I’m not even kidding about that! I’m so doggone tired of those SORRY Saturday night dances. It’s time we took some action. Things have gotten pretty putrid, and those backslappers aren’t helping!
This is a “Get out the Vote” poster for the 1932 Student Association elections:
One of the minor frustrations of my job is that over the last century people have taken the same pictures at Rice over and over again and a lot has been left out. Some images are just irresistible–Lovett Hall, for example, is simply a compelling vision. But after you’ve seen thousands of pictures of it, you start to wish someone had thought to turn around and take a picture of what’s behind them.
I ran across a really interesting photo this afternoon, although what made it interesting seems to have been an accident. This was taken from what would be the front side of Fondren Library, but the state of construction allows us to see through to the back side. For decades, this was one of the least photographed spots on campus.
Bonus photo: I took this yesterday standing in the intramural field next to the gym. I think it’s pretty attractive.
But this is the sort of bland, ordinary photo that I’m calling for more of:
It may be the only known image of the loading dock at the RMC.
I’ve been immersed the last couple of days in the early history of Rice football. The Rice team (briefly called the Greys) played it’s first game in October 1912, only days after the Institute’s formal opening. The first season was sort of catch as catch can. With only freshmen to work with, Coach Philip Arbuckle wisely chose to begin by playing an ad hoc mix of local high schools, a couple of colleges and Sam Houston Normal School. In the first game it ever played, Rice won a tight contest at West End Park against Houston High School by the score of 7-6. The difference was a point after touchdown missed by Houston but made by the Rice kicker.
So who was our hero?
It was my old friend W.T. Betts!! (Click here and here for the earlier posts.) I knew that guy was good stuff. Really, you can’t even imagine my delight.
I apologize for the lousy quality of the picture, but it’s a scan of a copy made from microfilm. There was no Thresher or Campanile in 1912, so the only way to find out what happened in these early games is to dig through the microfilmed newspapers in the basement of the library. It’s actually pretty interesting. There seems to have been intense interest in college football, primarily Texas schools and the Ivy League. Interest in Rice football was also very high–it was Houston’s first hometown team and expectations were possibly a bit unrealistic.
If I can figure out a way to get a clean copy, I’ll post the whole story of this game. The 1912 season saw a cluster of really significant rules changes, including adding a 4th down to make ten yards and creating “end zones.” These changes, taken together, revolutionized college football, primarily by making it possible to integrate the forward pass into a normal offensive scheme. The story reveals a certain amount of uncertainty about how this would all play out on the field. Here’s my favorite bit: “Once during the game High School had an opportunity to make a forward pass over Institute’s goal line and into the end zone. The attempt proved a fizzle for the ball struck the ground, making it an incomplete forward pass.”
I hate it when that happens.
The faculty play reading group, meeting in the Brotzen's house in 1970. Frances is in the doorway.
Almost exactly a year after the death of her husband Franz, Rice lost another dear friend and a stalwart member of our community. Frances Brotzen was a truly remarkable woman–passionate, intelligent, curious, warm and utterly engaged with the world. The program from her memorial service in the Rice chapel on Saturday contains a sketch of her life story. I had it in my mind that I would summarize it here, but when I sat down to do so I realized that it isn’t possible. You really need to read the whole thing:
Click to enlarge.
When Franz and Frances came to Rice in 1954, they brought with them a degree of sophistication and experience that was not common in Cold War era Houston. Their interests were wide-ranging–art, theatre, music, politics–and their willingness to bring others (particularly students) into contact with these things was stunningly generous. Frances’s service to Rice was second to none. She was co-master of both Jones and Brown, a regular participant in the cultural life of the campus, a stalwart of the Faculty Women’s Club and a kind ear for many students. She and Franz were awarded the highest honor of the Rice Alumni Association, the Gold Medal, in 1989 for “sustained and diverse service to the college sytsem and to the university.”
Frances Brotzen, RIP.
There’s a whole subgenre of photographs in the archives that show groups of people posing with a dead animal. Sometimes these kind of sneak up on you. Here, for example, is a picture from the very first Campanile of the Biology Club. I looked at it for quite a while before I noticed the dead rabbit. It’s worth clicking and zooming in on this. There’s Julian Huxley in the back and his lab assistant Joseph Davies in the front. They both came here in 1914. Davies stayed at Rice after Huxley left, eventually earned his Ph.D. here and taught biology until his death, just as he was about to retire, in 1966. The guy second from the right in the bottom row is Hermann Muller, who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Medicine (he was by then at the University of Texas) for his discovery of the production of mutations by x-rays. (Here’s a pretty neat bio of him that mentions his childhood friendship with another early Rice faculty member.)
I have no information on the rabbit.
But that’s not the weird one. This is the weird one. Striking image, no?
I’ve been trying to clean out my office on the 5th floor of the library recently, and in this process a number of really interesting things have bubbled up to the surface. Sometimes envelopes and boxes just sort of appear in my mail or even on the floor outside my door without any indication of where they came from or who sent them. Sometimes I immediately take these things down to the Woodson, other times they work their way down to the bottom of a pile and I forget about them for a while. Then I clean up and find them again.
These pictures are like that. I have no idea where they came from and no clear idea of when they were taken. But more importantly, I don’t know what they are. They are, in the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld, “known unknowns.” What’s fascinating about them is that it’s not the people in them that command your attention, but rather the machinery. What on earth is this stuff? There are many more of them than what I’ve put up here and all of them have equipment as the star of the show. I’ve even had a hard time guessing what discipline these things are being used for or what building they’re in. My best wild guess is that they were taken in the mid to late 1950s.
This is my favorite. What is she putting in that machine?
This is the only one that's even remotely funny. I'm guessing she was an English major.
Out of the whole batch, there’s only one I can even begin to identify. This is the back of Tom Bonner’s head, and so I would guess that the machine he’s sitting at must be some part of the Van de Graaff accelerator.
Any information or speculation would be most welcome.
Update: Lots of good information in the comments, and I also got this great explanation of the first photo from an emailer. Thanks for the help everyone!
So, today was even crazier than yesterday. Among other things, we have a bunch of materials coming from someone off campus and the library loading dock is currently inaccessible. They’ve ripped up the street outside and are in the process of repaving it. It actually looks pretty cool. You can really see how the elevation gradually changed over the years since the road was built.
Still, this means that there’s no way to unload boxes anywhere near the library. So to get the stuff into the Woodson we (that is, Amanda) had to go fetch it from outside the Sallyport, load it up onto a library cart and push it over to Fondren. I have performed variations on this more times than I can count, and I can assure you that it isn’t as fun as it looks. Those pea gravel sidewalks are a real drag.
I’m going to go have a scotch and get back at it tomorrow.
I am exhausted! Too much toiling in the vineyards of scholarship, I guess. What this means is that you guys get scraps tonight. (Although this might not really be all that different from what I usually post.)
While looking for a picture of the original light fixtures outside Anderson Hall (a task at which I failed), I found this 1947 photo of the building’s construction:
Click on it to enlarge and you can clearly see that someone has dragged a bunch of tables and chairs onto the lawn in front of the building. I assume this was to give the workers a place to sit and eat or take breaks, because there wasn’t anything else on that part of campus yet. (Construction on Fondren Library wasn’t started until after this picture was taken.)
I’d never seen such a thing before. But I see it all the time now. Right this very minute these tables and chairs are stationed in roughly the same spot.
For those of you who don’t make it to campus a lot, these chairs are now everywhere. They first appeared a couple of years ago, I think, at the new pavilion behind the library, next to the fountains and under the trees. Quite European, really.
They’ve since multiplied like rabbits and have begun to move around. They’re light, so people can just pick them up and put them where they’d like to sit. There are quite a few of them in the immediate vicinity of the library, and also by Valhalla. But they can turn up around absolutely any corner.
South Colleges
Herring Hall
These made it all the way over to Cohen House. Impressive.
If you think this is exciting, just wait until I unleash my post about the light poles.
Click on this to enlarge.
With the old photographs in the Teas collection as inspiration, I’ve spent a little time looking around in some other collections that we already have in the Woodson. I think I’ve been able to put together a decent picture of Rice’s earliest landscaping efforts. The first thing I found was in the President’s Office Papers. It’s a contract for general clearing and cleanup of the the front part of campus. It calls for the removal of small trees, shrubs and underbrush under the direction of the architect as well as plowing and harrowing and then finally planting grass. As you can see, it’s dated May 6, 1912, roughly five months before delegates from around the world would arrive for the Institute’s Opening ceremonies
To give you some idea of what this job entailed, here’s a picture from the William Ward Watkin Papers of the front part of the campus in March, 1912, just a bit before the contract was signed:
If I were you I actually would click on this one. It's a spectacular mess.
Now here’s how it looked about a year later, after what was obviously a great deal of work:
And finally here’s a page from one of the Teas payroll books (kept in accordance with the terms of the contract) that records some of the work done just before the Opening:
I acknowledge that I am easily amused, but it was great fun putting together obscure items from three different collections and seeing how they all fit together. Better than a cheeseburger, even. And there will be more later!
After last Friday’s post about the polar bear races, I got several comments and emails about the greased pole climb. Lo and behold, yesterday I inadvertently ran across a set of pictures of exactly that. They’re undated, but I’d guess 1965 or ’66. A note on the folder informs us that the photos were brought in to the Woodson by electrical engineering professor Bill Wilson, the longtime RA at Wiess College. It’s very easy to imagine him getting a huge kick out of this.
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