Rice History Corner

This picture has to have been taken in 1955, as that is Senator J. William Fulbright in between Houston and Autry House Rector Stanley Smith. Why they’re in a coat closet, and what’s so funny, I can’t say, but it looks like a scene straight out of Horsefeathers:

Virtual commencement might not be as good as the full treatment out in the quad but it might well be better than the hot mess of graduating in the gym, which looks like what would have happened tomorrow.

Bonus: Just a small town girl livin’ in a lonely world.

This week is normally one of my favorite times of the year. I love both the bustle of commencement preparations and the annual downshift into summer. Commencement will be virtual this year, which is, I suppose, better than nothing but it does leave one with a bit of an empty feeling.  To cheer us all up here’s a picture of young Nevenna Tsanoff in her father’s hood and cap as he gets ready to head to campus for the graduation ceremonies:

Katherine’s mad.

The picture came off this scrapbook page below, which I find just delightful. These images capture somehow the odd mix of the serious and the ridiculous that characterizes academic regalia:

I’m not sure but I think these pictures were taken in either 1921 or 1922. Here’s a great thing: because of Corinne Tsanoff I’ll be able to date them when I get back in the Woodson. See that number 256 on the top right hand corner of  page? She numbered every page (there are hundreds) and filed them by date and location. She was a gem.

Bonus: Campus chic, 2020.

One more thing about Alan McKillop, and an important thing it is.

This is a short excerpt from Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:Reflections on Sixty and Beyond:

“The teacher I wasn’t outreading, and the one, consequently, whom I paid the most attention to, was the now mainly forgotten scholar of the eighteenth century Alan Dugald McKillop, a stooped and rather shuffling figure at Rice when I arrived. I never knew Alan McKillop well, but I respected him greatly. In my last year as a graduate student I took his course in the English novel–but it was not as a teacher I was in awe of him: it was as a reader. I was just glad he was there, as an embodiment of learning of the old-school, unfrivolous kind. At Harvard he had been a pupil of Kittredge, Santayana, and William James. For myself, just beginning to glimpse a few towers and turrets in the deep mist of knowledge, Alan McKillop represented a level of learning that (I came to believe) had existed only in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1910, when my father was just getting his three annual months of schooling in a one-room schoolhouse. As I listened to Alan McKillop I came to realize that if any man had read the whole of English literature, from the Anglo-Saxon fragments to Anthony Powell, it was he. (At a tea in his home, the one time I was invited there, in 1959, he showed me Powell’s books, as well as those of C.P. Snow, whose academic novels he admired.)

Though not a particularly inspiring lecturer, Alan McKillop did leave one with the sense–valuable to me then–that literature, whether one wrote it, taught it, or just read it, could be a life-long occupation; one could approach it in a leisurely way, to be sure, but one needed to approach it seriously.

With Dr. McKillop as an example I figured out that the way to find out what to read was to locate a great reader and follow in his or her tracks. There are, though, surprisingly few great readers–they are as rare now as giant pandas.”

Like McMurtry I found great reader at Rice but in a sign of the times he’s not an English professor but a staff member. If you want to read better, go here and follow my friend Patrick Kurp.

Bonus: It was a beautiful day on campus Monday. I’ve never seen this closed before.

The women of the Semper Fidelis Club had good reason to ask that Alan McKillop be the man to choose the volumes to be added in Stockton Axson’s honor to the Rice library. McKillop came to Rice in 1920, just a few months after receiving his doctorate from Harvard. He would remain for his entire career, retiring as Trustee Distinguished Professor in 1968. His interests were largely in 18th century British prose and poetry and he was in fact the guiding intelligence behind the development of the Axson 18th Century Drama Collection. As a young faculty member he became close to Axson, sometimes taking up Axson’s administrative duties when he was slowed by ill health, and served as department chair himself for decades.

I found this letter from Axson to McKillop not in McKillop’s papers but in George Williams’. It was written in 1930 on the occasion of McKillop’s promotion to a full professorship in English:

I don’t know how this letter wound up in Williams’ papers but my best guess is that it was given to him by either McKillop or his wife. And much as McKillop lauded Axson in his memorial tribute, Williams lauded McKillop, though while he was still alive to enjoy it:

Bonus: McKillop was also the founding and long serving editor of The Flyleaf, the publication of the Friends of Fondren. The July 1972 issue was gratefully dedicated to him and contains an interesting interview of him by his English Department colleague Will Dowden. As always, the other stuff in there is pretty interesting too. I particularly enjoy the list of gifts.

Extra Bonus: I found this note from an alumnus in the ARA papers a while ago.

With the help of loyal readers Mike Ross ’70 ’74 and Marty Merritt ’85 (and a much needed  visit to the Woodson this morning!) we have a solution to last week’s Semper Fidelis mystery.  In Lovett’s files I found several pieces of correspondence from June, 1941 relating to the efforts of the club to honor Dr. Axson. This first letter was sent to Alan McKillop of the English Department who forwarded it to Dr. Lovett:

Lovett’s typical gracious response:

Note that they asked for the books to be marked in honor of Axson–hence the book plate–and that it was to be McKillop who selected the books for the library. I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow.

This club does not seem to have been affiliated with Rice. It was organized by a group of local women in the wake of Axson’s death and my best guess is simply that they had heard him speak and admired him. Axson was a frequent public speaker, both as part of the Rice Institute lecture series and in many outside venues in Houston, across Texas, and far beyond. His style would be considered ornate today but at the time it was what was expected of a sensitive and scholarly gentleman. Here’s a link to his 1925 Rice commencement address, a really interesting and for him pretty direct talk in my opinion.

Turning to the Houston Post sheds some light on the club. This article from February 15, 1939 was the first mention of them I found:

And especially interesting was this, also from the Houston Post, in the edition of March 1, 1940, on the genesis of the bookplate itself:

Nolan Barrick ’37 was a student of William Ward Watkin and later his son-in-law–he married Watkin’s daughter Rosemary. After teaching at Iowa State and Texas he joined the faculty in the school of architecture at Texas Tech in 1953, where he spent most of his career, much of it as department chair. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I own a book he wrote about the architecture of the Texas Tech campus, much of it designed by his father-in-law.

Looking through my collection of Rice library bookplates this morning I noticed this unusual one:

I don’t remember scanning this and in fact it looks more like I hastily snapped a picture of it with my cell phone. Where I found it I can no longer say. I’ve certainly never seen another like it. And of course I’d also never heard of the Semper Fidelis Club. The only mention of it in the Thresher is this article from October 16, 1959:

The club also appears in the 1960 and 1961 Campaniles. But I find this impossible to square with the bookplate. First, Stockton Axson died in 1935 and second, as soon as Fondren was built the library was called Fondren Library rather than the Rice Institute Library. So I suppose there must have been a much earlier iteration of the Semper Fidelis Club about which I still know nothing. So we’ve apparently gotten nowhere today. Maybe tomorrow, though, as I now seem to have all the time in the world to track down this kind of thing. Also, on Axson here’s a pretty good post I wrote about him way back in 2011 and of course this more recent classic about his platonic lover’s contribution to the library.

Bonus: This is from the same issue of the Thresher as the Semper Fi story. At first, of course, I was interested in the dateless boys but it turns out the real star of this piece is the totally inexplicable “dead party.” I can’t see at all why this would be fun. Once I get back in the Woodson I’ll see if there’s anything about this in the EBLS scrapbooks.

Extra Bonus: Many thanks to Ellen Rein Pierce ’91 for the hot tip that led me to this great ebay score. I’m taking tomorrow off, by the way. I clearly need a break.

Two days in a row I have something nice to talk about. A couple of weeks ago I put up this post with a couple of happy freshmen at the RMC piano in early fall, 1962. In the comments Grungy correctly pointed out that it had been donated in memory of Lee Chatham, long serving Rice band director. This afternoon I was reading the December 1958 issue of the Sallyport, which was largely devoted to the opening of the brand new Rice Memorial Center, and I came upon this:

Here’s a wonderful image of Lee as band director in 1926. Unless you’re a bishop it’s not easy to pull off a hat like that but I think he does it:

Rice Institute band director Lee Chatham

And even better, here’s a shot of the dance band, Lee’s Owls, at about the same time. We had a discussion of the range of instruments in this picture back in 2017:

Bonus: This great shot of the Blue Angels flyover today was taken by by loyal reader owlcop. Thanks a million!

As long as I’m digging around in my Houston stuff I may as well share one last small thing that I think reveals quite a lot about his character. It’s a thank you note, sent to the couple who were then responsible for what we call today Housing and Dining. In December of 1953 Rice had hosted a major conference on low temperature physics. The attendees stayed in the dorms and ate in the Commons. After its successful conclusion Houston sent this letter:

In all honesty I see a fair amount of bad things in the archives so when I come across such a simple, forthright, and generous expression of respect and appreciation, especially coming from the president to people pretty far down the chain of command, I feel a deep sense of gratitude.

Bonus: The first Thresher of the semester carried an article about the conference, which seems to have been rather a big deal.

 This of course immediately brought to mind a couple of posts from way back in 2012 about the spectacular Mrs. Frank Henderson and her gift to Rice of a helium cryostat for work in low temperature physics.

Well lo and behold, in the same issue of the Thresher I found this little notice:

Extra Bonus: I drove around campus this afternoon (too hot to go traipsing around) and stopped to take a few pictures. Just by chance I encountered this guy with his big happy grin, having his picture taken by his mama and his girlfriend:

He’s Braden Comeaux and he’s been our third baseman the last couple of years. They were having some fun for sure. The plan was to head to Reckling and hop a fence for some more shots. I’d just been over there myself and I’m pretty confident there’s a way in.

Still thinking about President Houston I remembered this picture from his formal inauguration as Rice’s second president in April, 1947. He’d already been on duty for a year and the changes he brought to campus were proving popular and effective. The Rice trustees had gone to considerable trouble to get him here, by the way. When they began talking to him about the job he’d been at Cal Tech since 1927 and was happy there, surrounded by eminent colleagues, as chairman of the department of Physics, Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering. He turned down the job multiple times (my memory says three but I have no way to check until the Woodson reopens) before finally accepting in 1946. I don’t know how they talked him into it. The general plan was for him to work closely on a fairly aggressive expansion with trustee Harry Wiess, seen here walking with Dr. Lovett. Wiess had spent part of the war years developing a long range plan for the university in 1945  but sadly he would die just over a year later at the age of 61.

Houston looks pretty happy here despite being inaugurated as a university president, a thing he had been quite reasonably wary of. That may well be the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on his face and it makes me wonder what kind of mischief was going on between him and the day’s speaker, Karl Taylor Compton. Compton was president of MIT, also a physicist, and a long time friend of Houston’s. They both seem to have the giggles:

Here’s the program. Note that it was held in front of the Chemistry Building at 11:00,  a bit of a gamble even in April:

Bonus: April 8, 2020. This was the only full parking lot on campus.

I thought at first this was Galveston but on closer inspection it looks more like the bay, which was a very popular destination at the time. That’s our first math professor, Griffith Evans, at right with his little lads Georgie and Griffy. Tsanoff is at left with Nevenna and Katherine, who looks rather trepidatious:

I found these in some of the Tsanoff correspondence from the summer before he taught in Austin. This summer was a bit unusual because Corinne had gone to visit family in Arvada, Colrado but had left the girls in Houston with “Raddy.” He seems to have kept things well in hand with the help of Alma, the housekeeper, and friends who also spent the summer in town.

Bonus: The baby cedar elm reminded me of this post from 2012.