Rice History Corner

Last week I wrote about the images in the Autrey’s scrapbook that were taken at Girard College in Philadelphia, the only plausible Rice connection I could think of. Today I unapologetically offer just a wee taste of other wonders contained on those pages that have nothing at all to do with Rice history. The scrapbook documents a 1912 family trip to the cities of the northeast. Someone brought along a pretty good camera and put it to good use, photographing many places and scenes that are still well known today. The combination of familiarity and strangeness is arresting and my reaction to seeing them the first time was something like shock.

The Atlantic City boardwalk:

Boston Garden:

The Hotel Astor, Times Square area. I don’t know what’s there now, but I do know this is long gone:

It looks like the Autreys left the northeast by ship, sailing down to Key West (I somehow neglected to scan any images taken there) and from there to Cuba before heading home to Galveston. There are several pages of pictures taken in Havana, mostly unlabeled. This looks to be Havana Cathedral:

This is my favorite of the whole bunch –the first game of the 1912 World Series at the Polo Grounds! If I recall correctly this would have been a brand new stadium, the earlier iteration having burned in, I think, 1911. It was a great series, maybe one of the greatest. This looks like the ceremonial first pitch–but there’s someone in the batter’s box:

Bonus: Signs of life.

Zoom in on his button. That’s right about where I am these days, minus the beer but with much, much cuter shoes.

Bonus:

As I’ve said before if you hang around here long enough you’ll see everything twice. Today’s exhibit: The Woodson Research Center, circa 1990. Note please the plexiglass shield in front of the front desk:

And the Woodson Research Center, June 10, 2020:

At least the ghastly yellow carpet is gone, until someone hopefully far in the future gets the genius idea that yellow carpet would be just the thing to brighten the place up.

Bonus: Main lobby, Fondren. I have two things. First, there’s no one here to use these computers. Second, is this device doing something by itself??

The excitement in the Woodson yesterday mostly (but not completely) centered around the arrival of new chairs for our conference table. And very handsome chairs they are too:

What’s actually important, of course, is not the chairs, lovely and comfortable as they are, but the table itself. It’s an antique, made of beautiful heavy oak and ornately carved at the posts:

It was original equipment in Dr. Lovett’s office. It’s easy to imagine him sitting there, doing big business:

Dr. Edgar Odell Lovett’s presidential office in Lovett Hall (Administration Building), Rice Institute

We were lucky enough to get this table when in the course of shifting people around for various inscrutable purposes some folks were given space in Lovett Hall and had no need for it. I don’t know what they were thinking but I’m glad that it has found a home where it will be used and loved. The new chairs really work with it too. We’re so cool in the archives I can hardly stand it.

Bonus: Excuse the finger!

Unsurprisingly almost nothing in the scrapbook from the Autrey family’s trip to the northeastern cities in 1912 has anything at all to do with Rice. But there are two pages that do, although accidentally. My heart jumped when I saw this label:

It’s actually spelled Girard, not Gerard, but there’s no mistaking what it is. Here’s an extremely obscure fact about William Marsh Rice–some years before he asked his lawyer to draft the charter for the Rice Institute in Houston, he had him draft a very different charter for a different kind of school. The plan was for that school to be built on Rice’s New Jersey farm, modeled after the Girard Institute, a manual training school for orphaned boys in Philadelphia, and when I say modeled I mean the charter was an exact copy the the Girard charter in every detail down to the height and width of the windows.

Maybe it’s just me but I feel like this next one would have been a better picture if the photographer had walked over to the other side of the tree:

They photographed the students too, likely in between classes:

So why did William Marsh Rice change his mind about the sort of school he wanted to start? Well, in a nutshell, his second wife nagged him into moving to Manhattan, where he became enamored of the Cooper Union, a much more sophisticated but still largely vocational institution. When he decided that he wanted to fund something more like that, his lawyer (quite a lazy one, apparently) put together a new document modeled after the Cooper Union charter, and when I say modeled again I mean copied. Only two things from the Girard charter were kept  in the new charter. First, the Rice Institute, now to be built in Houston, would be completely secular. This was an important influence on our development. Although Rice remained for a long time culturally Protestant it allowed for a strong Jewish presence on campus from the beginning. (There’s much to be said about this and I’m working on that research right now.) The second thing that Mr. Rice retained from Girard proved to be deeply troublesome–it would be for white students only. That legacy still haunts us.

For a short history of Girard College including its own tumultuous period of racial change, try this entry from the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.

And go here to see a very blunt 1914 letter from original Rice trustee Cesar Lombardi to Captain Baker about Mr. Rice’s intentions, his plans based on Cooper Union, and what should finally be done to realize his vision. (Spoiler: we never did it.)

Bonus: This was a first for me. I’ve seen numberless brides, birthdays, graduations, engagements, and quiceañeras being photographed on this campus but I’ve never before seen a baby having his picture taken by a professional photographer. Avery, six months old, and his very doting mother.

I don’t know where Rice sociology professor Bill Martin grew up but I’m pretty darn sure it wasn’t Boston, Massachusetts. So my question–if you’re out there, Bill–is why the Red Sox team picture on his office wall, especially since judging by the grey in his hair I’d put this photo about ten years later?

That was a great team for sure and that 1975 World Series was one of the best ever. The games were all day games but late enough in the afternoon (and in the Eastern time zone) that I could make it home from school in time to see most of them. I more or less worshipped Carl Yastrzemski and it was tough to see the Sox lose. But I was well over it by 1985.

Sigh.

:

From the Autrey Family scrapbook. A brewery owning family, as you’ll recall.

Bonus: I can do better than that.

When I was doing the research for last week’s post on Max Autrey I discovered that we had a small collection, just a single box, of materials from Lynette Autrey. We can now get things from the Library Service Center on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I requested it and it came in the other day. There’s not much there to speak of except for one thing–a scrapbook, containing mostly photographs taken by the Autrey family in 1912. They are on the whole very good pictures, clear and fairly well composed, of the sights they saw on a trip to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Key West, and Havana (along with several pages of Galveston, Seabrook, and Texas City images that seem to have been taken at roughly the same time period).  I thought at first they might be from Herbert and Lynette’s honeymoon but they didn’t marry until 1915. In any event I haven’t come across anything as wonderful as this scrapbook in quite a while. I’ll share more of it next week but for today, we have here at right young Max Autrey, and a handsome lad he was:

Well, what the heck, I can’t resist a couple more. Here are two images from the scrapbook, undated but labeled “the troops at Texas City.” It’s the second one that blew my mind. It looks like an airplane but doesn’t look like an airplane at the same time. Do you think that could actually fly? Not for long, I’d guess.

Bonus: Progress on the new module of the Library Service Center. We’re so grateful for this.

Today we have an absolutely delicious little mystery. I got an email this morning from Tina Hicks, the FE&P Senior Project Manager who’s working on the Mech Lab’s much needed renovation:

I have been working to clean Mech Lab out in preparation for the renovation.  In the basement, east end, I found this tiny plaque on the wall.  It was so small I had to get a photo so I could zoom in enough to read it.  Sharing for your thoughts….

Here’s the little plaque, she guesses about an inch and a half tall by four inches wide:

So far the only potential “G Hardin” I’ve found is an Chem E named Gregory, ’70 ’71 but there may well be others so I’ll keep looking. I admit I’m stymied about the vampire bat.

If you have any ideas I’d really love to hear them.

Bonus: We seem to be down a tree.

Here’s something from deep down in my laptop, a letter from Ralph Adams Cram to William Ward Watkin that I found ages ago in Ray Watkin’s papers. I’m not completely certain what book he’s referring to and am a bit haunted by the thought that there are some great photographs floating around somewhere that I haven’t found:

Much of the time we just don’t pay attention to it and sometimes I get aggravated that people keep taking the exact same picture over and over but there’s no denying that Cram is right about this. It’s really a smashing success of a building:

Bonus: We’ve got a skeleton crew working in the Woodson and I was able to go in for a while this afternoon. Campus is still extremely quiet, but I did run across two young women who came to have their pictures taken, the first to celebrate her graduation from Elkins High School, the second her quinceañera. They lifted my spirits.