Rice History Corner

The young man who actually weighed the coin I talked about yesterday was William Moore Craig, who served as an instructor in Rice’s Chemistry Department for only two years, from 1923 to 1925. He grew up in central Texas and graduated from Southwestern in Georgetown in 1906 and then again with an MA in 1907. After teaching for a bit he returned to school, this time entering the University of Texas for a MS in Chemistry. After service in World War I Craig went off to Harvard and began working with Professor T.W. Richards on the atomic weight of gallium, interrupting his studies when he came to teach at Rice in 1923. Craig was lured away in 1926 by some classmates from UT who were among the very first faculty members at the new Texas Technological College in Lubbock and he remained at Tech (with a break to finish his doctorate) until he retired in 1958.

Almost unbelievably, I managed to find a photo of the Rice Chemistry department in 1924. I’m fairly sure that Craig is the fellow in the middle of the front row with the bow tie:

So why am I bothering with this guy who taught here for a little while ninety years ago? It’s because he left something big behind.

It was William Moore Craig, working with architect William Ward Watkin, who designed the chemical and alchemical symbols that adorn the Chemistry Building:

I was surprised to find a reference in Bud Morehead’s Walking Tour of Rice University to a letter from Craig explaining the origins of those symbols so I went and dug around in Morehead’s papers and sure enough, there it was. It’s too long to post each page here so I’m putting it up as a pdf for anyone who is interested in this sort of thing.

Craig 1 046

And I’m sure none of you will be surprised to hear that Craig and Watkin collaborated again, carving many of the same symbols on the Chemistry Building that Watkin later designed for Texas Tech.

Bonus: The woman standing next to the presumed Mr. Craig in the 1924 photo is Vera Prasilova Scott, the wife of Rice Chemistry Professor Arthur Scott. I know I’ve mentioned her somewhere before but I never tire of her exquisite photographs of Houston’s elite in the 1920s and early ’30s. Here’s a short video about her and her work from Woodson staffer Dara Flynn and Paul Hester:

Here’s another story from the big envelope where I found Sammy’s eyes.

That envelope was so full of oddball stuff that I took it all out and laid it on a table to see if there was a coherent story anywhere. The thing that caught my attention first was another envelope, just a regular mailing one, that had something rather peculiar written on it:

I happen to recognize the handwriting so I know that Mr. McCants, the bursar, was asking a couple of chemistry professors to weigh something that I can only guess was once contained in the envelope. It probably went to Harry Weiser, a senior member of the department, who must have passed it on to William Moore Craig, a very junior colleague who taught at Rice from 1923 until 1925. Whatever it was, it weighed 6.0076 grams.

Sorting through the rest of the things I was instantly struck by an even smaller envelope–tiny, really–labeled “6.0076 grams.” Like the first, this envelope was empty. It looked like a dead end, but it seemed, like the eyes, weird and unsettling. Why would anyone take the trouble to save these things?

It all snapped together when I picked up the first, big envelope to begin putting things back. I had thought it was empty but I felt something in the bottom. When I reached in, I found stuck in the corner a very small, very old coin. It’s worn and dirty but if you squint you can see the owl of Athena. Here it is, sitting on the tiny envelope:

There was now only one possible course of action. I scooted right out the back door and over to George R. Brown, where I asked a friend in Biosciences if he could weigh this little thing for me. He graciously dropped what he was doing and carefully laid it on a small scale. Do you think it weighed 6 grams? It did.

And another piece made sense now too. Here’s a note in another hand, this time Miss Dean’s:

Hendrix Davis, ’26 gave the coin to McCants. Where did he get it? That’s a great question and as far as I can tell unanswerable. The other thing that kind of nags at me is why did Mr. McCants want them to weigh it in the first place. What the hell?

Believe it or not, I haven’t exhausted this topic yet. More tomorrow.

Bonus: Thanks to a very kind colleague in the History Department, we joyfully celebrated the arrival of some desperately needed obsolete technology for our digital curation lab.

I mentioned a while back that I’d discovered that Bud Morehead’s slide carousels contain a significant number of images that don’t appear anywhere else. Here’s one of those, a good look at some of the woods that would soon be paved over to make way for the stadium and its parking lot. It’s pretty fuzzy and I’m not sure exactly what angle it was taken from. Any thoughts?

Bonus:

One of my colleagues in the Woodson has been working recently back in the vault, going through boxes that don’t get a lot of use, making sure everything stays organized. I poked into a big envelope he had out and discovered one of the strangest collections of odds and ends I’ve ever seen around here. It was just . . . weird. Envelopes inside envelopes, scrawled notes, a couple of small objects, none of it related–at least in any obvious way–to anything else.

Even the one thing that immediately made sense felt peculiar. First, you might want to go back and take a quick look at this post about the 1917 kidnapping of Sammy the Owl by some A&M cadets. If you’ll recall, all that was left of Sammy when it was over was what you can see in this photo:

So in the envelope was this note from Mr. McCants, the bursar:

And sure enough, in the bottom of the envelope, the eyes:

Bonus:

From the Rice Baptist Student Union 1933 retreat. Looks like a fun crowd:

And yes, Floyd Kelly, ’36 played basketball.

Thanks to Nancy LaMotta Crabb, ’64 for her mother’s great photo!

If I could go back in time I would sign up for this immediately, even though you have to foot the bill for your own deck chair on the Atlantic crossing.

I found it and several others like it in a folder in James Chillman’s papers. Chillman was one of the early Rice faculty members, arriving in 1917 to teach Fine Art in the Department of Architecture. He was also the founding director of the Museum of Fine Arts and remained active at both Rice and the Museum until his death in 1972. I’d never looked closely at his papers before but they provide a deeply interesting view into the evolution of Houston’s cultural institutions and I will definitely be turning to them again.

Bonus:

I ran across this picture today and it occurred to me that you should always try to be kind to freshmen because you never know who they’ll turn out to be.

This bright eyed youngster, for example, a freshman in 1949, turned out to be a hugely important figure in Rice’s history:

Here he is again at the dedication of McNair Hall, a building made possible by his far sighted leadership of the Jones School, which was frankly foundering when he arrived back at Rice in 1997 to take over as dean:

I think of Gil every single time I walk past the building, often laughing at the memory of the first time we met. I had been prepared for a fearsome veteran of academic battle, the former business school dean and provost of the University of Michigan, but I what I found instead–at least at first glance–was a kindly grandfather figure. Five minutes into the conversation I realized my mistake. I was in so far over my head the only thing I could sensibly do was sit at his feet and learn. Much of my understanding of the extremely tricky nuts and bolts of modern university operations came directly from him. I’ll always be grateful.

I’m even more grateful for the friendship that we quickly fell into. A true friend, he got me at various points both into and out of trouble, dried my tears, told me jokes and shared gossip with pure hearted joy. I still miss him badly and that’s really the only reason I have for posting this today.

His Rice News obituary from 2007 is here.

Bonus:

One of my colleagues in the Woodson was scanning some photos the other day and came to me with this tantalizing image:

We knew from the label that the student athlete was Edward Herting and the picture was taken circa 1926. But who’s the guy all cozy under his blanket? And why “S”?

There’s not much of his face showing but I was pretty sure I recognized him anyway. And I was even more confident that I recognized the hat. Indeed, here he is wearing it at far left with the 1926 football squad and head coach John Heisman:

His name was Joe Bedenk and he was an assistant football coach here in the mid-twenties. The reason there’s an “S” on his blanket is that he had been an All American guard at Penn State, where the letter winner’s club is called the Varsity S. The reason he was fooling around with one of the players was probably that he was only a few years older than they were.

After a couple of years at Rice, Bedenk went back to Penn State where he was most famous as a fantastically successful baseball coach. He continued as a football assistant too, interrupted by a season as head coach in 1949, until 1952.

Which means that he coached with both John Heisman and Joe Paterno.

Here’s a great story about him, well worth your time especially if you’re interested in the history of college baseball.

Bonus:

What a loss. What a remarkable person.

Malcolm Gillis did nothing halfway. A son of the rural Florida panhandle, his drive, commitment and intelligence brought him to the very top of American higher education. Here’s a link to the Rice News story that details his career, including the profoundly productive period of his Rice presidency.

When he arrived at Rice in 1993 to become the university’s sixth president, Malcolm simply and for all time became one of us. His loyalty was total. There was almost none of that “here’s how we used to do it where I was before” that many modern university administrators drag along with them to each new post. He knew the campus; he knew department assistants, groundskeepers, and librarians by name and spoke to them as colleagues. All his effort–all of it–was directed towards the best interest of the institution. This could be painful at times–I got seriously crosswise with him once about a major issue facing Rice and I will never forget the intensity of that episode. When it came to Rice’s future, he went full throttle.

But I saw that passion and commitment play out in other ways as well. I once saw Malcolm comforting a grieving student as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered and I likewise heard a story from halfway around the world of him emptying his pockets to help an orphanage in Syria only to realize he hadn’t left himself money to get to the airport.

When Malcolm stepped down after eleven years as president he gave an interview to one of the Houston papers (I forget which) and he said that although he’d had some terrible days at Rice, he’d never had a boring one. I know that’s true and I think it’s safe to say it was true for his entire life.

Malcom Gillis, rest in peace.

Photo by Tommy LaVergne, 1993 at the Gillis farm in North Carolina.

They don’t look like they’re working on their tans. They do look like some rowdies at a baseball game in about the middle of the 1980s.

Bonus: KTRU lives.