Rice History Corner

I’m stumped.

Every once in a while I stumble on to something that really matters to people.  After I posted about Eddie Wojecki the other day, my in-box quickly filled with stories of his skill and compassion. More than a dozen people wrote to tell me how he had cared for them with grace and respect. So I went back and looked for what else I could find of him in the archives. There’s a reasonable amount, but I chose these two pieces from the Thresher, the first from soon after his arrival and the second from just after his departure. From beginning to end, it’s all of a piece. A good man, still remembered almost fifty years later for his kindness and decency. We should all be so lucky.

Bonus: Here are a couple of testimonials.

Eddie was beloved. It is that simple. He didn’t ask for much from others, and yet he was a gracious servant of all. Shortly after his death in October 1967, the football team dedicated the next game to his memory.  Rice played Northwestern, a much bigger Big Ten conference team.  And contrary to all predictions, Rice smashed them — for Eddie.  As I recall, the score was maybe 50-6 or 50-7. One sportswriter commented on the unlikely victory with a statement that I shall paraphrase something like “Playing on the emotion of their love and respect for Eddie Wojecki, the Rice football team could have beaten the Green Bay Packers last night.”

And I claim a minuscule personal connection.  I was a mere weanie.  No connection to the athletic department, but when I sprained an ankle, one of my jock friends took me to Eddie.  He examined my ankle, had me sit in the whirlpool for a while, and then he personally taped it.  If there had been a photographer to record the moment, the picture would have had me smiling.  Funny how I remember that incident more than many other, superficially more meaningful, events that happened that year. Eddie taught us all, jocks and weanies, what it means to care for one another. 

One I especially liked since it came from a reader who didn’t go to Rice:

You have no idea — so I’ll tell you — how much Eddie Wojecki did to improve safety for athletes in Houston grammar and high schools. When I had my first ankle injury (at the age of 10), he had Dad bring me over to Rice, and showed me a rehab exercise. We lived in the same parish, but I know he did the same for kids around town. It was in high school that I benefited from the ankle taping that he taught our trainers. Eddie knew so much about knee injuries, he’d “scrub in” and comment during orthopedic surgical procedures — this before arthroscopic surgery had been developed!

I find myself quite pressed for time tonight, but I do have something cool that I found unexpectedly this afternoon. This was the centerpiece of a full page newspaper spread published in the early spring of 1941–the reporter followed a Rice co-ed through her day on campus.

This is baffling to me. Why is there a turnstile in the middle of campus? Really, sometimes I just have to stop in wonderment.

Also, do you think this is the same walkway? It’s obviously much earlier (note the top of the campanile) but it sort of looks the same.

Bonus:

An aside: I was very touched by all the emails I got about Eddie Wojecki. I’ll have another post about him tomorrow.

There’s clearly much more to being an athletic trainer than taping ankles but apparently people enjoy taking pictures of ankle taping because there are a lot of them. It also seems that taping ankles is more enjoyable than one might suspect, as every image I’ve seen of this activity has a smiling trainer in it. Here’s one undated and unidentified:

And here’s one of Rice trainer Eddie Wojecki, who arrived on campus in 1942 and took care of Owl athletes until his death in 1967:

Wojecki was a big deal in the world of athletic trainers, one of the people who worked to make it a profession. There’s a Southwest Athletic Trainers Association award named in his honor–you can read about Wojecki and his contributions in this short biographical piece at their page.

Bonus: From a 1905 book, here’s the Gibney Method of taping ankles. It doesn’t look like what they’re doing above, but what do I know.

Special thanks to Bill Hobby, who brought this story to my attention.

This photograph is undated but between Willy’s toga and the Faber College motto it seems safe to say it was probably taken in or around 1978, the year Animal House was released:

This is the groundbreaking ceremony for the statue. I wonder if these gentlemen would have been surprised by the escapade above. I’d bet not.

Great view of the Chemistry Annex in the background.

 Note to Mike Ross: This is a Schlueter photograph.

I’ve has this picture for quite some time and just couldn’t figure out what it was. I actually titled it “No Idea Construction” when I scanned it. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t get it to make sense.

Then, the answer to yesterday’s Bonus Question gave me an idea. Just as a reminder, here it is: Who knows where this is?

And Don Johnson’s correct answer is: I think I do. It is the ceiling skylight in one of the newer wings of Abercrombie. Newer being a relative term; the fill-in wings were constructed in the 80s, if I recall correctly. 

I got confirmation this afternoon from an eminent authority that the top image is of filling in the space between two original wings, c1980. Here’s a look at the wings during construction in 1948:

And a 1983 view (if you zoom in you can see the scaffolding still up on Mudd Lab) of the top of the building from Bonner Lab:

Bonus: This was discovered yesterday inside the ceiling of an art department room in the first Sewall basement. It’s a piece of art, intricate and exquisitely constructed. Covered with dust, it had clearly been in the ceiling for quite a long time. If you have any idea who made it, where it came from or why it was in the ceiling I would love to hear from you.

Roughly the same spot, roughly fifty years apart. The first set, I’m almost certain, is from this meet in the spring of 1916 (Rice left the Southwest Conference in 1916 and rejoined it in 1918, by the way, which is why it’s a TIAA meet):

The images were made from some of the glass plate negatives that Tommy Lavergne gave me a couple of years ago:

The second set is also undated but must have been taken in the late 1960s, maybe for the media guide:

Bonus: Who knows where this is?

Every once in a while I run across something that I have to lay aside for a while before I can talk about it. I’ve had this photograph of history professor Francis Loewenheim for six months but it seems so poignant to me that even now I’m not sure what to say:

There’s a tremendous amount of testimony from students that Loewenheim, a scholar of modern German and diplomatic history who taught here from 1959 to 1996, was a powerful, even great, teacher. Here are the kinds of words they use: inspiring, daunting, brilliant, witty, unsparing, passionate. All, I think, true. He also wrote extensively, even voluminously, mostly op-ed pieces in newspapers both in Houston and across the country. He consumed a tremendous amount of newsprint as well: I remember piles of newspapers snaking out of his office door and down the hall of the History Department.

At the same time, Professor Loewenheim could be, as a member of Rice’s academic community, rather a difficult individual. At times blunt to the point of combativeness, he seems to have always regarded himself as an outsider among his colleagues, although those whom he considered friends had his absolute loyalty. We have his papers in the Woodson–culled in one of the most remarkable episodes in my two decades at Rice from a veritable mountain of boxes that came from his estate–and they are truly wide-ranging and fascinating. I’m not doing him anything like justice in this short post and in fact it might not be possible to do so even if I wrote all day. He was really complicated. That’s what I see in the picture.

c 1973

Long-time Rice architecture professor Will Cannady recently donated his papers to the Woodson and they contain some pretty interesting materials. Most engaging for me are the before-and-after photos of the 1976 addition to Cohen House that was designed by Cannady and Anderson Todd. This building has been renovated and extended many times over the years–the first time in 1929, only a few years after it was completed–and it isn’t easy figuring out exactly what happened when. You can see what I mean in this recent shot. There’s a lot going on here:

Cannady’s pictures, though, go some way towards understanding how one of the constant problems, the kitchen, was tackled over time. Here’s a “before” image of the kitchen interior. Note the three rectangular windows:

It’s actually easier to see what happened by looking at the exterior, what was the loading dock area in 1973. Here it is from the side, and you can also get a good idea of its size in the first photo above:

And here it is about a month ago:

All that new interior space is kitchen (which unfortunately I don’t think has been touched since). At first I thought the older part of the building had been removed. Then, wandering around inside, I saw this:

Bonus: I didn’t know this was here until just the other day. It’s a very nice room. It even has a sofa, upon which a young man was soundly sleeping when I visited.