Rice History Corner

1515 Milford

Things are being rearranged in the archives these days. As new collections come in to be processed, some boxes from the workspace in the basement are moved upstairs, which means that other boxes already on the upstairs shelves have to be moved out to the Library Service Center. I don’t really like this very much, incidentally, since I’m lazy and now will have to relearn where things are located. A happier result of all this commotion is that some things have bubbled up to the surface that I might never have looked at otherwise.

One of these things is a small scrapbook that belonged to Joan Wilson, the daughter of Rice’s first physics professor H.A. Wilson. There isn’t much Rice-related material in it, as it mainly covers the years she attended St. Mary’s College (now a high school) in Raleigh, North Carolina. I did discover, though, tucked away in a two small sleeves, a couple photos of the Wilson family at home. This is pretty good–we don’t have many pictures of H.A. Wilson and I found two more nice ones in one day.

The pictures are completely unidentified. Apart from Professor Wilson and his wife, I don’t really know who anyone is, not even Joan (although I believe she is the young woman standing on the left in the photo above). I’m also a bit adrift about dating these pictures. They’re quite outside my usual experience. I do know that the Wilsons moved in to that house in 1945. (In what has to be an upset it’s still standing, between two much newer behemoths.)

Anyone have any thoughts?

One more thing in the scrapbook made me laugh:

Honor or not, I opened it. Nothing incendiary in there.

Bonus: As I looked through the scrapbook, it dawned on me that I had seen a photo of Joan Wilson in a different collection in the Woodson. Here’s a beautiful portrait of her done by Vera Prasilova Scott, the wife of Rice physicist Arthur Scott and a stunning portrait photographer.

I ran across a couple of great ones this week. First, did you know there was a time before laser pointers? What did people even call those things? Probably just “pointers,” I guess. I think it telescoped. I’m not even going to get into what’s going on with the monitor:

And second, one of the most epic obsolete technologies ever–the eight-track player:

They've got the Isley Brothers in the machine. I'm a big, big fan.

Neither of these pictures is identified at all, by the way, so there might be something really important going on in the first one at least. The second one just looks like a couple of guys messing around in their dorm room.

Bonus: Here’s a technology that apparently cannot be improved. (No jokes about administrators, please.) I found it on campus, but I’m not saying where.

Zevi Salsburg, John Kilpatrick, Marty Graham (peeking out from behind a visitor and his wife)

I had a really busy day today. I know I say that all the time, but it’s true. Lots of running from here to there and so forth. It’s partly because more and more things just seem to fall out of the clear blue sky and land in my lap. (This isn’t a complaint, by the way. Far from it. I love the surprises.) Here’s one example: I got an email at the end of last week from my friend Bart Sinclair over in Engineering. He had found an thick file full of various items having to do with the R1 and R2 computers. Did I want them? Yes, I certainly did. A couple of these things we had, but many I’d never seen before. So I ran over there first thing this morning and got them. Since I completely lacked the discipline to just bring them to the Woodson and get back to what I should be doing, I sat and rifled through the stuff, thereby falling behind on my schedule. Naturally, I blame Bart.

For the curious, here’s the list he sent in his email:

* A set of documents that relate to some I/O devices used in the project (I recall seeing and using the Potter printer and the videojet printer) from 1971

* a manual on the operating system and assembly language programming for the Rice University Computer (1964)

* the basic machine operation manual for the Rice University Computer (1962)

* a technical report “Leaking Mode Computation on the Rice Computer” by Jean-Claude De Bremaecker, Jane Jodeit, John Iliffe, and Sigsby Rusk (1967)

* a technical report “A Direct Technique for Improving a Matrix Inverse” by Gary Sitton (1966)

* a technical report “Tags for Description and Control” by Jane Jodeit and Gary Sitton (1967)

* a technical report “A Machine-Oriented Logic Incorporating the Equality Relation” by Elbert Ernest Sibert, Jr. (1067 – this is actually a copy of his PhD thesis)

* a copy of Ed Feustel’s paper “On the Advantages of Tagged Architectures” (1972 – this is probably the most widely known publication to come out of the Rice Computer Project)

* a mimeographed copy of a description of the R2 instruction set (1972 – this was the computer that I and John Doerr worked on as undergraduates – failed miserably, but not our fault)

* a copy of “The Rice Research Computer – A Tagged Architecture,” also by Ed Feustel (1972 – this also had to do with the R2)

* a handful of design schematics for pieces of the original Rice Computer (1958-1960)

* a set of photos of people associated with the original computer, with names.  One that you might particularly appreciate has Zevi Salsburg, John Kilpatrick, Marty Graham, and a visiting faculty member and his wife standing in front of the computer console.  Another has Ted Schutz, An Hurd, Jo Mann, Jane Jodeit, John Iliffe, Phil Deck, Marty Graham, ?, Jim Peal, and Joe Bighorse posed in front of one of the computer bays.

* There’s also a letter, which appears to have come with the pictures, from Marty Graham to Kay Flowers in 1986. that identifies people on the photos with their titles, or in the case of Jodeit Mann, and Hurd, as math undergraduates.  Phil Deck was a graduate student in EE.

* a line printer print-out dated 27 August 1986 titled “AN ICSA CHRONOLOGY” (all caps, of course) compiled by Joni Sue Lane, beginning 1965 and going through 1985.  It would be interesting to know the occasion that prompted Joni Sue to put this together.  For whatever reason, this print-out was in the same envelope as the photos and letter from Marty.  Perhaps it was a copy that Marty had kept and was sending back to Rice along with the other stuff.

Here’s one of the pages. Frankly, I can’t make heads or tails of most of it but I strongly suspect that it’s quite meaningful to others. That’s why we keep things like this:

I haven’t had a chance yet to really dig down in the ICSA history but that is what’s most interesting to me in this batch.

Bonus: More signs going up on the buildings today–and these ones are both very visible and very pretty! This is one of the guys who put them in. He’s a really big Texans fan:

Here’s what the letters looks like. They have little dowel-like things on that back, which fit into holes the guys drilled in the buildings:

And this is the new sign up on Rayzor. I think it looks great. Very dignified:

Hello there, boys!

I have no idea.

I had a travel day today, up to Omaha for Annie’s baptism on Saturday, so I’m a bit tired. I promise I’ll get back to that picture showing the old stadium next week but I can’t find what I need to do it now. Instead, let’s have a look at another picture from the same series. This one is a really nice view of the academic quad from just in front of Lovett Hall, nearly straight down:

See the area just to the west of the Physics Building, where Anderson Hall is today? You can tell here that they were growing something there. A bit surprisingly, it was roses, which were carefully tended by Rice’s gardener, Tony Martino. There aren’t many pictures of this garden, so I was happy to find this one. Here’s another, taken at ground level:

I’m certainly not a gardener, but I would think it might be tricky to grow roses in Houston.

One other thing captured my attention in the first picture: the cowpaths. Even without zooming in it’s easy to see the big one going from the dorms to Lovett Hall, but if you click in and take a closer look you’ll notice that there’s a smaller one going out from Lovett and curving around the west side of the Physics Building. That one was certainly made by students (and surely faculty as well) cutting off the corner on their way to the Mech Lab and Chemistry.

I confess that this made me laugh when I first saw it. It’s the exact opposite of the cowpath that runs in that part of the quad today–if they met, they’d make an “X.” Here it is, visible on Google Maps:

This suggests something about human nature, I think.

Bonus:  I like to know what’s expected of me.

Who knows where this is?

One of the Texas National Guard aerial photos gives us a beautiful look at the old old stadium–that is, the old stadium before it was expanded in 1938. Just to be clear, I don’t mean the very first stadium (such as it was). The first stands, complete in time for the 1913 season, were just wooden bleachers:

That's Tiny Kalb in the middle, without a helmet!

I’m talking about the the original “old stadium” built in 1921, at the same time as the Fieldhouse. These were the first new structures on campus, by the way, since West Hall was completed in 1916. Some time ago I posted a 1921 aerial shot of the stadium taken from the Main Street side. Just for fun, here it is again:

The 1933 picture, though, was taken from the west side and unfortunately it’s a bit blurrier than the others in the series. (Yes, there is a lot going on in this unusual photo, so much that I can only manage to talk about one thing at a time. I’m just warming up here.)

Twelve years after it was built, the stadium looks more or less unchanged. But within only a few years of when this picture was taken, growing crowds began creating problems. Lovett insisted that if improvements were to be made, Rice boosters would have to raise the money for the expansion. I wrote about that project in this post on the 1937 Owl map.

And just by chance, a couple of days ago I ran across two photos of that addition being constructed:

Not as scary as the construction pictures of the new stadium

Bonus: I admire their confidence.

I’ve been spending much time in recent months thinking about the 1930s at Rice (hence my delight in all those Maxwell Reade photographs). It was a difficult time, what with the Great Depression and all that entailed. Enrollment growth ended as did new campus construction, faculty salaries were reduced and the Institute lost several important faculty members to other universities. As bleak as that sounds, it wasn’t all bad. Lovett basically held the place together and the students, well, they acted like students always do.

I’ve also been closely studying a series of aerial photos taken in 1933 by the National Guard. They’re all stamped on the back with “11th Photo sec AC TX National Guard.” I’m not precisely sure what that means, but I do know that these are very good pictures–crisp, clear, high quality prints. There’s a lot to be learned from them. I’ll start with this one, a straight ahead campus view from the south, including Hermann Hospital, Palmer Church and Autry House:

First, there’s a wonderful view of the Engineering Annex just to the west of the Mech Lab. It was built to house Chemistry very early on and then turned over to Engineering when the Chemistry Building was completed in 1928. You can also see how much of the western part of campus seems to have been under cultivation. I don’t know what they were growing. And if you zoom in all the way and squint real hard, on the right side of the road that cuts the cultivated area in two you can just make out that single pine tree that still stands by the Geology Building.

Most interesting to me here are the double rows of trees along the entrance road that runs between South Hall and West Hall. They were clearly planted not all that long before the picture was taken, much more recently than most of the other oaks on campus. That road is gone, of course, but the trees are still there. Here they are in one of Joseph Davies’s photos circa very late 1950s, with a beautiful lawn where the road had been:

And here they are last fall, with the lawn replaced by a gravel walkway. Too much shade and too many feet, I suppose:

Bonus: Also from last fall here’s this little fellow, a Downy Woodpecker I believe, in one of the trees on the quad side of Rayzor Hall.

This is a post about a tree on the quad that is NOT an Italian cypress.

We were refiling some pictures this morning and I took notice of this one, dated 1917, for the first time:

I was first taken with the strange circular view. I don’t know what that was all about, maybe just being fancy. Next I realized what an unusual view it really is. There aren’t many photos with such a close view of the road that used to run through the middle of campus.

Once I got the picture scanned and could zoom in on it, I noticed something else. See the little tree there? Just to its right, on the other side of the crosswalk, you can tell that another small tree had recently been taken out. As I walked out to my car this afternoon I stopped to check out what this spot looks like today, and lo and behold, there’s still a tree missing. All the rows are four across except for the first one–there’s a bench where that tree should be:

I don’t know what kind of trees these are, but I do know that there are often Downy Woodpeckers in them.

Bonus: See the manhole cover in the first picture, right smack in the middle of the crossing? There’s still one there, although it’s a much prettier one now:

Extra Bonus: Dan Wagner, winner of the Vintage Rice Football Program Calendar, does a bit of a geek touchdown dance in the comments today:

My days as president of the library club in high school have finally paid off! I’ve got a spot picked out in my office, right above the Catalyst archives.

“Catalyst? What the heck is Catalyst?” I ask myself. It turns out to be what Rice undergrads are up to in the science labs. It’s definitely worth a look.

Here’s another startling discovery from the Baker College scrapbooks, circa 1975:

Clearly a retreat of some sort, at someone’s ranch. It’s hard to believe that intelligent Rice students would be brandishing cow patties for the camera but this seems to be the case.

Bonus: I had a tiny little distraction today. My granddaughter Ann had her first visit to campus. She visited the library where she enjoyed the Dorothy Hood painting, “Nebula at the Edge of Time:”

While there, she stopped in at the Woodson Research Center to see the exhibit about William Ward Watkin:

A snack at the Brochstein Pavilion:

And finally a visit to the Italian cypresses on the quad:

Like generations of students before her, she slept through a lot of it.

Dan Wagner of the Biochemistry and Cell Biology Department correctly identified these as the rods that held cards in the drawers of the library’s card catalog:

Congratulations, Professor Wagner! No doubt you spent many happy hours in the library as a lad. Your awesome calendar will arrive by campus mail.

True confession: I couldn’t figure this out myself. Someone else had to explain it to me.

I also confess that I loved the other guesses.