Not long ago we got back the fifty-three boxes of the Tsanoff Family collection from off- site storage at Iron Mountain, where it had been housed until the recent completion of the second module of the Library Service Center:

Before they were sent to the LSC I spent several happy hours making a rough catalog of the contents of each box. Purely by accident I put my hand on a wonderful letter from Corinne Tsanoff to her sister Eva, a high school teacher in Colorado. In it she brings the events of the 1962 Rice Semi-Centennial to vivid life.  There’s so much in here that I’m taking it in a couple of pieces, this first one about the afternoon inauguration of Kenneth Pitzer. It was mid-October, so it might well have been a cool day. But it wasn’t:

Suddenly this photograph of the inaugural ceremony, which I’ve seen dozens of times, feels different. It feels, I guess, hotter. And notice all the empty chairs in the back by the camera:

They all got up and crammed together into the shade of that huge oak tree on the corner! And it wasn’t so bad on the platform, which caught the shade of Lovett Hall:

Bonus: Mech Lab stays, Abercrombie goes.