Rice History Corner

It’s undated but I’m guessing sometime in the ’70s based on the hair. You sure can’t tell from the bathrobes, which are relatively immune to fashion.

Bonus: A closeup of the azimuth marker!

Obviously.

A while back I got this question from Carl Riedel in the Central Plant:

I have been working here at the Rice Central Plant since 1991. I was asked a question today about the steam plant’s early days that I couldn’t answer. When the plant was first built it had coal fired boilers in it. I’ve seen pictures of the coal deliveries to the plant so I understand how that was worked out.

What I’m wondering, after being asked about it, is where did the boiler make up water for the steam come from?

This is a really good question. I’ve written before several times about how the boilers were fueled–it was mostly oil with coal as a backup, then natural gas after the mid-20s– but had never thought about the water source. Intuitively, you know the answer has to be that they dug a well. There certainly wasn’t any city water being piped in–we weren’t even in Houston! I tried to find something more specific but came up empty.

And then, a miracle occurred.

A couple days ago I was rather half-heartedly looking for documentation of the installation of the Geodetic Survey markers that I talked about yesterday. As I expected, there wasn’t any. But I did find a folder I’d never noticed before and from it emerged, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, the fully formed answer, complete with map.

It starts with a typhoid outbreak in Houston in 1933. One of the stricken was a Rice graduate student, which raised the issue of the safety of the campus water supply, prompting this report:

Although the typhoid story, which is very well documented in the folder, turned out to be a bit of a page-turner, I managed to stay focused on the matter of the well, specifically the original well that was dug in 1911. (It wasn’t our fault, by the way. The typhoid outbreak, that is.)

The report had appended to it a map showing the location of the wells and the other stuff underground in their vicinity:

As soon as I saw it I recollected this photograph of Mech Lab construction, taken on November 1, 1911. Look at those tanks to the left of the campanile. The one on the left looks like a water tank, exactly where it should be:

Bonus: I got multiple requests, some whinier than others, for a picture of the survey marker underneath the metal plate. That plate is quite heavy and there’s dirt under it (mud, really) but I went ahead and sacrificed my manicure for the sake of the historical record.

I generally like my job on most days but every once in a while it positively fills me with glee. This usually involves something either deeply strange or so tiny as to be nearly trivial (or both). This time, though, the occasion of my mirth turned out to be something hiding in plain sight.

I had a very nice visit a while back from Philip Walters, ’76. While he was here we went for a walk around campus and I listened to him tell me things I didn’t know. As we walked he pointed this out to me:

That’s Philip’s shadow.

It’s in the sidewalk between Lovett Hall and the statue of William Marsh Rice, which is, I believe, considered by most to be the exact center of the universe. I’d walked past and over it thousands of times and never given it a thought.

It turns out that the metal plate hides a station placed there by the National Geodetic Survey in 1942. A link to their website is here but for those who don’t want to go digging, here’s a screenshot of the page that shows its exact location:

I don’t really know anything about this stuff but I kept poking around and found the data sheets for this marker, which proved more interesting yet. They provide a sort of short history of the station and also pointed me to other markers on campus: two reference markers in the quad and an azimuth marker. Here are the sheets as a pdf:

DATASHEETS

I easily found the azimuth marker embedded in the granite at the base of the main gate at entrance 1:

It was a bit of a struggle to locate the two reference markers in the quad but I finally found them several inches down with the help of my metal detector. (I just knew that thing was going to come in handy some day!) In the meantime, Philip made an inspired guess, blew up one of the aerial shots I’d posted of campus construction in 1948, and discovered that you can actually see the markers as three fuzzy white dots:

I’m incredibly grateful to Philip for making this delightful adventure possible.

Note: I actually do know what an azimuth is.

Bonus:

I got home much later than usual tonight so I don’t have the energy to say very much but I do promise that I’ve got a couple of really exciting things coming tomorrow and the day after. For right now, though, all I have is this:

I originally scanned it only because I liked the way it looks but it dawned on me recently that I don’t know where those blinds could have been. It’s undated so it might be that it was taken before the back wing was added on Fondren but I really don’t know.

Bonus:

I love this image but I don’t quite understand it. It looks like there’s something happening beyond just listening to records but I’m not sure what that might be:

I also lack both a date and a location. The record–La Dolce Vita, by Ray Ellis and His Orchestra–was released in 1961 so it can’t be earlier than that. And I definitely don’t recognize those walls. Anyone?

Bonus: Here’s a weird one.

There is no identifying information for this photo at all. I have no real idea what’s going on other than it has something to do with film. I don’t know who they are.

But look at all that glorious hair!

Bonus: Is it just me or is this a little unnerving?

I’d noticed these images before but as you can see they’re slides, which are a bit awkward to deal with, so I just left them and moved on with my tasks. Yesterday, though, I had enough time to go back and scan them (apologies for the sloppy scans, by the way–I was having trouble with Photoshop). As soon as I got a better look I was struck by how frightening fire really is. This first one is almost the scariest, with those flames shooting out into an otherwise normal scene:

Here’s the aftermath:

We can’t thank firemen enough.

J. Frank Dobie, Texas writer and folklorist, speaking at the fifth anniversary celebration for Hanszen College:

There is, apparently, nothing new under the sun.

Bonus:

This afternoon I ran across this fascinating Houston Post article about the opening of Brown College in 1965:

There’s so much of interest here I almost don’t know where to begin, but a visit yesterday morning to the offices of the Brown Foundation has Alice Pratt Brown (referred to in the article only as “Mrs. George Brown”) on my mind so I’ll start there.

It just so happens that I recently found some pictures of the library space that I now know she and Herbert Wells decorated with both new pieces and some that had been owned by her beloved sister-in-law, Margarett Root Brown. The room is really swell; restrained, elegant and almost shockingly sophisticated:

Bonus:

Looking through some of William Ward Watkin’s things I became fascinated with photos of construction work being done on the quad side of the Administration Building in 1911. They look to me almost like ruins, more like something falling down than something going up. This one is my favorite–Entrance 1 on May 25, 1911:

 And here it is last fall:

Bonus: