Rice History Corner

A student recently turned this up in one of Julian Huxley’s scrapbooks and brought it to attention:

I’d seen the image before but had apparently never bothered to turn it over. I did this time and found a note in Edgar Odell Lovett’s handwriting:

I couldn’t help but walk over to Lovett Hall and have another look at those carvings, which could only be done by crouching down and peering around the construction fence. There’s a lot of change happening on campus these days, mostly good, but sometimes continuity matters too.

Bonus:

Sorry for the less than perfect image; this is another one off a contact sheet. We do have the negative, though, so when there’s more time I can get a clearer picture. A little blurriness, however, can’t disguise the glory of all those mismatched stripes:

More important, of course, is that I don’t know what it means. What was this computer and where was the picture taken? I know someone out there knows.

Bonus:

Sometimes I come across something on eBay that is simply irresistible, just absolute catnip. Thus I have for you today a spectacular advertisement from the 1939 volume of the Engineering News-Record, a construction industry publication that still exists:

That’s a really nice image of the then brand new north stands of the old stadium. I had a devil of a time back in 2015 figuring out when exactly they were built and there are very few pictures of them before the big south stands were constructed in 1938. Here’s the other one that I know of:

The bench seats were replaced at some point but those stands lasted until 2015 so we really got our money’s worth.

Wolmanizing involves just a teeny little bit of arsenic, by the way, but probably fine as long as you didn’t eat any of the wood.

Bonus:

Ron Sass was truly a stalwart of Rice. He was hired in 1958, when William Houston was president, and he stayed for his entire career. He was here for the semi-centennial and here for the centennial. Ron’s wisdom, compassion, and generosity of spirit were coupled with a keen intellect and a sort of hard-headed practicality. These qualities made him an extraordinary teacher–he won the Brown Award three of the first four times it was given and was the first teacher at Rice to be retired from the competition– and they also helped guide us through the campus tumult that began in the late 1960s and bubbled through the ’70s.

Back in 2018 the Woodson unexpectedly received a package of materials from the Warren Skaaren Charitable Trust. Among the papers was a draft of a letter that Skaaren ’69 wrote in support of Sass’s nomination for the E. Harris Harbison Award, a national prize for excellence in teaching that was given by the Danforth Foundation. (He didn’t get it, but he should have.) The last page of the letter is missing but even so I can’t do better than Skaaren. This is the Ron Sass I knew:

Bonus:

It’s been one of those rains that just won’t stop. Hard, soft, drizzle, drips, but always something. Three days so far. After a hundred and twenty years of working on campus drainage we don’t get the kind of epic floods we used to, but this is still a lot. I won’t even show you what the quad looks like.

Just today I came across a bunch of images of a football game played in the rain sometime in the early 1970s. They were in one of the binders full of contact sheets that came in this collection. We have the negatives that go with them but not the time to scan them today, so bear with me here.

It’s interesting that although it was raining pretty hard the student section was fairly full. Enjoyment levels seemed to depend on whether you had possession of an umbrella or not:

II looked closely but can’t figure out which game this was. If anyone has any thoughts about this  please feel free to speculate in the comments.

Bonus:

I got several emails and comments about the new sidewalks in the engineering quad, both pro and con. For my part, I have mixed feelings.

That pea gravel came, I believe, out of an effort to maintain as much as possible of the look of the original walkways, which were just plain gravel. You can see in this great shot (I’m guessing circa late 1940s) that both the walks and the road that came in off Gate 3 are gravel:

I think the gravel looks good and much more natural but I can see why it might not be the most practical thing for a campus. Thus the pea gravel, captured here as it was first being installed sometime in the 1950s:

By the way, I originally wrote about that image here but I misdated it, thinking the paving was done in the late 1940s. Pictures I later found from the 1951 student elections proved me wrong on that:

The pea gravel is both good and bad. It really is slippery when wet but even worse for someone like me, who has had to push and pull various carts, dollies, and wagons around campus, it’s hard to move things over. It’s loud and clattering and sometimes catches small wheels, which once sent me flying over the top of a library book cart right in the middle of the quad. I definitely won’t miss that part.

But the pea gravel looks better than the stark grey pavement (why not something with a bit of brown?), which I think is harsh and out of place on such a green and leafy campus:

Any way, I don’t have a vote on the grey pavement but I do have Yeats’s Lake Isle of Inisfree:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Bonus: It looks like Cannady Hall is pretty close to done.

Sorry to have been absent recently–I was trying hard to finish a project which is just . . . about . . . done. (I hope.)

I drove through a lot of stuff coming from northwest on Monday–we saw rain, freezing rain, sleet, and even some snow–but this looks like a legitimate snow storm. I think it was January, 1918 and I love that someone got up and took a picture from the Administration Building

Bonus:  The other day I was walking along the O’Connor building, thinking as usual about something else, and for some reason at that moment something seemed odd. I stopped for a minute to pay attention and finally saw it.

The new sidewalks don’t have pea gravel!

I came back from break today to a drippy, dark, sodden campus. Here’s what the quad looked like this morning from the fifth floor of Fondren:

Pretty messy: but not as bad as this:

That’s from a big rain in 1922, looking west towards Harris Gully. The low slung building where the road ends is the shed I talked about in this post from a while back about things that aren’t here anymore.

That 1922 rain was quite a storm. Here are a couple more images of the aftermath, all looking towards the gully:

I have a long history with that road between the dorms.

Bonus: Not an Italian cypress but dead nonetheless.

We have several scrapbooks in the Woodson that were kept by members of the first couple of graduating classes. If you study them closely you find that they are, among other things, testaments to the close relationships between the young people who were privileged to be the pioneers of student life at Rice. It was an exciting time to be here, as the architecture of the undergraduate experience was being imagined and then built. You see it too even in the local newspapers, where student parties and outings were given coverage: the excitement around the founding of the new institution carried over to the entire city.

Part of this is present in these scrapbooks in the form of bits and pieces of the rich and varied social life of the students. Among these scraps are dozens of Christmas cards exchanged between them. I’ve found the same simple card in many of the books, this from the very first brave soul to enroll at the Rice Institute and the first person to be awarded a Rice diploma, Ed Dupree ’16:

Here’s young Mr. Dupree, I’d guess sometime in the teens or early ’20s:

I join him in good wishes for the Yuletide.

Bonus: I also join another friend who says the best holiday greeting in this difficult year is “Let there be light.”

On more from On Campus, this one very timely. The holiday lull is one of my favorite times of year. It might have even moved into first place now that we don’t have the pre-commencement bustle in the academic quad anymore.

I was on campus after the end of finals and it was just as this article says. Not dead but quiet, on a damp, grey day. As always there were grad students around, and the football team was practicing, unusual for this time of year. There were maintenance crews around cleaning up and working on the inevitable drainage problems. Construction workers were busy at Cannady Hall. But you could still feel the slowed pace and the kind of hush that only descends at this time of year.

Lots has stayed the same over the years but see how much has changed–no more fancy dinner dances at Cohen House, once a staple of the holidays at Rice:

Bonus: