Examining a batch of slides I’d never seen before I ran across this odd, dark little image of what was then a rather remote corner of campus:
It’s not quite so isolated now, with the new colleges right there. I dimly remember a reader mentioning a flower garden (possibly during a discussion of campus locations conducive to romance?) in this general vicinity. Anyway, I think this must be it.
Bonus:
One of the things I’m always on the lookout for is material related to Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society. It started with my attempts to figure out when the bent moved from one place to another but I’ve since developed an interest in the enterprise itself.
Earlier this summer Big John Laxen from FE&P gave me a box of materials he had found, which turned out to be papers that had belonged to Jim Sims, ’41. (If you look closely you can see his name written at the top left.) Going through them I came upon this little booklet prepared by a group called the Rice Engineophytes, petitioning Tau Beta Pi for a chapter. Their description of their activities is a nice snapshot of how they worked to establish Rice’s qualifications:
There’s a good deal more material about the founding of the Rice chapter, which I will get to eventually. But there’s something in this booklet that’s even more interesting than that. Take a look at this list of prominent Rice engineering alumni. I’m familiar with most of these names and there are several I’ve written about here: Herb Allen from Mechanical, Donald Norgaard from Electrical, Elmer Shutts from Civil.
I was caught by surprise, though, by a name I’d never seen before: “Franz Brogniez, Brewmaster and Chief Chemist, Gulf Brewing Company, Houston.” This was absolutely news to me. A quick check turns up this fascinating article about his father, the master brewer responsible for Southern Select, in whose footsteps he followed. Here’s the younger Brogniez in the 1923 Campanile:
Bonus:
From a Brown College scrapbook:
I’ve written quite a bit about early infrastructure construction on campus and in particular the role of the site engineer that Dr. Lovett hired, a Princeton man named Wilmer Waldo. We have a good deal of correspondence from Waldo in various files but his own papers are housed in the archives at the University of Houston. I’ve intended to go over and see what’s there for a long time but only recently had the chance to do so. It was a short visit and I only had time to look in one box, but that box was completely mind blowing–it was a veritable mother lode of dry, arcane, technical matter, all of it completely new to me. Much of it relates to Waldo’s considerable work for the city of Houston but there are also records from the Rice job. Here’s the folder that leapt out at me:
My attention was initially attracted by the “pipe drains” but when I opened it up I found something even more exciting than that. Look at this:
Bills of lading for the materials that were used for that early campus infrastructure! These are important for one big reason: they tell us exactly where the building supplies were shipped to, which in turn will help me understand precisely how they got all that stuff out to a site in the middle of nowhere. This has come up before several times, as I’ve struggled to figure out the various pictures that show what seem to be at least two different sets of railroad tracks on the Rice property. (Here, here and here).
Everything Waldo ordered was sent to the same station, a place I’d never heard of: Blodgett. I turned to the internet and of course found what I needed in a matter of moments. (There’s apparently a fairly large population of railroad enthusiasts out there who are interested in this kind of thing).
The Blodgett station, also known as Tower 12, was a crossing of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway and the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway. It was established in 1903 near the intersection of South Main and Blodgett, south of downtown and near the future site of the Rice Institute. There’s lot more information at this Texas Railroad History site and maps that show the station’s exact location. (The link is seriously broken and I can’t find a way to fix it but if you google “Blodgett tower 12 Houston” it will pop right up. I promise!)
I still have no idea how they got the materials from Blodgett to here, but at least I now know what direction they were coming from:
There must have been a sale on that striped fabric.
This image is from a glorious old kodachrome slide. The color on those things was just fantastic. We have a bunch that were taken at Rice in the ’50s by J. Fred Duckett, ’55 and this may be one of those.
Bonus: It occurred to me this morning that I can actually hang out of the hallway windows in the Space Science building. It’s funny to me that I hadn’t thought of it before.
I saw this a couple of weeks ago on the inner loop over between Baker and the Housing and Dining Office:
The juxtaposition of the truck and the trees reminded me of an earlier, less fortunate encounter between the world of nature and the freight industry which took place within a stone’s throw of the same spot. It took me until today to track down what I was remembering:
There’s whole roll of film of this mess, including guys with chain saws shimmying up the tree, but the image that touches my heart is this one:
That poor guy! I think that’s a ticket he’s holding in his hand.
Bonus: Rice’s quick thinking General Counsel, Richard Zansitis, brought in a real treasure that he found at an estate sale earlier this summer. It’s the only Rally Club beer mug that we have in the archives. Many thanks, Richard!
Many interesting things are turning up in the Thresher photo files from the ’90s and ’00s. Today it’s Vladimir Putin, on campus in 2001 (that’s thirteen years ago if you’ve lost count) for a talk at the Baker Institute. The Thresher sent a couple of photographers–Konstantin and Renata according to the cursory labels. Most of the pictures from the actual event are competent but not especially interesting. They basically all look something like this, except sometimes Putin’s eyes are closed and sometimes they’re open:
What was eye-catching was Putin’s arrival at Rice, which was just a tad more spectacular than the usual discreet black town car pulling up to the Institute’s front door. Check out these nice images (and please note that I managed to get a horse in two days in a row):
I was frankly less interested in the remarks than in the spectacle, but I offer this without comment:
Bonus: Nothing tightens my stomach like seeing construction equipment in the parking lot but it was just maintenance. These guys were doing the chalking for new stripes and I was quite taken by the bright colors.
I found out on Facebook that today is Harold Hyman’s 90th birthday. Dr. Hyman came to Rice in the fall of 1968, just in time to experience the Masterson crisis, and he was instrumental in ensuring that the history of that episode was preserved for people like me to use later. He was a prolific writer and editor in the fields of legal and constitutional history as well as the Civil War and Reconstruction and he ran an infamous, never-ending graduate seminar that proved brilliantly effective at getting his students to complete their doctorates in a timely fashion. He was devoted to those students and worked tirelessly on their behalf. He and his beloved wife, Ferne, treated them as family.
Because he was both accomplished and photogenic he got his picture taken a lot–we have dozens of pictures of him. This first one, dated 1972, is very sweet:
But I can’t resist adding a second, because it made me smile. He could stop you in your tracks with that look:
A Marine in World War II, Dr. Hyman spoke movingly at Rice’s Veteran’s Day celebration in 2012.
Happy Birthday, Dr. Hyman!
And thanks to Rachel Dvoretzky for pointing me to the Facebook post.
From a box of old slides, the Rice Homecoming Parade, September 30, 1950. This would have been before the first game (against Santa Clara) in the new stadium. It was a very big production:
The Homecoming Queen:
Definitely not the Homecoming Queen:
That’s President Houston in the back seat at right. I don’t know who the others are.
And the Rally Club proposed an alternate Homecoming Queen:
Bonus: A small act of kindness really brightened my day. Phil Brooks in the Chemistry Department brought me a little rolling stool so I wouldn’t have to kneel on the floor to go through several boxes of old papers. I’m so very grateful.
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