I’ve been poking around the sallyport recently and have realized that I’ve never talked about the renaming of the Administration Building for Edgar Odell Lovett. This was done in a ceremony held on the afternoon of Thursday, December 4, 1947, just more than a year and a half after Lovett’s retirement.
Here is President Emeritus Lovett at that occasion, looking quite pleased, along with Rice trustees Harry Wiess, Lamar Fleming, Harry Hanszen, William Kirkland, and George Brown. Dr. Houston, Gus Wortham, and Frederick Lummis are at right:
They’re standing right in front of where the plaque would eventually go but it isn’t there yet. A quick search of the files turned up the fact that they knew almost immediately what they wanted it to say. A bit trickier was the matter of how to lay it out. Here’s the first draft:
Somehow not quite right. A little squashed, no? It went through a couple more iterations before we got to this one, which spreads it out nicely over three sections of stone:
And here it is today (yesterday, actually), spread out nicely over three sections of stone:
Bonus: A faithful reader with what seems to be too much time on his hands (No, it’s not Mike Ross . . . this time) has solved the mystery of Mrs. Pitzer’s coffee. It was part of Rondelet weekend:
