In this undated photo we find former Rice trustee and Chairman of the Board from 1982 to 1996, Charles Duncan, Jr., spreading seasonal good cheer with his festive holiday tie. You can tell it’s working by how happy fellow board member Albert Kidd looks.
If you zoom in, you can see that the polar bears are enjoying refreshing Coca-Colas.
I’ve had something rolling around in the back of my mind for a while about that picture of the interior of the Community House. Remember it?
This is almost completely pointless, but I started wondering about the picture on the wall to the right. If you zoom in, you can see that it’s a page from the Houston Chronicle with lots of photographs on it. I sort of, kind of, almost recognized it. All I needed was a little time to think about where I might have seen it before. Sure enough, this morning I located two separate copies of it in student scrapbooks from the era. They were both too fragile for me to attempt scanning them right now, but I did take some shots with my iphone. The page was published on January 11, 1920 and its sole point seems to have been to depict beautiful, socially active Rice co-eds in the Sunday paper.
The large image to the left of the medallion is President Lovett’s daughter, Adelaide, ’20, and the young woman to the right of it is Anna Schirmer Vilbig, ’20, in whose scrapbook I found one of the copies.
I obviously have no real message here, but if the end of the world really does come tomorrow I’m perfectly happy to end with this.
We have a fantastic collection in the Woodson of intramural records. For many years all the teams and results were kept in scrapbooks, some of them complete with action photos. I’ve used them fairly often, sometimes for scholarly purposes and other time to dig for material to tease my friends with.
One thing in them that still has me curious is a sport I’d never heard of before, volleywall ball. I was really baffled by it for quite a while and then I found a copy of the rules in someone’s scrapbook. Now I’m only slightly baffled.
I don’t know if this was just a Rice thing or if it ever spread beyond campus. Neither am I sure when it started or how long it survived or if it indeed still does. (I doubt it, but who knows.) The scrapbooks go up until the late 1960s and it was still around then. It sounds, frankly, like a blast.
Bonus: There’s a little Christmas tree in the back of the library, decorated with scraps of paper that have people’s wishes written on them. They’re pretty interesting.
In what has to be a bit of an upset, I discovered today that contrary to all my expectations there was no “e” on the end of “Old.” I had assumed that if you’re going to go with “Ye” you’d might as well go the whole nine yards. I suppose this is why I don’t work in marketing.
I went back this morning looking for interior shots of Ye Old College Inn and I found several good ones, some from the early 1920s and others from the 1940s. I was also reminded of what an interesting artifact the scrapbook really is. It’s quite a substantial thing, with wooden covers and nicely labeled photographs and articles. It seems to have been assembled by George Martin, the restaurant’s owner and a huge supporter of Rice athletics, sometime in the early 1960s. (I think I’ll add a post about him next week. Or maybe tomorrow. Who knows?? I’m unpredictable like that.)
The first thing I’d like to talk about today is where the building was located. I found this wonderful aerial shot taken in 1933 that lets us get a decent look. Directly across Main Street from the football field and the field house, you can see first a bunch of billboards and then the structure back in the trees. That’s it–just a smidge east of where Smith Tower is now.
And here’s one of the billboards, circa 1922, for Ye Old College Inn itself. They apparently got a lot of traffic from Rice sporting events.
Finally, here are a couple of interior shots from the 1920s. I love the guy in the Rice letter sweater at left in the top one. Very casual.
This seems to be the same room a bit later and a touch fancier:
I was a little surprised to note that the two pennants on the back wall are for North Dakota and South Dakota.
Bonus: Here’s something I’ve never seen before–these lights on in the daytime.
One of the unexpected things I found in that big box last week—in fact, the thing that was right on top—was this lovely drawing by Rice’s first architecture professor, William Ward Watkin, for a “College Inn.”
Quite some time ago I wrote a post about the original snack shop out by Rice, The Owl. At some point George Martin came to own this but after the Episcopal Diocese decided to build Autry House right there as a student center, Martin made plans to open a more formal restaurant further down Main Street, just across from the brand new Rice Fieldhouse. This drawing must have been produced by Watkin for that project. And by chance one of the things that turned up during all the moving around that came with the Tudor Court renovation a few years ago was a very nice Ye Olde College Inn scrapbook. (Thanks, Don Knodel!) One of the things it held was this photograph, taken just after the building was completed in 1920. It looks like Martin built it pretty much just as Watkin drew it.
I do have some images of the interior, but I don’t have them where I happen to be working this afternoon. They are pretty swell so I’ll try to post them later this week.
Bonus: Again, this is the type of thing that brings out the rebel in me.
I looked into a box today that I’d never noticed before even though I probably have walked past it several time a week for the last fifteen years or so. It’s a big box, and a flat one. To my amazement it was full of maps and drawings, very old ones, that had come out of the business manager’s office many years ago. Most of these maps and drawings are of Houston and it’s environs in the early part of the 20th century, some of them wide views and others close up depictions of single neighborhoods. It’s not clear what they were for, although at least some seemed to be supporting documents for mortgage applications.
Several of them were frankly pretty exciting. Here’s one that’s well worth a look:
Two things jump out immediately. First, the map is dated 1923 and the rail spur is still intact. I didn’t know it was there so long and I still don’t know when it finally disappeared. Second, of course, is the box labeled “Fraternity Home Addition” out over by the athletic field area where University Boulevard is today. That was a piece of property that the Institute didn’t acquire right away. It had once been home to a gunpowder factory, I believe. The Fraternity Home Addition was meant to be a tiny subdivision, which I know because I also found this is the box:
It obviously didn’t happen, but I’m not sure what the sequence of events was. I’ll see if I can figure it out after Christmas break.
For those of you following my dental saga, my root canal is now complete! Rejoicing can begin.
I had a very happy day today, largely spent in the back room of the Woodson quietly doing research. No emergencies whatsoever. Then, when I ran across something I enjoyed, I had enough time to go run it down just for fun. It was great.
Do I have your attention?
I was looking through a scrapbook from the late 1940s and found a series of pictures of some sort of theatrical production. I couldn’t tell what it was but I was pretty confident from context that the images were made in 1947.
So I figured, what the heck–I’ll just go look at 1947 Threshers and see if I can figure it out. I realize that this might sound like a waste of time, but I’ve found over the years that it’s never a waste of time to read old newspapers. Something good always comes from it. You’ll just have to trust me on this.
So the story has a happy ending: I found an article in the December 4, 1947 Thresher about an Elizabeth Baldwin Literary Society production of a Tempe Howze, ’48, original work called “Purity Pursued.” Zoom in and take a look at the description and you’ll see that the photos match it exactly.
I was particularly interested to note the venue–the College Inn on Main Street. I didn’t know that this sort of thing went on there, although I guess I’m not especially surprised. The other thing I got a kick out of was this picture of the curtain. Lots of hijinks.
Bonus: I was alerted this morning that there was a discussion underway on the Rice sports message board about something that really gets under my skin. There’s not much that really aggravates me, but this “Rice Fight. Never Die.” business sure does. As the writer correctly points out, it was from the beginning “Rice Fight Never Dies.”
The Woodson recently and rather unexpectedly received a good number of boxes from the Graduate Student Association which contain materials that shed light on the history of that group since it was founded in 1969. The folder that I’ve most enjoyed so far is the one that holds the history of the GSA crest. The original crest looked like this:
Here it is charmingly reproduced on a cake at a picnic celebrating the 20th anniversary of the GSA in 1989. I can only hope whoever had to do the icing didn’t go blind from the effort.
In 1996 someone finally noticed that this crest was heinously ugly and a move to redesign it quickly got underway. I would like to point out here that the person most responsible for this effort was a delightful colleague of mine in the History Department’s Ph.D. program, Christopher Stokes, who was the GSA president in ’96 and who also worked in the Woodson. The new design is much cleaner: a closed book between two grackles and a field of seven white lozenges on a green background.
The seven lozenges represent the seven schools that offer graduate programs, likewise the seven gold seals on the book, which itself represents learning. The two grackles represent the division between research and professional degrees. The grackle is the official mascot of the GSA and the organization’s Latin motto is Bonis Avibus—translated as “Under Good Auspices,” but literally “Under Good Birds.”
Here’s the crest on the GSA banner. I believe the event this was taken at was the 40th anniversary of the founding of the association in 2009 and the speaker is Kristjan Stone, that year’s president. I think that this is really quite a handsome design.
Bonus:
Update: An astute reader did what I failed to do and counted the lozenges. There are seven on the 1996 sketch, but eight on the more recent drawing and the banner above. The original seven schools that offer graduate programs were Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Engineering, Music, Architecture and Business. Who can name the newest one? Just for the record, I actually do know this.
I found the picture that I posted last Friday—a high-spirited lass and her boyfriend outside the Episcopal Community House—in a student scrapbook that I haven’t spent a lot of time with until now. I was also astonished to find this image, quite blurry but the only one I’ve ever seen taken inside the building:
Not exactly luxurious, is it? If you look at this shot of the outside, I think the windows look like they line up right.
Almost miraculously, in the same scrapbook, carefully tucked in the back, was this little pamphlet that explains the purpose of the House and the activities and services it would sponsor. This is one of the most interesting things I’ve come across recently, a little bit of insight into daily student life out on the edge of the city. It’s kind of a mixed bag—I knew about the dances and I expected the religious activities, but I was a little surprised by the barbershop “for the beautification of the men students” and the Pressing Club.
Bonus:
I know two things about this picture. It was taken in 1919—note the Community House that preceded Autry House in the background—and that guy was in for it.
Bonus: Many thanks to Dannie, Charles and Steve from FE&P who found these old copper plates up in the attic of Lovett Hall and brought them in to us! We really appreciate it.
Extra Bonus: One of the things you can do on WordPress if you feel like it is to see what search terms people use to find your blog. I rarely check but I glanced at it this morning and found this—“melissa kean historically inacurate.” This put a smile on my face that has lasted all day.
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