During the summer that Radoslav Tsanoff spent teaching at the University of Texas in 1925 he had three more or less constant companions. They were Clyde Glascock, who was quite easy to identify, and the more mysterious Arrowood and Mrs. Arrowood. All the members of this little circle spent a great deal of time together, swimming, dining, visiting in the evenings. Tsanoff’s letters are full of references to them, as in this one, written on August 10th, in which he describes Mrs. Arrowood’s thoughts on hair bobbing, a procedure then under consideration by Corinne Tsanoff (she didn’t do it, by the way):

Last week as I dug around looking for the members of the triumfeminate much to my delight I stumbled upon the identity of Mr. Arrowood, who turns out to be another member of the class of 1918. The caption here is quite interesting:

Arrowood’s silence may well have been partly temperamental but my guess is that it had more to do with the fact that he was a full grown man when he entered the Institute. A native of North Carolina, he already had degrees from Davidson College and the Union Theological Seminary. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1915 and was pastor of a congregation in Houston part of the time he was attending Rice. I think it’s safe to say he had little in common with the crowd hanging out in the sallyport. (I took a peek at his Rice master’s thesis, entitled “Thomas Hill Green’s criticism of hedonism,” and can confirm  that he was not the sort of fellow to be throwing dice in the cloisters.) After Arrowood left Rice he earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, then returned to Houston and joined the Rice faculty. He stayed until 1928  when he went to UT, where he spent the rest of his career as a scholar of the history and philosophy of education. (That summer of 1925 he, like Tsanoff, was a Rice faculty member teaching summer school in Austin.)

Quiet he may have been but he does seem to have made some friends among the student body while he was at Rice. While researching triumfeminate member Helen Browder Barber I came across her marriage certificate. Recall that she married fellow Cornell doctoral student Glenn Gray on Christmas Day of 1925. I was surprised but not surprised to see who married them:

Bonus: Mrs. Arrowood, another North Carolinian, was named Flora. While her husband was on the faculty at Rice she sometimes directed the student theatrical productions.

Extra Bonus: Table for one. Sad!