Rice History Corner

I have a long meeting today. Be back tomorrow.

Unlabeled, undated. I assume it’s the ’70s and I also assume it’s the gym.

Bonus:

Here are two quite unusual images from the file labeled “Homecoming 1951”:

Well now. What to make of this? I’ve never seen anything like it. What alumnus could merit a microphone on the tarmac, not to mention special trip out to the airport by Miss Sarah Lane?

One of the envelopes inside the folder had a name on it: Jack Glenn. He turns out to be precisely the fellow in the center of the top photograph. In addition to his local fame as president of the Rice Institute’s class of 1926, Glenn was famous as the producer of “The March of Time,” a newsreel series that was shown in movie theaters for several decades. I’ve had a look at a few of the episodes on YouTube and they are difficult to categorize. It’s not really news, exactly, but something more like short, opinionated documentaries narrated by a man with a booming voice. In a turn of events that has left me a bit dazed, “The March of Time” has a Facebook page. If you like messing around with things like this it is well worth your while:

https://www.facebook.com/themarchoftime/?target_post=10154789475400203

All of this is interesting but as usual it’s something else that has caught my attention. It didn’t take long discover that Jack Glenn’s papers (142 boxes worth!) are preserved for some reason in the archives of the University of Wyoming. Most of the collection is his professional papers and film but there are several entries in the finding aid that are clearly Rice related including—hang on—a scrapbook from his student days.

I need to go there.

Bonus: Come see our new display in the trophy case in the RMC and think about coming to the panel on February 18th too. With a topic like this it can’t fail to be interesting.

This isn’t what I meant to talk about today (I’ll get to that later) but it’s too fabulous to put aside.

I sat down this afternoon to find the pictures that I originally wanted, typed “1951” into the search box where I store my images and what popped up first was another picture from the event I wrote about yesterday. It came from a completely different place–Bud Morehead’s slides– and it is in glorious kodachrome:

Even better, the label on the slide gives us an idea of what was going on that day:

Fair Warning: I’m out of town at a meeting the next couple of days so if posting is slapdash or nonexistent, well, you were warned.

These turned up in a folder of pictures from Homecoming in 1951. It took me a minute to realize that they were two completely different outfits:

I’m always going to vote for the band that includes a banjo.

Something else quite interesting emerged from this folder and I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. It might require a trip to Wyoming after the snow melts.

Bonus:

This was the best laugh I had all week:

I thought about digging out the picture of the students dressed as a priest and a pregnant nun but I was afraid it would detract from the beauty of the exasperated press release, which I believe stands on its own.

Since finding that spectacular picture of the trustees at the 1946 baccalaureate service last week I’ve been looking closely at images of other such events. There’s a lot to be said about these and I may well go back and say it later but for right now I just wonder this: what is the job of the person sitting with pen and ink at the desk in front of the dais?

I picked out three years but there are more. Here’s 1918:

1919:

1925:

Bonus:

Now this is interesting:

I found it in one of those enormous scrapbooks compiled by Rice alumni. It would probably be possible to figure out from stuff we have in the Woodson how much money was realized from this but the thought of so much tedium is just too much for me. And in any case that isn’t what interests me here.

First off, the description of the state of affairs concerning athletic facilities so soon after the new stadium and gym were built is something I’ve never seen before. I’m reasonably certain that the golf holes were eventually added. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that there was still $2 million to pay off. If I had to guess, I would say that the debt was actually owed to the university itself, which likely fronted most of the money for construction. This would have been an easy thing to do at the time because through the 1950s the athletic department made a profit every year, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars.

Bonus: This caught me by surprise the other day. The Rice Equestrian Club was attracting attention by means of a tiny horse named Ringo. It certainly worked.

I’m playing a bit of hooky again today and posting images that aren’t directly Rice related. I found these in a file marked “Old Stadium” and have puzzled over them for a couple of years now. It certainly does appear to be an old stadium but it sure doesn’t look like our old stadium. I do have a strong suspicion that I know who took them and roughly when. They’re slides and based on their appearance I’m guessing that they were taken by J. Fred Duckett ’55 sometime in the mid to late 1950s.

Anyone know where this is?

Bonus:

This afternoon here were a couple of boxes on one of the book carts in the back room that had been ordered from storage by mistake. This obviously called for a thorough investigation of their contents. And I wasn’t at all surprised to discover in the very last folder–labeled “curriculum debacle 1970”–something wonderful. It’s an issue of a Rice publication I can’t recall ever seeing before called “Rice Report,” possibly a predecessor of the late, lamented Rice News which only exists digitally these days:

As a snapshot of campus doings in January of 1971 it is packed with interesting material from all over. I was especially interested in the Media Center exhibit of kinetic art by Pol Bury which I hadn’t been aware of. The publication was probably saved for the enrollment report but that’s not what made me scan it. No, I was attracted by a single glorious sentence, the very last one on the second page:

That must have been a heck of a party.

Bonus:

Hard to tell. It’s unlabeled, naturally.

I love those benches.