I’m embarking on a busy, likely unpredictable day so while I have five quiet minutes I’m going to get this up. This way we can enjoy it all day!
Rice historians Andrew Muir and Frank Vandiver, Honolulu, August 1962, looking like they’ve already started on the punch. Can you feel the tropical breezes??
Looking through some boxes of old library records, I found the earliest history of my archives. Their very first appearance is in a 1949 memo from Librarian William Dix to President Houston:
It seems pretty persuasive to me and apparently Houston thought so as well. A committee was quickly up and running and they wasted no time in getting a notice into the Sallyport, explaining what they were up to and how alumni could help:
I’m especially charmed that they assumed any future historian who might be working on the history of the institution would be a man. As I think about it, I’m fairly sure that my sex is not the only thing about me that would have surprised them.
As I worked through the folder I was transfixed by these minutes, taken at a 1950 meeting of the committee. It’s just a list, but I can almost hear them talking as they try to figure out what records are where:
The records of the Rice estate trials are in the Fieldhouse, the architectural plans are in the attic of the Chemistry Building—this is exactly what I do today (or at least part of what I do today). It’s shocking how much stuff is still floating around both on and off campus.
So things seem to have gotten off to a good start. But it shouldn’t surprise any of us–at least any of us who work at universities–to find that they kind of got stuck here. I think they did go out and gather these materials, almost all of which we have, but then the committee just sort of petered out.
More to come.
I guess this is a cliffhanger.
I was back in the oversize area the other day looking at old Sallyports and just for fun I started opening up random envelopes. Look what I found:
They’re the plans for the Math Science Building (Herman Brown Hall) that we’ve recently been watching go up as we simultaneously watch the parking lot disappear. The drawings of the basement are by far the most interesting ones–the other floors are pretty standard layouts of offices and lounges. I think I get the gist of what’s what here from previous discussions.
I’m not sure I understand, though, exactly what is meant by “Keypunch.”
The most revealing thing in this booklet, though, and the thing that makes me bother writing about it at all, are some handwritten notations on a map of campus.
That’s President Pitzer’s handwriting, by the way, and I really wish I could ask him what was going through his mind here. I suspect that he was casting about for possible locations other than this odd site. Note also what he’s got written down where George R. Brown Hall is today: “save for Chem. repl. present bldg.”
Bonus: I’ve seen this and it’s good.
I was looking through an early scrapbook this afternoon and was struck by this photograph.
It’s dated 1916 and the young football player is identified as Travis Lee Haltom. I went to see if I could find anything about about him and indeed I did. This is from the 1919 publication called Rice Records in War Service:
*TRAVIS LEE HALTOM. San Antonio. ’15-17. Entered Air Service (Aeronautics) at Fort Sam Houston, April 22, 1917. Attended School of Military Aeronautics, Austin, and Air Service Flying School, Kelly Field, San Antonio; commissioned Second Lieutenant, Air Service, Signal Reserve Corps, Reserve Military Aviator, March 20, 1918. Killed in airplane collision at Gerstner Field, Lake Charles, La., June 7, 1918.
Most of the things that I found in the box labeled “Campus Construction Negatives, 1964-68” (first mentioned here) are pretty much what you’d expect to find in a box so labeled. Not everything, though. Archives can be weird places.
These images are both fascinating and hard to explain. It’s the laundry facility for the Rice Hotel in the summer of 1965. Here’s the exterior:
And the interior, complete with workers:
What puzzles me about this is that, while the history of the Rice Hotel gets pretty convoluted, I’m almost certain that we didn’t own it in the summer of 1965 (although I do believe we then owned the land on which it stood). Also, I have no clue where this facility was (is?) located.
Just for fun, here’s the parking lot, full of glorious cars:
Bonus: A couple shots of the inside of the Rice Hotel, which I’m fairly sure were taken at a time in the ’70s when we did own the building. Lots of napkins to wash in that ballroom.
He was throwing chairs before throwing chairs was cool.
Somewhere back in the comments someone asked about a road open to automobile traffic behind the Chemistry Building. I can’t find the comment but if I recall correctly there were some questions about exactly where this road extended at various times. I looked around in some of the logical places but I never could discover even a trace of that road until just the other day. But here it is now, in all its glory, in a 1942 aerial shot taken by the Texas Air National Guard:
It’s kind of a funny little road–it doesn’t really go anywhere except around the building. It does look like there might be a few parking spaces at the northeast corner, but otherwise I guess it must have been arranged around access to the loading dock.
The reason I couldn’t find it in other aerial images is pretty simple: those little trees grew up and blocked the view. This picture is from the early ’50s (the stadium is very new and the Gaping Maw is still out there in the Stadium Lot) and it’s hard to tell if there’s still an operational road back there.
This photograph is a little bit later. It actually has a date on it: July 3, 1956. Here we get a better look at what’s going on with the ingress and egress to the main parking lot. Note that the road doesn’t come around the building and exit at the loop anymore. It’s hard to be sure, but I think there’s still a road there and I think you could drive across campus all the way from Main Street, take a left at Chemistry and then a right by the edge of the parking lot and come out on Rice Boulevard. Don’t hold me to this, though.
More like Moving Month, really. It took most of June, 1949 to get all of our books into the new Fondren Library, which had it’s official opening that fall. There were books stashed all over campus: on upper floors and in the basement of Lovett, in the Physics Building, in Chemistry and in the Fieldhouse (that I know about). This was just one day in that long process.
Great shot of the back of the library!!
Fun fact: All the books were fumigated before they were put on the shelves.
Sometimes what happens when you work in the same archive for a long time is that you just get used to it. It seems so normal when you’re in it every day and it becomes easy to take things for granted, to believe you thoroughly understand things and don’t need to think hard about them any longer. I mention this because I read something today that Edgar Odell Lovett–a man whose greatness is an article of faith at Rice–wrote in 1946 about the plans for the new library. I’d never read this before and it struck me as a specific, immediate and forceful reminder of why it is that Edgar Odell Lovett actually deserves to be revered.
I’ve been to Austin and back today so I had to rummage around in my laptop for something interesting to look at. Lo and behold, more pictures of Bill Martin! Here he’s still hanging out with undergrads but (wisely, in my opinion) he’s ditched the beanie, which seems to have returned to it’s rightful place:
Here’s a more dignified image, one I’ve always liked. It’s clearly a commencement photo but it isn’t dated. That’s one of Rice’s greatest deans and provost, Bill Gordon, with his back to the camera. The only other person I can identify is, I think, Clarence Miller from Chemical Engineering in the center of the frame next to Bill’s right arm. I’m not sure what’s happening here.
And finally, another picture with the allegedly stylish eyeglasses. This one is a bit puzzling–the seal on the podium is of the UT Medical School. It is also, of course, undated.
Bonus: Another thing for which I have no explanation.
RSS Feed