engineering quad. A classmate of mine from New Orleans, Charlie Nutter, went to Europe with his parents in the summer of 1957. He came back with a small Fiat, to which classmates soon attached a large wind-up key in the back. As I recall, it was not much of a reliable car, perhaps justifying FIAT as an acronym (Fix It Again, Tony). Charlie left Rice after that year and graduated from Tulane.
Good looking VW. When I was in high school, late 50’s, 6 of us turned a teachers VW sideways in his garage, wasn’t easy but we did it and he slept through the whole thing. Acronym for FORD was “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
When I was at Rice (63-67) security was supplied by small number of officers provided by the Pinkerton Agency ( in Rice jargon, Pinkies). They patrolled campus in a VW Beetle ( I don’t remember color). From time to time, if the VW was unattended, Rice students delighted in picking the car up and moving it. I don’t think this was the car, because it is too far from the street.
We carried a TR6 into the Wiess Commons in the spring of ’83. It took the owner a bit of work to push it back out the doors.
But did you take pictures??
Let me check…
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