Rice History Corner

One of the pleasures of Commencement is that it brings people in to see me who I otherwise don’t get to see. Among my visitors this year were loyal reader Rob Brazile (’86) and his wife Juli (’85), who were in town to see their talented and charming daughter Cory graduate.

I knew Rob was coming and I was excited to get the photo scans he was bringing (more on these later). What I wasn’t expecting was that they would also bring scrapbooks from Juli’s parents, Sandy (’56) and Helen (’57) Havens. What a treasure! As you surely already know, both Havens were deeply involved with student theater at Rice for many years. Here’s a link to a piece about Sandy and the history of the Rice Players. Down at the bottom you can click through to a video of a lecture he gave about the same topic. I recommend it!

You’ll notice the flyer is undated so I don’t know whether the pictures, which are dated 1955, were taken the same year.  Still, I’m confident that what we see here is pretty clearly Shakespeare on the steps of the Chem Lecture Hall:

This is just a delightful collection and I am so grateful for the chance to study and preserve it.

Bonus: I’ve still got some commencement stuff up my sleeve.

We had a bit of a hubbub in the comments both here and on Facebook over the misspelling of “Wiess” in the street sign that I posted last night. It made me smile and brought back to mind the days when my book was being edited. My thorough and competent editor painstakingly changed every instance of “Wiess” to “Weiss.” Then I had to go back and fix them all. I was so happy the book was being published that I didn’t care.

So I went and poked around in my laptop to see if I could find a followup and this was the first thing that popped up. Doesn’t it look like fun? It’s undated but just eyeballing it I’d guess it’s circa 1960.

Love those benches!

As I’m sure you expected, something did catch my eye. What is that behind the guy at bottom left? Is it a vending machine?

Bonus: I am unilaterally declaring that Memorial Day weekend has begun. I’ll be posting as usual until Friday but don’t even think about calling me until next Tuesday.

A loyal reader sends these snapshots of some intriguing street signs in a new Las Colinas, Texas townhouse development:

Does anyone know the story??

Bonus: Sometimes it’s just better not to ask any questions.

I’m sure this helped boost morale.

I woke up this morning and as usual immediately checked Alan Shelby’s daily RUBPA email for all the Rice news. Thus I learned of the passing of Maxwell Reade, Ph.D ’40 at the age of 100 years and two days. (Click here for the obituary.) I went back and checked to see how many times I’ve mentioned him here and I wasn’t surprised to find that it was a lot. His carefully annotated and clever scrapbook draws a lively portrait of the Rice campus and life as a Faculty Fellow in the late 1930s. I also was lucky enough to have had several long conversations with him, thanks, I believe, to a Rice phone operator who sent him to me when confronted with his enthusiastic but probably lunatic sounding questions. The questions, odd though they might have seemed to someone else, were good ones and required me to think about things I never had before. He was more than willing to answer questions too and in fact delighted in my own deeply peculiar inquiries, lighting up joyfully at the recollection of tiny details of his time here. What a privilege it was to be part of that.

Godspeed, Professor Reade. And thanks for everything.

I was going through some stuff with Ron Sass this morning (don’t worry, he’s fine!) and I was happy to come across these images of a pretty nearly perfect fairy ring in front of the Shepherd School. They were dated too!

The first one includes a student:

In the second she’s gone. Nothing but mushrooms. Not much else in the vicinity either:

When I walked out onto the quad on Friday I felt the strangest sensation. What I saw was this:

And what I immediately thought of was this, from 86 years ago:

They had some problems with one of those big round lights and a sadder sight than a large deflated ball I’ve rarely seen:

Bonus: My favorite picture from the 2016 commencement is this, of one of the lighting and sound contractors. I bet he’d be an interesting speaker:

Successful commencement ceremonies now behind us, the place clears out almost instantly. Here they are headed home after the 1924-25 academic year:

I’ll be in and out myself for most of the summer, with a move, a new grandson due in June, and an article to finish all keeping me busy. I’ll keep posting of course because I don’t know how to stop. Things might get a bit weird, though, (even more so than usual) as I’ll often need to rely on what I happen to have saved on my laptop. It’s kind of scary in there.

Bonus: I have two images from Brandon Martin, the campus videographer, both taken last Friday evening. The first was about 5:30, just before the decision was made to hold the Baccalaureate Convocation outside. (I believe I’m actually in this photograph, in a white shirt right on front of the speaker’s platform.)

It turns out the call was correct. Here’s the scene at 7:30:

The first ceremony, the Advanced Degree Convocation, begins in an hour and a half. The last one, the Plenary Commencement, ends tomorrow morning. See you on the other side.

From a 1929 student scrapbook, here’s a sample of the kind of coverage we used to get from the local media:

A couple of years ago I ran across some correspondence about the origins of the Rice ceremonial mace that is used at commencement and I posted about it here. For those of you who can’t be bothered to click on these old links, I don’t blame you–so here’s what’s important for my purposes today:

The mace was designed by Civil Engineering professor Jim Sims ’41, but I didn’t know anything about the man who actually made the thing, Raymond Martin. I was delighted a little while ago, then, when I stumbled across an image of Mr. Martin holding it at his desk. He looks to me like a man to be reckoned with as well as one who knew his way around a machine shop:

Even better, this morning my dear friend, the estimable Dr. Keith Cooper, ’78, ’82, ’83, was presented with a miniature copy of the mace, which he’s carried as Chief Marshal for ten years. This was an inspired gift, presented to him on the occasion of his last commencement in that role. Here he stands with Nathan Zuege of the Carpenter’s Shop who made it for him:

We all owe Keith an enormous debt and there are many things I love about this but I’m going to single out just this: in the letter above Carl McDowell notes that the owl atop the mace was cast using a Lalique owl as a model. The owl on top of the replica, on the other hand, came off a wine stopper:

Bonus: