The Woodson recently received a wonderful and unexpected gift from the family of H.A. Wilson. I’ve written before about his daughter Joan and my discovery of her high school scrapbook in her father’s papers. Much to my delight her daughter has now sent us Joan’s scrapbook from her years as a Rice student. Here it is, still in the box:
And inside the front cover, this:
I’ve been reading it slowly and carefully. Joan was a meticulous record keeper, saving clippings, letters, report cards, drama programs, and noting month by month in the margins all her social activities. It provides an extraordinarily rich portrait of a young woman’s life on campus in the middle of the 1930s and I look forward to writing more about her soon.
Here’s a little snippet from the first page, Joan getting registered:
An architecture student taking Math 100 …!
(full disclosure: just seeing “Math 100” makes my blood run a bit cold. That class was my downfall!)
You’re sure not the only one!
Oh my, two Melissa Kean(e)s? How rare is that, in a small community like Rice?
As for Archi students taking Math 100, my recollection is that they took both Math 100 and Math 200 in the late 1950s, but I could be wrong. Math 100, for sure.
Hi Melissa – interesting that she first attended St. Mary’s in Raleigh, N.C. – looks like for one year after high school. I grew up in North Carolina. Hope you are well, Betsy Wittenmyer
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The house at 5510 Chenevert is still there. HCAD says it was built in 1928.
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