Rice History Corner

The back of the Chemistry Building, 1925:

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve never seen a clear shot of the north side of the Chemistry Building but I found this one yesterday while I was digging around for images of the Chem Lecture Hall doorway. It looks enormous, even bigger than the front, I suppose because the south side is broken up by those wings. Honestly, I’m just thrilled by this.

And as I was walking across the quad yesterday morning it occurred to me that although I’ve seen many pictures of commencement taken from the upper floors of Lovett Hall, I’ve never seen a picture of commencement preparations taken from up there. This is understandable, of course, but I would maintain that the preparations are every bit as photogenic as the event itself.  So I climbed up and asked a nice young woman if I could go out on the balcony outside her window in order to remedy this situation myself:

Bonus: I can’t believe I never noticed this before.

Suddenly everything has gotten quiet on campus.  Unless you’re one of the people responsible for organizing commencement there’s not much to do except wait for it. I had intended to put together a short but brilliant post about commencement this afternoon but instead I found myself completely sidetracked by a picture of the main entrance to the Chem Lecture Hall. This is the photograph that started me down the rabbit trail:

It was taken in October, 1943 for a Navy recruiting brochure and of course my attention went immediately to the sailors. But it only took a moment for my eye to pick out something else: at the top of the door but below the elaborate stone carvings there seems to be some decorative metal work. If you’ve been reading this for any amount of time, you surely know that there is no way I could let that go.

After some thought and some digging around, I came upon these close up images, which seem to date from around the same period:

Sitting there thinking about it I would have sworn that I’d never seen that before. And I was right. It’s not there any longer. In its place is a really, really tall door:

I don’t know when or why it went away. And I’ll get to the ivy later–it turned out to be much more complicated than the door.

Bonus: It was awfully muggy out there. Many thanks to the crew.

That’s Carl Wischmeyer, the first master of Baker, gamely regarding some unknown joker with a comb.

I mentioned yesterday that Ed Dupree was the first student to enroll in the Institute. What also bears mentioning is that the first woman to enroll at Rice was his classmate, Hattie Lel Red. The distinction of being first was recognized in photos taken at the 1916 commencement ceremonies:

Left to right are English Professor Stockton Axson, mathematician Griffith Evans, Dupree, Dr. Lovett and finally Hattie Lel Red. The diploma she holds in her left hand now hangs on the wall in the back room of the Woodson.  Look closely and you’ll see that “with distinction” is written in President Lovett’s own hand:

It’s a small thing, I know, and from a very different time, but I still find it somehow moving.

Bonus: Here she is posing that same day with her friend and classmate, Ruth Robinson, who soon married Rice engineering professor J.H. Pound. Both taught for many years in the Houston public schools, Miss Red at Lamar and Mrs. Pound at Lanier.

Today, thank heavens, was the last day of finals. Summer is nearly upon us. When the summer of 1916 rolled around, this routine was enacted at Rice for the first time. Here’s a photo of the last exam taken by members of the first graduating class. It’s dated June 6, 1916 and it looks hot:

I’m not sure what the class was but I can tell you that the young man on the right is Carl Knapp, ’16, the one on the left is his friend Ed Dupree, ’16, and both of them graduated with degrees in engineering. There are a couple of things here that interest me. First, Ed Dupree was the very first student to enroll at the Rice Institute. Here’s an image of him taken about that time:

The other and more deeply interesting thing is the relationship between Dupree and Knapp, a friendship that seems to have endured throughout their lives and intertwined with the history of the Rice Institute over several decades. It’s going to take a few posts to describe it all so I’ll just start with a couple pictures of their student days. This first one is very early, an electrical engineering class in 1913. Left to right are Elmer Shutts, Dupree, Knapp, Professor Francis Johnson (who came to Rice from the British Columbia Electric Railway Company, of all places) good old W.T. Betts, and a guy named McDonald whose first name I can’t recall at this moment:

Next, one of my favorite images of the early years, Knapp and Dupree in the mech lab, probably 1914 or 1915:

It just looks like so much fun.

Bonus:

Why is my job so interesting? Because of things like this:

What’s so interesting about this? Nothing, really, about the content of the image itself. I came across it while looking through a box jammed full of commencement photos, all slides, that we organized by year and put into transparent sleeves. I’d never looked at them intently before but since Alex Dessler gave me that loupe a few weeks ago I’ve been on a slide viewing binge. What slowly dawned on me as I made my way through the box was that although the slides were all stamped by year, almost all of them were the same two years. Then I found this one and I had to sit back and laugh:

It looks like there are about six or seven different commencements that are stamped either “1990” or “1992-93.” I find this completely hilarious and I look forward with some glee to figuring out which are which. I guarantee you that by the time this is over I will know precisely how long George Rupp’s hair was every May. I’m deeply grateful to my friend Tommy LaVergne for this opportunity.

Bonus:

As expected, you guys did a great job on last week’s quiz. Almost everything was correctly answered in the comments. Working backwards, we have:

3.)

From Mike Ross:  I’ll guess that it’s a calculation relating to the incline/spacing of the seats in the lower bowl of Rice Stadium. (Half is shown, since it would be symmetric.) 

That’s absolutely correct. I found the document in Herbert Allen’s papers. Allen was the trustee who headed the building committee for this project and his collection is a treasure trove of information about the construction process. This was the very first piece of paper in the file.

2.) This one was tricky because it requires knowledge of recent happenings in campus remodeling projects.

Hanszenite got it partly right: For question two, those owls look like the ones found on the expansion to Baker by Hopkins Architects in 2010: http://www.hopkins.co.uk/projects/2/158/ .

Fondren’s own David Bynong provided the rest of the story: Those are my favorite owls on campus. You can see a very small photo taken several years ago of them in their natural habitat here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8438085/Owls-Baker.jpg. This is one of the college additions that they tore down a few years ago near Baker and Will Rice, but I was always a bit confused as to which college the building was part of (and I thought that there were more owls than the ones that they situated in Baker College’s new area as shown in the Hopkins Architects site above). One of the rooms in the student center also has an extra one of these owls in the corner (unless he is one of the ones that flew over to the Glasscock School).

Either nobody figured out that the green marble in this picture was scavenged from the Geology Building in a major renovation a few years ago or nobody was willing to admit it.

The always alert Helen Toombs, though, correctly identified the two rascals in front of the counter as trustee emeritus Albert Kidd, ’64 and former Board Chairman Bill Barnett, ’55.

1. This turned out to be the most interesting question. Some of you identified differences that I did not have in mind when I asked what wasn’t there, but nobody saw one that I thought was obvious.

The first missing thing I noticed was the top of Allen Center, which several people noted. The second, though, just jumped out at me and I was quite surprised that no one else saw it (although you do have to zoom in in order to notice it). Here’s a photo of the same spot I took last year:

What’s I saw missing in the first image is the memorial plaque that marks where George and Esther Cohen’s ashes rest.

Bonus: Commencement prep, 2014. There will be some big changes this year but you can’t tell it from here.

I was poking around an obscure and deserted corner of campus, working up an alibi just in case I got busted, when I caught a glimpse of this out of the corner of my eye:

Y’all would have laughed if you’d been there to see me jump. I almost came out of my skin. Serves me right, I suppose.

Don’t worry, it’s Pass/Fail.

1. What’s not here? There are (at least) two correct answers.

2. A recent tour of the new Glasscock School building turned up a couple of examples of ingenious repurposing of materials that were already on campus. (Dumpster diving—I’m a big fan.) Where did they come from?

Bonus points for identifying the two amused alums.

3. What’s this all about?

Although I often walk across campus with my mind drifting around in years other than the one in which I happen to live, sometimes I forget big things about how we used to operate around here. I was reminded of this last week when I ran across two photographs taken in the Physics Amphitheater over three decades apart. I am unashamed to say that I love this room and the building that it’s in. What I hadn’t ever considered was that for many years it was the biggest room on campus—it was built to seat about 300 people—and thus the default space for events of all kinds. Public lectures, of course, were commonly held here but all sorts of other things went on in this venerable room. A few weeks ago, for example, I posted a picture of Dr. Lovett giving a matriculation speech there

But here’s something completely different—a pep rally in the fall of 1929:

On a more scholarly note, I believe this is the address of John Lyon Reid, who was awarded Rice’s Medal of Honor for Architecture at the semi-centennial celebration in 1962:

I’ve never seen a photo of events like these in the Chem Lecture Hall, but I don’t know why not. Sometimes it’s just chance what survives.

Bonus: Be the best that you can be.