Here’s a photograph that left me puzzled for quite some time. A couple of things about it are clear: it shows Rice students protesting at KHOU and it’s pretty early in the 1960s, well before you’d expect to see any real protesting going on. What could have provoked their wrath?

Reading through some old Threshers this weekend (yes, I did that) I found the unlikely answer. It was March, 1960 and they were mad that the local television station wouldn’t carry a national Sunday afternoon broadcast of a College Bowl contest that a Rice team was participating in:

Note that they brought along an eight-piece band:

We lost to Dartmouth, by the way.

Bonus: I spent most of the weekend happily moving my books back into the house after having been separated from them for almost two years. This is how I would up reading bound volumes of the Thresher. The biggest mystery so far is how did I wind up with four copies of Tristam Shandy.

Oh, and here’s a random Rice picture, another one of our magnificent defunct drinking fountains: