Rice History Corner

I had occasion to visit a friend’s office in Hersztein Hall (the old physics building) this week. It’s beautiful since the renovations they did before the Political Scientists moved in. I was struck again by the beauty out the windows:

It feels timeless, at the still point of the turning world. But of course it isn’t.

Here’s what it looked like from a few feet away in an undated photo that was taken sometime between 1921 and 1925:

And here’s what you see today if you turn your head only slightly to the right:

Bonus: I will send a genuine Vintage Rice Football Programs Calendar to the first person who can figure out what these are. The only hint I’ll give is that they were pieces in an obsolete technology. 

Extra Bonus: I think I forgot the mention that I’m giving a short course in the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies next month. If you’re interested I’d love to have you. I feel confident that it will be entertaining. And the more, the merrier. Details are here.

I found some really unusual pictures today. (Not the upset of the year, I suppose.) They were on a contact sheet that I could tell at a glance was bizarrely filed in a folder called “Campus, no date.” This was the first shot on the sheet:

Wh-? A guy with a movie camera filming straight down Main Street–you can see the Rice campus off to the upper right. Once I got past the nausea this image made me feel I started working out where and when it was taken. It’s all too clearly on a roof, and too close to the edge if you ask me. I think it’s the Warwick.

Next shot:

Looking the other direction up Main towards downtown, it’s clear that they are indeed on the roof of the Warwick. The big lawn with the fountain is where the MFAH’s Audrey Jones Beck building is today and the church across Binz is, of course, St. Paul’s Methodist. (Rice used to hold it’s rainy day graduations there back in the day.)

For purposes of dating, here’s a pictures straight down. The key piece of information is that the island in the center of the roundabout has fountains in it rather than a rose garden. I don’t know when that change took place, though I suspect it can be hunted down:

But why was this filed in a “Campus, no date” file? Because when they came down from the roof, they all went over to Rice and continued filming (and photographing the filmers):

This was taken in a somewhat unexpected spot–in between Jones College (and maybe Brown?) and the engineering quad. That’s the back of Abercrombie there on the left.

So I have two problems: when was this taken and what were they filming? If you zoom in on any of these pictures you’ll see from my labels that I guessed 1962. This is clearly wrong. I guessed that because my first instinct was that this might have been part of making the film called “Golden Years,” a very sentimental movie about Rice’s first fifty years. I watched it this afternoon and quickly realized that I was mistaken–these pictures were certainly taken later than 1962. But not necessarily a whole lot later. The difference in clothing between 1962 and, say, 1965 is stark. I’d say we’re more like mid-60s than early 60s here.

A satisfying solution to the dating problem will emerge, I believe. The photographer, in an act for which I bless his memory, decided to use up the last few pictures on his roll of film by turning around and taking a picture of a building under construction. I feel sure that this is the Space Science building, which broke ground in 1965 and opened in 1966. And because I have Alex Dessler’s  photo chronology of the building’s emergence I think I can date these photos almost to the week. I just didn’t have time to do it today.

I have no idea why they were filming though.

Clarification: I got a nice email today from a reader about my post on obsolete technologies, clarifying what the microphone was all about. I didn’t have a chance to write back and ask for permission to share it so I’m leaving his name off, but I thought this was  interesting enough to share:

You’re kidding about “…I don’t understand what they’re up to here,”

right? Well, in case you aren’t, I’m pretty sure that they’re cutting a

record. The disk on the turntable looks like a typical 8″ recording

blank from the 50’s. They were thin aluminum with a polymer coating

that was cut by a stylus similar to a regular phono needle. No mistakes

allowed, and what you got was the only copy.

It’s also possible that they’re playing back a freshly-made recording.

And a clarification of my own: 70% of the time I’m kidding and 30% of the time I’m bewildered. I’m not sure which is which.

Bonus: This post is already way too long, so I’ll save the bonus for tomorrow.

It was quite a busy day today and in the middle of it I had reason to dig around looking for old Physics Department stuff. One of the things I found pulled me back to my old friend, the 1937 Owl map. Just for a refresher, here it is:

What I’m interested in this time is the “Atom Smasher–U Find Em, We Smash em!!” I’d never really seen anything that spelled out exactly what Physics Professor H.A. Wilson was up to out there (or more likely I just hadn’t had reason to pay attention to what was in front of my face). Today, though, I found this February 1939 article from the Houston Press about Wilson and his atom smashing. You have to zoom in a couple of times to read it. I leave the entire front page for your amusement:

I realize that they’re talking about the construction of this machine in 1939 and the map  is from 1937, but if you take a look at the article you’ll see that there is reference to an earlier machine that Wilson had built. It was all being done in “a frame structure behind the Physics Building.” There had been such a structure since the completion of the building. Here’s a shot from 1915, the year it opened:

I originally scanned this picture because I was interested in the tennis courts.

And here’s another, probably from only slightly later:

I’m boggled by the idea that Wilson was “smashing atoms” in there, but I don’t really have any ideas of where else it could have been.

I took a legit day off today and wasn’t going to post anything. But I was wasting time on Facebook a little while ago and I saw something interesting on the Rice Centennial page. Here’s the announcement for this year’s Kalb lecture, which will be held on February 9:

This is a Big Deal lecture series, always worth hearing, and it’s free to the public. If you have the inclination it would almost certainly be worth your while.

But of course, that’s not what grabbed my attention.

What stopped me was my (admittedly very belated) realization that this lecture series is named for Ervin “Tiny” Kalb, seen on this blog repeatedly as a member of the first graduating class and an early football hero. Naturally, he’s the big guy:

Like most of the members of that class, Kalb remained interested and closely involved with Rice for the rest of his life. We have that gang to thank for starting many of the traditions that still exist here and for naming the Campanile and the Thresher. Here are some of them at their 40th reunion. Tiny’s not difficult to spot:

Shockingly, I know who every one of these people is! Three others besides Kalb have been mentioned here. If you can identify any of them, I’ll be really impressed.

I was looking through some of the Baker College scrapbooks that I found in their library recently and much to my surprise I turned a page and discovered this picture of the distinguished Rice history professor Albert Van Helden, relaxing of an afternoon:

I particularly like the can of Schlitz, which reminds me of my happy youth.

In the interest of fairness, here’s a photo of a somewhat more scholarly-looking Professor Van Helden (in the Woodson, I believe) preparing for the 1987 symposium on Julian Huxley:

Bonus: You couldn’t make this up.

One of the things I see a lot of in my work is obsolete technology. It’s everywhere in the archives, all kinds of it. Things blossom and die with depressing regularity and it seems increasing speed. I especially love the older construction photos. The workers carry themselves with a powerful dignity that I find genuinely inspiring. I try to always remember who built the rooms where we study and teach. But their methods and tools, and frankly the job sites in general, look like nothing so much as a massive OSHA violation.

I've never been able to figure out precisely what they're doing.

More recent obsolete technology is much funnier looking, even faintly ridiculous. I came across two really interesting examples of this earlier this week. This first picture was taken in Fondren Library not too long after it opened, sometime in the 1950s. The label on the back says that it’s a student play reading group meeting in the new Music Room. I freely confess that I don’t understand what they’re up to here. Does that equipment play something or record something? Both?

I really get a kick out of this next one. Obviously, it’s Norman Hackerman teaching a Chemistry class. It must have been taken very early in his tenure at Rice–look how young he is! I assume that’s a microphone of some sort, but ye gods what an ungainly device. I hope it’s existence was fleeting.

I’ll just stop here, or I’ll wind up boring you with a rant about floppy disks.

I was badly stumped by a photo for the better part of this afternoon. I came across it in a folder labeled “General Campus Scenes,” a not particularly helpful designation. All the other pictures in the file were instantly recognizable but very bland images of Lovett Hall, the main quad, and so forth, some with students, some without. They can legitimately be called “general campus scenes.” This one, though, I’d be willing to bet wound up in this folder not because it’s “general” but because no one could figure out what it was.

Of course, the first thing you notice is the snow. That’s why someone was wandering around taking pictures like this in the first place. But otherwise, this is a strange view. You can see three buildings through the gate and the trees, two relatively modern looking and one obviously quite old. Looking at it, I had the sensation that something was badly out of kilter. After staring at it for a while and enjoying a couple of consultations with campus experts, I think I get it now. What got me squared away was the gate itself. I knew I’d seen that particular ironwork somewhere before:

That’s the original terrace railing, now inside the Main Dining room of Cohen House. So this must be inside the walled garden, looking out across what’s a parking lot today. The buildings visible along the side are the back of Allen Center and the old part of Baker. The one directly across the trees is the 1955 wing of Baker. Right?

I’m still a bit uneasy about this because I don’t quite understand the sequence of events at Cohen House that led to the creation of that view. The garden was originally enclosed by a hedge. Here it is in a side view from probably sometime in the 1940s:

Nice palm trees.

The wall was added in 1960, after the 1959 Lloyd and Morgan addition enclosed the old terrace. This gate must have been put in then. I’ll see if I can figure this out tomorrow. Also, I didn’t have time to go look but I don’t think it’s there anymore. If not, then when did it disappear? Hmmmm.

I find the 1940s kind of amusing too, but in the 1940s everyone dressed in the same basic styles. In the 70s, it was like a riot broke out. Bell bottoms, miniskirts, maxiskirts, long hair, wild patterns, bright colors, wide ties–much of it executed in polyester–and very few were immune to the siren song of unbridled self expression.

The weather was raw this morning–cold and windy–and the campus felt deserted when I came in. It made me feel a bit sad, but when I got to the Woodson I discovered that someone had pulled a photo file that contained shots of the 1972 Freshman Reception in Cohen House. This perked me right up! 1970s fashion, baby:

It takes a bold man to wear that kind of sport coat, but I think he pulls it off. It makes Frank Vandiver’s paisley tie seem tame.

Here’s a crowd shot. That might be English professor Bob Patton in the windowpane suit and aviator glasses:

And finally, I admit that I share this older lady’s skepticism about the whole enterprise:

Bonus: There was no one outside today.

This looks like it could be a police lineup, doesn’t it?

I found this undated photo in a folder called “Faculty–Groups” and was intrigued by the fact that no matter how closely you zoom in, you can’t tell what they’re holding. Trial and error leads me to this conclusion: those three shifty looking fellows in the middle (Ron Sass, Bill Martin and Allen Matusow) are the first winners of the George R. Brown Certificate of Highest Merit Award. This is what they give you when you’ve won the Brown Teaching Award so many times that you’re automatically retired from the competition. It must have been taken in 1986.

I believe only four others have won this award since then: Dennis Huston, Frank Jones, Rich Smith and Stephen Klineberg.

I don’t care who you are, that’s pretty good company.

I was so distracted by the bow I almost missed the goat entirely.

They were in a file called “Students–1940s.” Could be late ’30s, though. It’s kind of hard to tell, isn’t it? What would you go by?

Bonus: New trees going up in the Quad. I can only laugh. Ruefully.