Every once in a while I see something so unexpected that I lose my breath. This afternoon I was scanning some more of the slides that were given to us by David Davidson ’57 ’58, enjoying his interesting eye and just generally cooking along smoothly. I noticed that there were some images of the inside of dorm rooms, something I’m always looking for, but it was too hard to make out exactly what they were without blowing them up. So I did.
And I suddenly saw–out of the blue–a dear friend, fooling around in the middle of a first floor hallway in South Hall in the autumn of 1954:
I’d love to know who wound up inside the barrels.
If you ever knew him there could be no mistaking that the young man in the glasses is Jim Kinsey ’56 ’59, who later became Rice’s Dean of Natural Sciences. In the fall of 1954 he lived in South Hall 113. David Davidson lived in 109. I wrote about Jim after his death almost exactly four years ago in this post and I still deeply lament his passing. So today, on this day, I am filled with gratitude to have him returned to me if even for a moment.
Bonus: I have several reader who routinely get to campus much earlier than I do. From two of them I received these images of a golden (if a bit damp) Rice morning.
