Rice History Corner

My eye was caught a little while ago by this interesting and startlingly modern depiction of William Marsh Rice, Jr. in the 1927 Campanile:

Just as interesting was the dedication of the Campanile to him that year:

Two things jump out here. First, an error. Will Rice wasn’t William Marsh Rice’s grandnephew but rather his nephew, the son of WMR’s brother Frederick. I assume that his general good humor meant that he laughed this off.

Second, I’m struck by the singling out of his donation of the trophy case. As I think about it, that must have been a very important moment in the life of the new university. Now, on the centennial of that donation, the Woodson uses the case for exhibits:

It’s a beautiful thing but it’s getting increasingly fragile and could really use some loving attention.

Bonus: A friend sends this photo of what are likely some of yesterday’s chairs in more recent use.

I had to laugh at myself a little bit today. I came across this photograph and didn’t even notice that there were people in it until I had already scanned it:

What I had focused on, of course, were the chairs all jumbled up in the back of the room. The picture looks to have been taken in the ’70s but those chairs are far older–probably not original equipment  but still pretty old. The typewriter I noticed next. Also old. It didn’t occur to me until just now to wonder what on earth was going on here and why these young ladies were photographed in a room full of outdated equipment. That’s almost certainly unanswerable but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of those chairs were still floating around somewhere. In fact I have a couple of ideas about where one might look.

Bonus: I’m going to be out of town for a few days. I might miss a day or two here but then again I might not.

I have no idea when this was taken or what it was all about but it’s certainly interesting:

What’s got me puzzled is the mix of people at the table. That’s Alan Chapman with the cigarette dangling from his lips and Franz Brotzen (characteristically making a point with his hands) at the left. Both were long time engineering professors and both also served terms as Dean. Standing in the back is Bill Gordon, who was Dean of both Science and Engineering for a while. I’m guessing that the guy who belongs to the bald head at right is Holmes Richter, who served variously and for long stretches as Chairman of Chemistry and Dean of Graduate Studies. I can’t quite place the man at front right. However, this is clearly a powerful group. So why are they all meeting with what look to be students? Any guesses as to time? Do you think it’s in Cohen House? I’m lost here, people.

Personal Note: I’m very grateful to everyone who wrote with condolences after my mother’s passing. It helps.

Extra Personal Note: The best thing that happened in the last ten days is that I found boxes full of old family photos that I’d never seen before–and they are labeled!

We lost my dear mother last week, unexpectedly but peacefully, just a few days shy of her 87th birthday. She wasn’t a Rice person especially, although she did enjoy a nice tale of academic futility and she once, hilariously, knitted me a blue and grey scarf for Christmas. For many years she owned a girl’s clothing store in the Chicago suburbs and working with her there provided me with my earliest lessons in human folly and how to meet it with a smile. (There’s nothing quite like managing a 13 year-old and her mother trying to choose a new fall wardrobe for insight into the dark struggles of humanity.)

Going through some of her things I was surprised to find a 1946 article from, I believe, the student newspaper of Nazareth Academy in La Grange, Illinois, where she attended high school. I’d never seen it before but in it I clearly recognized my own mom, the exact same person 70 years later:

To the very end, even with limited ability to talk, she had the nurses and doctors laughing. I will miss her terribly.

Norma Rae Flair. Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine on her.

Anyone who’s ever done a house renovation has got at least a couple of contractor horror stories. That’s just how life is.

The first major addition to Cohen House was built in 1958. Most of you don’t know Mr. Cohen as well as I do so I will tell you now that he was not the sort of fellow to just turn over control of a project to someone else and then wait for it to be finished. No.

Not at all.

Mr. Cohen was what we call today “hands on.” So Rice had someone assigned to keep him up to date on the progress of the construction and there’s a thick file of photos (which I’ll eventually get to) that went to him on an almost weekly basis. It’s the letters that went with the pictures that are funny. And the comedy slowly escalates, so slowly that by the time the addition was finally finished I was nearly in hysterics.

All I can manage here is a small sample so much of the drama is lost, but the emotional trajectory is intact. Mr. Dwyer’s relentless and completely unwarranted optimism sends me into giggles even now. The work wrapped up, by the way, sometime towards the end of January.

This remarkable artifact turned up recently, tucked away in George Cohen’s papers. It’s the program for the banquet that honored Rice’s 1937 SWC Championship team. We’d never seen one before and it is a real beauty:

What makes it really special is this autograph page, which seems to carry the signature of most of the players and coaches from the team:

Bonus: It’s beginning to feel like this will never end.

In a bit of a surprise, I recently discovered that President Lovett had a file full of jokes. There are a whole bunch of them and I assume they were meant to be “ice breakers,” used to open speeches. (He gave a LOT of speeches.) I don’t know how funny they were at the time but  most of them aren’t remotely funny anymore. The first one here, though, made me laugh out loud:

Bonus:

I had hoped to post this yesterday for Memorial Day but found myself far from any internet connection. Even today I don’t have access to photoshop so I can’t set the scan straight. But I found this letter so moving that I’m going to post it as is, with apologies. I came across it recently, quite unexpected among a box of unrelated material.

It’s a letter from Dr. Lovett to the family of Lieutenant Robert La Prade ’42, who was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for his actions in combat on Guadalcanal. A sadder letter I can hardly imagine:

Here’s my original post from Christmas two years ago about Lieutenant La Prade.

The only way this could be better would be if they were cooling off their feet in a baby pool.  Or if they had beer. Or both.

Bonus: One of the things I’ve learned about commencement is that a lot of it comes down to mistake management. This is my favorite 2016 mistake, from the Ph.D. hooding ceremony–funny, harmless, and not mine.

A while ago I was leafing through some photos of the 1958 renovation of Cohen House and I was startled by this one:

I’d seen other images that were taken about the same time and one had even been used by the Cohens for their holiday card in 1958, which noted that there would be no New Year’s Eve party due to the construction. Here it is:

Almost the same, right? What you can’t quite see in the second, fuzzier one is the rectangular hole in the wall next to the entrance in the top photo.

Here you can see it from the other side as a cement rectangle:

And here it is today, a marker for the resting place of Mr. and Mrs. Cohen’s ashes: