Rice History Corner

All of these were inspired by the batch of slides that Alex Dessler brought in a couple of weeks ago. The growth of the tree canopy is amazing. I think the most startling example is the view of the North Lot from the balcony of the Space Science building, 1967 and 2014:

Next is the Media Center, undated but right around the time of completion, I think, then right before it was taken apart this year. The area changed from bleak concrete to a small oasis at the edge of an enormous parking lot:

Finally, these last two bear no real relationship to anything but I was amused by the way the wing is always in the way no matter what year it is. The first was taken in 1921, the second in 1967:

Many thanks to Dr. Dessler for his thoughtful gift!

I’ve heard some wild tales about the years when the campus was seasonally overrun with huge flocks of birds. We apparently tried cannons, nets, noisemakers, bird whisperers, etc. to drive them off, all to no avail. And then one year they mysteriously didn’t return and haven’t been back in those numbers since. (I hold my breath every fall.)

The other day this undated clipping that documents one especially grisly aspect of the annual visit fell out from between the pages of a scrapbook I was looking at. I have to sheepishly admit that I had a good laugh at the temerity of those birds that dropped dead in some big shot’s reserved parking spot.

I’ve never been able to pin down the precise beginning and end dates of this invasion. And although I’ve seen a couple of reproduced photos, both this sad one and a couple in the Campanile, we don’t have a single original picture of it in the archives. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Bonus: In case you weren’t aware, Rice’s women’s tennis team is fantastic.

Summer’s almost here.

Here’s Bill Martin, c1971:

And Alex Dessler and Jim Sims c1974:

In yesterday’s comments section, someone asked about the story of the dastardly kidnapping of Sammy by some sorry A&M cadets after a basketball game in 1917 and his subsequent rescue by a group of Rice students. By today’s standards this is an utterly incredible story, the kind of thing that now gives rise to visions of lawsuits and serious jail time. This is the basic narrative as reported at the time by the Thresher:

I seem to have had problems scanning the second page, but you can see it here. It’s completely crazy. Completely.

Happily enough, a good deal of material surrounding this episode has survived and is scattered across several collections. Here is a galling photo from the A&M archives of Sammy decked out as a cadet. I believe the entire A&M senior administration is here, gloating:

But all was not lost. Here’s a photograph I found during all the digging I did in the gym before it was renovated—Rice students enjoying their quasi-victory. Note that they hired a professional photographer to take the picture:

Just by the way, the young man second from the right in the bottom row is Jimmy Waters, discussed here and here. (Go look. It’s good.)

And finally, a young coed’s heart rending poem titled “The Martyr Sammy:”

Bonus: I can’t resist one more. This comes, of all places, from the papers of Rice’s first professor of Biology, Julian Huxley. Huxley was already in Europe, serving England in World War I when he received from Rice math professor Griffith Evans a handwritten copy of the Thresher story above. It was copied word for word from the Thresher’s account of the incident, in five examination booklets (they weren’t blue yet, by the way, but white). I don’t know why he did this instead of just clipping out a copy—it’s just lost to history, I guess. Here’s the first page of this very long document:

But what makes me include it here (and what makes me laugh) comes at the very end of the last page. Evans, writing to the ornithologist Huxley, adds a note of his own:

“You will probably see that the sex of the bird changes during the reading.” I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

A three-legged race.

Today another significant group of slides I’d never seen before quite unexpectedly fell into my lap. As I looked through them I was surprised to discover a clear link back to the glass plate negatives from the 1929-30 school year that turned up a few weeks ago. Here are some freshman hijinks in the fall of 1929:

And here are two undated shots from today’s batch:

I’m not sure how to even begin to go about dating these. Maybe ’80s or early ’90s? Same event or different ones? They’re all pretty dorky one way or the other.

I heard we have a baseball game against Texas A&M this afternoon. It reminded me of this bit of youthful high spirits:

I’m pretty sure it was taken in 1930 and the note on the back says we had to send students back up to College Station to clean it up.

Rice won, by the way, 7-0.

This dunking booth at the Baker Shakespeare Festival in the spring of that year may have been the last straw:

Bonus:

I was looking at a file of old RMC stuff earlier this week in preparation for a meeting when I came across this fund-raising brochure for the building. Here’s the cover:

As you can see, there’s only a resemblance, and a rather loose one at that, to what was built. What was really startling, however, was something else altogether — they meant to put it on the opposite end of campus, where Allen Center and it’s parking lot are now:

And here’s the text:

As some of you might know, the building was meant to house some of the (rudimentary by today’s standards) student life functions that had been located in either Autry House  or the basement of Fondren. There was quite a bit of grumbling when it opened about how far away the new RMC was from both the dorms and from Autry House and I wonder why the powers-that-be changed their minds.

Just for fun, here are some RMC construction photos that I found among Joseph Davies’s slides. First, the uncharacteristically blurry groundbreaking:

There are also a couple that he took from the new Biology Building across the street, which seems to have still been under construction also:

Note: I’m taking the day off tomorrow for Good Friday. I’ll be back next week.

There are many, many photographs in the archives that I’ve never seen because they’re difficult to look at. Some are oddly shaped or sized and therefore awkwardly stored, so it’s a hassle to get them out. Others are tiny slides and you have to get out the lightbox to get a decent look at them. Most of these unseen images, though, are negatives. There are a lot of them, mostly kept wrapped in envelopes made of some sort of thin paper. Yesterday I already had the lightbox out for another reason and in a spare moment I grabbed one of those envelopes for a quick peek.

It turned out to contain some very charming (and undated) pictures of Presidents Lovett and Houston standing outside on what looks like a nice day. Lovett kept an office on campus after he retired, on the third floor of the Admin Building if I recall correctly, so I suppose it wouldn’t have been unusual for them to run into each other.

So what year is it? There’s not much to go on here. The only thing I notice is that the walkway they’re standing on looks like it might still be gravel. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly when that spot was paved.

This next shot, though, is more helpful. In the background beyond the Physics amphitheater there’s the Bonner Lab, which was finished in 1952. Dr. Lovett died in 1957, so we have a five-year window when this could have been taken. I can live with that.

Bonus: In the same batch I discovered this image of Houston in his office. My attention was riveted by what I could see out of the window.

Extra Bonus: Alex Dessler, the founding chairman of the Space Science Department, came by the Woodson for a visit yesterday. We had a fun and very productive afternoon. We covered a lot of topics and he helped me identify some slides he left with me, some of which I’ll post later. Watching me struggle with the slides, he gave me a fantastic gift, one I’ll use frequently.

I had a crazy day today and can’t summon any productive remarks. So here are some pretty flowers, along with a few pretty weeds:

I found these pictures in the Thresher photo files and I don’t think they’re especially old — maybe late ’90s — but I was instantly struck by how wild they look. People often remark to me about how built up the campus has become but it’s also remarkable how manicured it is now.

Bonus: