Undated, I believe on a door in Wiess:
Bonus: New wires holding up the Italian cypresses! These ones here, along Sewall, are actually in pretty good shape. I’m going out on a limb and predicting that the ones by Rayzor will be the next to meet their doom.
Oh, those zany architects!
Unlike the jokes in the Thresher, this is actually funny. The high-spirited, almost goofy tone is characteristic of Rice in the early decades.
What caught my eye was something small–the play was presented in “The Blue-drawing Room Theater.” Where was that? Luckily, I got an answer without having to work for it:
Bonus: If you’re keeping track of these things, Mr. Fendley ’17 was also on the track team.
In the papers of long-time Rice English professor George Williams appears a letter from a young man once his student, then his friend, William Goyen. It’s a remarkable letter on its own, urgent, written aboard the USS Casablanca at the end of World War II as suddenly Goyen (rather than the Navy) was responsible for his own future. I hardly know what to say about it.
Goyen badly wanted to be a writer, and he succeeded in that ambition. His papers are in the Woodson and the brief biography at the beginning of the finding aid gives a broad sense of his career:
Charles William Goyen, author, editor, and teacher, was born in Trinity, Texas, on April 24, 1915 and moved with his family to Houston at the age of eight. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Rice University (then Institute) in 1937 and 1939, respectively. After teaching for one year at the University of Houston, he left to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Returning after five years, he left Houston to pursue his work as a writer, residing at various times in New Mexico, Europe, New York, and California. His East Texas origins, however, were to have an enduring influence on the speech patterns and cultural characteristics reflected in his writings.
His first novel, House of Breath, was published to critical acclaim in 1950. Subsequent publications included the novels In a Farther Country (1955), The Fair Sister (1963), and Come the Restorer (1974); Selected Writings (1974); short story collections Ghost and Flesh (1952), The Faces of Blood Kindred (1960) and The Collected Stories (1975); the non-fiction A Book of Jesus (1973); and plays The House of Breath (1956), The Diamond Rattler (1960), Christy (1964), House of Breath Black/White (1971), and Aimee (1973). He also created lyrics for the film Left-Handed Gun (1958) and served as translator for The Lazy Ones by Egyptian author Albert Cossery.
In addition to being a writer, he was instructor of English at the New School for Social Research in New York City, 1955-60; Associate in English at Columbia University, 1964-66; senior editor in the trade department at McGraw Hill, 1966-71; and visiting Professor of English at Brown University, 1973. He married the actress Doris Roberts in 1963.
Among awards he received were music awards for words and music from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (A.S.C.A.P.) in 1964, 1965, 1968, 1970, and 1971; an award from the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters, 1950; and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rice University in 1977. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1950 and 1952 and a Ford Foundation grantee in 1963-64. He died in Los Angeles of leukemia in August 1983, two months before his novel “Arcadio “was published. Since then a number of his other late works have been edited and published.
This biography, however precise, doesn’t even attempt to capture the strangeness of Goyen’s life and work, which is profound. For that, a Texas Monthly article from last fall, Voice of the Pines by Karen Olsson, is helpful. As I often say (and always mean), it is well worth your time.
I’ve been sitting around this afternoon looking at some images I scanned and then forgot about over the last year and I was quite taken with these two by Rice Accounting professor Verne Simons. No wonder I scanned them!
They’re not dated but I can tell from aerial photos and from the size of the trees on the north side of the Administration Building that they must have been taken in the early 1930s.
(We’ve seen something very close to this first image once before, by the way, a picture found in Dr. Lovett’s desk when he died.)
The second shot is a view I’ve never come across anywhere else:
I’m grateful to Professor Simons for his documentary thoroughness.
Bonus:
I found this little booklet, meant to introduce the 1921 freshmen to the Honor Code, in the James Campbell papers. Rice’s current Honor Council Constitution is based on a draft from the late 1940s, which has since undergone frequent revisions. The Constitution in the middle of this booklet, though, is essentially the version originally adopted in 1913.
What really fascinated me were the introductory and concluding remarks. They are well worth a look:
Bonus:
but nothing immediately springs to mind. There’s clearly an athletic event taking place–that’s the only thing that can account for the crowd–but these rather elaborate shenanigans seem to be an extra treat. Maybe half time entertainment?
It came out of the Campbell materials so I’ll carefully scour the 1924 Campanile for clues. Because I have nothing else to do.
Bonus:
We recently received a truly marvelous collection, a generous gift of the family of James Ira Campbell, ’24. Campbell was one of those all-around guys, a good student, popular, busy with band, drama, Honor Council and other campus activities. For our purposes, though, the most important thing about young Mr. Campbell is that he was the editor-in-chief of the 1924 Campanile and, luckily for us, a bit of a pack rat. This collection arrived in three (!) boxes and includes copious material relating to the production of that volume, everything from the page proofs with annotations to business records to a gorgeous pile of photographs, some used in the book, others not. Here’s what it looked like spread out on the map cases today:
It was breathtaking. It really was–at one point I realized that the reason I was uncomfortable was that I was holding my breath. Encountering a collection this large, in such good condition, and so old is a rare thing. I will enjoy every minute of this and I am deeply grateful to the Campbell family.
I was going to wait until next week but I just can’t. Here’s a small taste, one of the stranger images I’ve come across anywhere. It shows a Rice student in a baseball uniform competing in the javelin throw at a home track meet:
Every once in a while I get the urge to walk over and pull things off the shelves at random. Even after all these years there is so much in the archives that I haven’t seen. Parts of the collection I know extremely well because I’m very intentionally using them for research. So it’s randomness–the opposite of intentionality–that becomes the means of discovery.
In the course of such a recent exploration I came across this useful little document:
It contains drawings of the interior layouts of the dormitories from their construction through the changes that were current at the time it was compiled in 1945. The bland title gives no hint that there’s something beautiful inside, but there is. Look at this–South Hall in 1912. Zoom in and look closely:
I had to look up “slype.”
And now the same floor plans, circa 1942. I especially appreciate the dramatic change in drawing and lettering style. The layout remains roughly the same, but these drawings reflect two very different worlds:
Bonus: A loyal reader sends this photo of Rayzor 110, taken sometime before the building was renovated in 2003, probably in the late ’90s.
It’s almost certainly the same room as the one in this photo from last week, twenty or so years earlier:
I remember taking a class there in the mid-90s so I can personally swear that sometimes the chairs were set up normally.
I couldn’t help smiling when I read this note from Dr. Lovett to Lester Ford of the Math Department:
I can’t make heads or tails of it, of course. I suspect the game was a dull one–we beat Sam Houston State 7-0–and there was plenty of time to think about other stuff.
Lester Ford, incidentally, seems to have been an interesting and talented character. Here’s a link to a short bio.
Bonus:
What the heck is this? It’s got a date–1969–but no other identifying information. Where are they? I don’t even know where to start–what could those outfits be made of? And the mustache!
Yikes.
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