Rice History Corner

I’ve been running around like a maniac this week, so for now I’m just going to post a little taste of good things to come. When the Teas Nursery sold their property on Bellaire a while back, we were fortunate enough to acquire their large trove of historical materials. (We’re extremely grateful to the Teas family for this.) Among the many treasures are several reminders of the long relationship between the Teas Nursery and the Rice Institute.

This is Elizabeth, hard at work and still smiling.

We have several fantastic students working in the Woodson this summer. One of them–the wonderful Elizabeth–is currently working through several boxes of old slides and negatives from the Teas collection. This is hard labor, my friends, that requires a lot of squinting and the ability to speculate both freely and rationally. She’s good at it. Yesterday she brought me several great slides related to the Rice campus that I’ll post about soon, so I was pretty happy. But then she really outdid herself and reappeared with a very old negative. This is frankly impressive. It’s hard to look at negatives for very long, even harder to make sense of them. And this one was indeed quite interesting to me. It’s something I haven’t seen before, and it’s also funny. It made me laugh because the person who took the picture, being a nurseryman, was more interested in the shrub in front of what I wanted to see.

Click on it to enlarge, then click again to zoom in. It's hard to believe this image was just resurrected yesterday. Kind of makes you wonder what you have in your closet.

That’s a sign encouraging people to “Boost for Rice” by attending their home football games. I’m not sure where it was, although it looks to be the middle of nowhere. I’m also not sure what year it was taken, but I think there’s enough visible information to figure it out. Nice shrub, though.

Bonus picture: Tools of the trade.

I’ve recently been trying to find some pictures of Rice trustee Newton Rayzor that I know for a dead-lock certainty are somewhere in a bunch of scrapbooks that belonged to Gus Wortham, another Rice trustee. (And a very important one, I might add. Wortham, the head of American General Insurance, joined the Rice board around the end of World War II and was instrumental in modernizing the Institute’s investment policies.) I haven’t been able to find the pictures I’m looking for (yet!), but just like yesterday, I did manage to stumble into something else interesting.

Wortham had a lot of ranching interests, mostly in Texas and Louisiana, and he was interested in breeding cattle. One of his ranches was a big one, quite close to Houston, called the Nine Bar. (It was north of town then, and is covered with housing developments now.) Every spring for many years Wortham held a big cattle auction there, with a fancy party the evening before, all of it carefully documented in photographs which were kept in immaculate scrapbooks. These auctions were clearly major social events, attended by important business and political figures and their wives as well as ranchers. The scrapbooks are sometimes breathtaking, full of powerfully evocative images of Texas in the 1950s and 60s.

Scandalously, almost all of the pictures are unlabeled. This is incredibly frustrating. But sometimes the people in them are so famous that I know who they are just by looking. This photo below is the one that stopped me in my tracks. The man on the right is none other than Ben Woodson, Wortham’s colleague at American General, member of the Rice Board of Governors and namesake of the Woodson Research Center at Fondren Library, where I work. Now that’s a celebrity! I just discovered today that we have 25 years worth of Woodson’s business diaries in our collection. (There’s a short bio of him at the link also.) It took all the restraint I could muster to stay away from them.

I believe that's Woodson's wife Grace to the right and his daughter to the left. The other fellow is J.W. Link, Jr., a close associate of Wortham's in the insurance business since the late 1920s.

Bonus picture: At the party the night before, there was a birthday cake for another important member of the Rice community, Congressman Albert Thomas, class of 1920. We also have Thomas’s papers in our collection at the Woodson Research Center. It all gets kind of tangled, doesn’t it?

I did not cut Mrs. Thomas in half. That's the doing of the original photographer.

I’m back from vacation and, as I suspected, I’m going to have to scramble a bit to get caught up. One of the more interesting things I had in my inbox was a question from FE&P about the original lighting in the walkways in front of Fondren and the connecting walks to Anderson and Rayzor. In the end I couldn’t find the exact picture they wanted, but I did get to spend some time going through some old photos of the library that I’d never really examined before. Here’s a picture of the circulation area that was taken in May 1949, before the building’s official opening in November of the same year:

Very sleek, very modern, very different from the earlier campus buildings. But I do have one question. Click on the picture to enlarge it, then click again to zoom in. Notice the numbers up over the circulation desk? What’s that all about?

I have a blister on my hand from hitting too many golf balls (on the driving range, NOT on the course, by the way), so I have time for a post this afternoon since I can’t play.

There’s been a long and frankly sometimes brutal history of hazing at Rice, although most of the seriously bad stuff seems to have been confined to the Institute’s earliest years, when sophomores regularly hazed freshmen. With the urging of the administration the students themselves put an end to much of it, until what remained was usually just goofy rather than dangerous. I have to believe that this is an example of some goofy initiation, because I don’t have any other way to explain this activity. I think this must have taken place in either the fall of 1959 or spring of 1960, as the freshman beanies visible in the second picture say “1964” on them. This photo below is much clearer than the one above–click on it to enlarge and take a close look (if you dare!) I’m not sure if they’re having fun or not. I’m also unclear on the exact object of this exercise.

Update: I got a comment today on my earlier post about LBJ at the Sid Rich dedication and I thought it was so interesting that I wanted to put it up here so you wouldn’t miss it. It was sent by Charley Landgraf, Sid Rich ’75. I’m very grateful that he took the time to write down his thoughts and send them in:

“These photos certainly look to be of the dedication in Sid Rich Commons. It was, I believe, on a Saturday in late August, September or October 1971. Ours was the first Sid Rich freshman class that fall. Dedication ceremony was in morning or midday and, as the photo suggest, attended mostly by outside dignitaries and University officials and faculty, and the press — that is, not students or at least not many. It was followed by a small luncheon, I believe, in master’s home, but Prof J. Venn Leeds or his wife Jan would be best source on that. The great thing is that President and Mrs. Johnson stayed around for a couple of hours after lunch, holding forth from a soft sofa in the lounge area of the college talking with just us Sid Rich students and the Leedses. As I recall, it was a civil, good-spirited session, remarkable in view of the deep feelings about the Vietnam War that LBJ had handed off to Richard Nixon just 2 1/2 years before. His charm and hers lived up to legend and his answers seemed candid at the time to this awe-struck youngster. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the historiographical presence of mind to rush upstairs and write down the best of his remarks.”

I’ll be back from vacation next week, assuming the Omaha airport doesn’t flood, but my to-do list for Monday already has eleven things on it so it might take a day or so to get back to what passes for normal.

Alice Dean was a member of the Institute’s first graduating class in 1916, but she didn’t have a lot in common with most of her classmates. She came to Rice in 1913, having been superintendent of high schools in Victoria but lacking a college degree. She graduated with honors in mathematics and stayed to work on a masters degree. She taught Math 100 for many years, although she had no formal academic appointment. By 1914 Miss Dean was already Rice’s acting librarian and began working closely with math professor Griffith Evans to build the institute’s collection. Not too long ago I ran across the first lists of books they felt they needed as they began to place orders with dealers in New York. I’ll post a couple of these when I get back from my vacation in glamorous Nebraska.

Alice Dean served Rice with great dedication for a very long time, and didn’t get much recognition for it. She remained Acting Librarian until 1946, when she was finally given the title of Librarian and a formal appointment as Assistant in Mathematics just as she was getting ready to retire. Not long ago I found her letter to President Houston after she was informed of these title changes. It strikes me as a model of absolute graciousness and restraint.

Miss Dean worked very hard, but even she took time off to wade in the surf once in a while. This picture was taken at the Math Department picnic in Galveston in 1936.

In a comment to an earlier post on LBJ’s unannounced helicopter landing at Rice someone mentioned that he had heard Johnson speak at the dedication of Sid Richardson College. That reminded me of these unlabeled photos that I had seen before. I had always just assumed that these were taken at that event, but didn’t really have any way to confirm it. So here they are–does anyone remember this?

Also, I’m at a meeting today but I’m taking the rest of the week off for actual vacation. I’ll probably still post because, frankly, I don’t know what else to do with myself. But it will be more erratic than usual.

I really need a break. This is what I feel like:

The trolley that ran between Eagle Avenue and the Institute was a source of near constant hilarity for the Rice students of the early era. Here are two cartoons on trolley themes. The first is probably better executed, but the second one actually made me laugh.

 

This one is from 1920.

This one is from 1916.

I mentioned the other day that former Dean of Natural Sciences Kathy Matthews so kindly took me on a tour through the recently dedicated Brockman Hall. As much as I love the old building, this one is also stunning. I can’t speak to its utility (although I have much faith in the people who contributed to its design), but its beauty is plain to see. Let me acknowledge right up front that I was initially put off by the building’s siting–it’s in what used to be the small green space between Hamman Hall and George R. Brown on one axis and the Engineering Quad and the Natural Science buildings on the other. (Even now I don’t think “wedged” is an unfair description.) All the same, I was deeply impressed by the obvious–and I think successful–care that was taken to make certain that Brockman would not be left sitting there all alone.

It’s not alone at all. In some ineffable way, it’s talking to every building around it. It doesn’t try to reproduce or mimic the older Rice architectural styles, but instead reflects back something of our past and sort of graciously nods in passing. I totally get that. I completely respect it. We are who we are because of our past, and that needs to be honored. But we need to move forward, with dispatch. I really like this building. If you’re on campus you should go have a look at it.

Bonus pictures: The reason I was looking for a picture of Hamman Hall yesterday was because I was startled by how it seems so transformed by its relationship to Brockman. (By the way, I’ve always loved Hamman, but I realize I may be in the minority here.) Here’s a photo I took the other day:

And here’s what it looked like from pretty close to the same spot in 1974:

And speaking of reflections, here’s me reflected in the glass as I take a photo in the old physics building:

I’m still working through all the slides I looked at last week. There’s a lot to think about. I found pictures of not one, but two ROTC buildings, Navy and Army, both taken in 1952.

This first one is the Army building. It’s nice, simple and utilitarian.

And here’s the Navy building. For some reason they felt the need to display large weaponry. (I’m not judging, though.)

But where were they? I thought that the Army building must be the red-roofed one behind the Mech Lab in this 1952 picture taken from the top of the stadium, but I wasn’t certain so I didn’t mention it. Today, though, I was looking for a picture of Hamman Hall when I came across this construction shot from 1957. Enlarge it and you can, in fact, clearly see the building directly behind the Mech Lab annex. I’m pretty sure the Navy building is just to the right, but you can only get a glimpse of it in between the trees.

I tried to find a picture of the rear of either the Mech Lab or Ryon Lab to see if I could get a better view of the Navy building–but I could not find a single photo taken at any time of the back of either building. I find that quite sad.

Bonus picture: Here’s another construction photo of Hamman Hall, obviously farther along in the process. Zoom in on it and you’ll see a big barn-like structure beginning to rise out of the trees behind it. What is that? First Christian Church?

Some of you may not be as crazy as I am about the old Physics Building, but please humor me here. As my heroes in FE&P work to get the renovations right, I’m still looking around for photos that can help shed some light on things. Today I came across three pictures of the back of the building–as far as I can tell these are the only ones we have with any age to them. They are all taken from slightly different angles, which makes it kind of tricky. The only thing I really have to go on is the state of the landscaping. The first one (above) is dated 1916, which would have been just after it was completed. That seems right to me given how barren it looks. The only plants you can really see are those two sad little shrubs on either side of the back entrance.

The second one is undated, but it’s clearly more recent than the first based on the larger shrubbery. I think the two little shrubs in the first picture are the big round bushes here and there have been two more planted on either side of the walk to the doorway:

The last one has been dated firmly and with exemplary precision by someone in the Architecture Department as having been taken on April 26, 1930. Those big shrubs framing the door are the two small ones in the photo just above.

So the second picture was taken sometime between 1916 and 1930. This is not a particularly satisfying answer. There is, though, one more clue. If you enlarge and zoom in on that second photo, you can see the tiny live oak saplings that must have been recently planted when the picture was taken. If I can figure out when that happened, I’ll have it narrowed down to a more enjoyable range.

And here are those saplings today:

Bonus photos: I was recently part of a debate about whether it was possible for a person in the Physics Lecture Hall to look down into the department office below. I contended that it was not, but after checking it turns out that I was partially wrong. (!) It’s sort of possible, but it’s not easy. Except for the one at the very top, the windows are significantly above eye level for human beings.You can’t climb up on a chair, because the chairs are attached to each other. Further, the blinds can’t be raised, but they can be opened. This is what you can see with the naked eye if you get up on your tiptoes and separate the blinds. This, I would contend, does not constitute “seeing in.”

However, if you have a zoom lens, you can clearly see everything on the window shelf inside, so I have to concede something here. Still, if you were thinking of looking in there, you can just forget about it because that office is getting new blinds.