Captain Baker’s Scrapbook

A few weeks ago my colleagues in the Woodson were doing real librarian work–reorganizing some collections–as I stood around and watched. (It looked hard!) At various points I got interested and asked to see things, probably making a nuisance of myself. But I did find some completely new material. One example is, remarkably, Captain James A. Baker’s scrapbook.

Here’s the 1976 High Emprise article about the donation of the scrapbook by James A. Baker III:

 There are quite a few things in the book that I’ve never seen before. Here’s one of them, a clipping about the big shots in attendance at Rice’s 1940 football victory over Texas–that’s Baker in the middle of the bottom photo. (These old scrapbooks are not easy to deal with, by the way. Those rows of spots are some kind of mucilage type adhesive, supplemented here with tape. They make the pages wavy besides holding the clippings in with an iron grip.)

You can see in these two images above of Captain Baker that he had a very particular look, which I think could fairly be described as “stern.” I had always assumed that this look grew on him as he came to carry so many heavy responsibilities as an adult. But I was delighted to find in the scrapbook a much earlier picture of him as a military cadet, a handsome lad . . . with the exact same stern look on his face. I wish we had a baby picture so we could see if he was born with it.

Bonus: