Rice History Corner

The editors of the 1941 Campanile did an unusual thing. They dedicated that yearbook not to a person, as was customary, but to the buildings of the Institute. It’s well worth your time:

I am deeply grateful to John “Grungy” Gladu for (among many other things) doing the considerable work of scanning several discs worth of Bert Roth-era (late ’60s through ’70s) MOB photos. As I looked through them this morning, I found that the image I most wanted to share was one of gentle loveliness on a band trip to SMU in 1968. I don’t know who she is.

Many thanks, Grungy.

For some reason lost to history there are a very large number of photos of President Hackerman in the files, enough so that I’ve gradually noticed some themes begin to develop. (My earlier  “Obsolete Technology + Norman Hackerman” post shows what I mean.)

Today, a couple of examples of another classic Norman picture: standing with hands in pocket. There must be a dozen such images in one collection or another, these are simply two that crossed my path yesterday. First up, in his office with Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1983:

Next, a rather more intriguing photograph, complete with some nice obsolete technology. It’s unlabeled and undated but likely very, very close to the beginning of Hackerman’s administration:

I recognize a couple of people here—the longtime Dean, Holmes Richter, is the tall bald fellow and Chemistry Professor John Margrave is beside him—but I don’t know where they are.

Bonus: I felt a small chill yesterday when I saw some guys surveying the lot I park in.

The first thing I noticed here was the crazier than ordinary owl picture on the wall. The third thing I noticed was that the guy with the grin is Scott Wise, (’71, ’73). I don’t really have a good guess as to when this image was taken so I don’t know exactly what his job title was at this time but he certainly looks like he was enjoying it:

The really interesting thing to me, though, was the thing I noticed in between those two things—-the telephone. I can promise you two things about that phone: it was a ROLM phone and it was green. How do I know this? Here’s the phone in my office at home, a cast off that found its way to me a while ago:

I don’t know when the campus emergency number changed–it’s now 6000–but I suspect it was at the same time the campus exchange became 348.

It works, by the way.

Oh my goodness, I had a wild archival day today. I started out trying very hard to find something which I did not find (although I  still hold out hope). Multiple twists later I found myself up to my elbows in a collection I’d never really studied before, the Bud Morehead manuscript collection. An architecture professor and later registrar, Morehead came to Rice in 1940 and stayed until his retirement in 1979. Among his papers are hundreds of prints, negatives and slides of the Rice campus including a group that had been given to him by William Ward Watkin. Some of these were included in his short book, A Walking Tour of Rice University, but many others were not and there are a substantial number of photos I’ve never seen before.

These two jumped out immediately. There are actually a pretty fair number of pictures of the construction of the new stadium in the Woodson but they tend to mostly look the same. Nearly all of them were routine construction progress shots, usually taken from the same angle each week and almost all in black and white. I’ve never before come across anything as dramatic as these:

It took me a moment to get my bearings with this next one. The key was realizing that that’s the old stadium in the background:

Where was this taken from?

Bonus: I spent some time at another university last week. My favorite part of the visit was the service entrance of the faculty club.

I’ve had this photograph for quite a while and every time I look at it I’m filled with longing. It’s labeled on the back “Fondren Staff Area, 1966.” I don’t have a good mental map of how the library was laid out before I got here in the early ’90s so I’m not really sure where this room was located. I’d guess it to be closer to the front of the building than the back, though.

There’s an awful lot of obsolete technology here but the thing I’m interested in today is hard to see. Zoom in and look at the old typewriter to the left of the woman in the brown dress. That’s actually not what I’m talking about, but on the same table you can just make out a couple of small carousels. Those carousels held something we don’t use any more: rubber stamps.

I didn’t think much about this until a couple of weeks ago when one of my colleagues in Fondren, Sarah Bentley, showed me something amazing that she’s kept by her desk:

They’re useless now, of course, but they’re still kind of beautiful.

Bonus: Fondren Summer Hours! As I guess is becoming customary, I’ll try to keep posting on a regular basis over the summer but might miss a day or two here or there. I’ve got plans to go out to Berkeley to look at Ken Pitzer’s papers. Tantalizingly, they also have a collection of papers from Griffith C. Evans, Rice’s first mathematics professor, which include both documents and photos from his years here.

Among the slides that Alex Dessler brought in a few weeks ago were these beauties. While there have been many images taken over the years of Rice faculty wearing regalia, they are almost always either in procession or on the podium. Aside from the ones I’ve taken myself I can recall only one picture of faculty members preparing for their role in the ceremony, a moment that I find oddly touching.

These were taken in Cohen House, which seems to have been where the faculty robed when commencement was held on the front side of Lovett Hall in what we now call Founder’s Court:

And just for fun, here’s a shot on the podium from the same day. I recognize some of these rascals:

I woke up this morning to a half dozen emails from alert readers who pointed out what I would have known if only I’d looked at this scan of the front page of the brochure, which was right next to the first photo I posted yesterday. It’s actually the same quarry that provided the granite for Lovett Hall (Thanks, Dr. Boles!), a fact which had escaped me entirely.

Yikes. I need a vacation.

I’m far from home today and when I opened up my briefcase I realized that I’d left my most current flash drive back in Houston. This means that all of us are at the mercy of whatever photographs I happen to have on my hard drive. It’s not ideal but I suppose that once in a while it’s good to be thrown back on my wits, such as they are.

Luckily, I have a large, if random, assortment of images with me at all times in case of such emergencies. Here are some that I dimly remember coming across in a back corner of the archives a couple of years ago—amazing photos of the quarrying and transport of the blocks of marble that comprise the Michael Heizer sculpture 45° 90° 180° that dominates the Engineering Quad. Moving things this big was a precise and  intricate undertaking, carefully planned and executed:

Every turn was thought out in advance:

Somewhere I have pictures of the installation, but right at this moment I couldn’t say exactly where. Someday I’m sure they’ll come in handy.

Bonus: One of my favorite undocumented aspects of commencement is the strategic placement of pieces of green plywood to prevent people from doing damage to themselves or others.

There was only one comment to yesterday’s post about the door to the Chem Lecture Hall but it was a great one, from loyal reader Doug Williams, who has won my heart with his attention to trivial detail:

Melissa, have you ever run across any information about the lowest step leading up to Chem Lec? In the 1980s, the first step was concrete. More recently, I’ve noticed that it has been replaced with a stone step matching the others. Whatever was there at the time of this photo is just outside of the shot.

The story I was told was that originally there was no step there. The early chemistry department wanted to discourage women from taking their classes. The missing first step required women to lift their skirts to reach the beginning of the stairs. Since they had to expose their ankles, no real lady would ever take chemistry.

It has to just be a good story, but I’ve never seen an early picture of Chem Lec where I could tell if there’s a first step or not.

I really love crazy stories like this. They don’t come from nowhere—there were  in fact some early reservations about female students. They evaporated quickly, though, as women such as Alice Dean proved to be among the very best students on campus during the first years of the Institute. It was also the case that it could be tricky to get women students lab time in an era when they couldn’t be unchaperoned. However, there was always a bottom step as we can see in this 1925 photograph:

Many thanks for the great question, Doug.

Bonus: Things can get strange right before commencement. I saw these guys right around lunch time:

I thought they might be jumping the gun a wee bit but it turned out they had just had their pictures taken in the RMC:

Extra Bonus: Rolling robes.