I came across this one today and thought it had the makings of a lovely post about the coming of spring and the hopeful end of the Texas “stay at home” order tomorrow. The May Queen was elected every year–you can see the 1929 candidates listed on the sign–and it looks like they’re all having so much fun:
Katrina Smith was the winner that year and she was really something, not just the May Queen but one of the Campus Beauties in the Campanile and the Rice Princess at the Dallas Fair:
It’s hard for me to understand how we can mourn for someone we never knew, or for something that happened 90 years ago but it’s a real thing. I was stunned when I learned that by the next spring Katrina Smith was dead of typhoid fever. This is from the May 22, 1930 Houston Chronicle:
Bonus: Keep on planting, though.
Wow! #6 Remington – fancy digs! On the other hand she had typhoid fever and we have Covid-19. The same rules still apply.
What a shocking and sad story.
Star Rice athlete Bob Quin, who is the namesake of the annual Bob Quin Award given to Rice’s best male athlete, also died of typhoid fever in 1930.
And there was this short article on page 10 of the April 26, 1929, Thresher:
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The discovery recently of six cases of typhoid fever among the students of Rice Institute led to an investigation of the source by the Houston Health Department. The investigation revealed that a cook at the Autry House who was infected with the disease was the source of the trouble.
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https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/be67/a5cfdc4e19602f7f01daf73a6aa941f3fa4a.pdf
The first picture doesn’t look like 1929, more early 60’s.
However, the four co-eds shown on the blackboard ballot — Eloise Hall, Anita Stewart, Maxine Jeans and Katrina Smith — were all mentioned in the March 15, 1929, Thresher, in which the election results were announced: Katrina as Queen (of course!) and Eloise & Anita as princesses.
https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/65249/thr19290315.pdf