I came across this one today and thought it had the makings of a lovely post about the coming of spring and the hopeful end of the Texas “stay at home” order tomorrow. The May Queen was elected every year–you can see the 1929 candidates listed on the sign–and it looks like they’re all having so much fun:

Katrina Smith was the winner that year and she was really something, not just the May Queen but one of the Campus Beauties in the Campanile and the Rice Princess at the Dallas Fair:

It’s hard for me to understand how we can mourn for someone we never knew, or for something that happened 90 years ago but it’s a real thing. I was stunned when I learned that by the next spring Katrina Smith was dead of typhoid fever. This is from the May 22, 1930 Houston Chronicle:

Bonus:  Keep on planting, though.

The V. stood for Vermillion and impish students called him Red behind his back. He was a  dignified man, calm and thoughtful, and to think of him with such a silly nickname always brings a smile to my face.

After yesterday’s post with pictures of him with Vannevar Bush and J. Robert Oppenheimer I realized that I’d never put up anything  about his academic accomplishments, which were significant. As is often the case the best overview of such a career is the National Academy of Science biographical memoir written by his colleagues Kenneth Pitzer and Bud Rohrschach. As a scholar Houston was the real thing, a peer of the most eminent physicists of the era, a member of the National Academy, and decorated by the Navy for his work in undersea warfare during World War II. (Here’s a bunch of them at Cal Tech in an earlier post.)

If you get through this and want more, here’s a link to a 1964 oral history interview he gave at the American Institute of Physics web site. Even if you don’t want to get down in the weeds it’s worth it to skip around until you find the bit about the ping pong matches in Werner Heisenberg’s lab .

Bonus: The name plate on his desk had a tiny torpedo on it.

The other day I found this great picture of President Houston with Vannevar Bush at the first Rice Associates Dinner in the spring of 1954.( Houston brought the idea for an associates program with him to Rice from Cal Tech, which had already established an effective group.) During World War II Houston had worked in the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which Bush headed, and the two knew each other well. Bush, a key figure in the transformation of American scientific research into a largely government funded enterprise, would have been a big draw as a speaker. (Here’s a short assessment of Bush and his career. It’s hard to sum it up briefly and still be fair but this is reasonable.)

Here they are, clearly in Fondren, both sporting double-breasted dinner jackets:

Some years ago I scanned most of an article about this dinner. It came from one of those enormous scrapbooks kept by alumni volunteers and I have no idea what happened to the rest of it. I’m pretty sure from the general tone that it’s from the Houston Press and I have no online access to those archives to retrieve the rest. Still, there’s a lot to chew on here, in particular the part about Bush’s involvement in the suspension of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance:

(If you want more, here’s a link to Bush’s remarks that evening: Vannevar Bush Rice Address )

And here’s a surprise: For no good reason I also happen to have a picture of Houston with Robert Oppenheimer. This was taken at a conference at Yale in 1958:

I don’t have anything like the strength to get into the Oppenheimer security clearance issue right now other than to point out that Ken Pitzer also had significant role. Maybe later.

Bonus: Grandson, locked down.

In one of my few spare moments today I sat and leafed through a 1930 edition of the Houston Gargoyle that I have laying around in my office at home. I’ve mentioned this magazine several times, most prominently in this post about Houston’s Cradle of Culture. For much of its existence the Gargoyle‘s back cover featured a full page ad for homes in River Oaks. I was surprised and delighted that the one I picked up this morning showed some dear friends of this blog:

I’ve written about Carl Knapp ’16 more times than I can remember but one of my early posts talks about him at some length, including both his time at Rice and the route he took to working for the River Oaks Corporation.  This one is pretty interesting too, and if you want more just go put “Knapp” in the search box at right. I can’t go past the River Oaks Shopping Center without thinking of him.

But what really made me happy were the little girls, whom I met at a much later date. Elizabeth Knapp Gayle ’41 and Carolyn Knapp Hohl ’43, appeared in the Woodson one day in 2012 and brought us all much joy.

Bonus: I took this in George R. Brown back in February. I stood gaping like an idiot until I managed to sort it out.

This is one of those images I scanned and forgot. The forgetting usually comes from not knowing what to say about a picture. When I saw it again today, though, I was struck by how genuinely happy they look and these days I guess that’s enough:

That’s Nancy Ritter and David Pace, both freshmen in 1962. The label says she’s playing a show tune.

Bonus: That piano has seen a lot of use. I still regularly hear it played. A few years ago I stood and watched a nice man tune it.

I’ve been asked several times recently why there is so little evidence of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic at Rice. There isn’t a simple answer. That it took place in the middle of World War I and that the Institute was being run as a military camp has a lot to do with it. Another important piece was the relative frequency of epidemics in those times, some of them truly terrible. Diseases that we routinely vaccinate for today would sweep through communities with sometimes devastating consequences. Diptheria in particular was an awful killer of children, but measles and smallpox epidemics also broke out with alarming frequency.

Houston, with its hot, muggy climate, was for many years especially susceptible to epidemics of mosquito-borne diseases. Of these the most terrifying were the yellow fever outbreaks of the middle and late 19th century. The Woodson has a bound collection of letters and a travel journal written by Kezia DePelchin describing her experiences as a volunteer nurse across the South during the yellow fever crisis of 1878. It’s an extraordinary collection and it’s available on-line in the Rice digital repository.

Here’s the first page (had to screen shot it–technical difficulties!):

A few years ago I found a stash of documents in the ARA Historical Collection relating to the construction of the 1938 version of the stadium. I scanned some of them but didn’t use them at the time.  When I ran across the scans again this morning I was struck in particular by this document, which explains where the funding for the new stadium came from. There was no development department at the time (and in fact there wouldn’t be one for decades) so the people who wanted the improvements went out and raised the money themselves. Crazy, I know. This appeal is really worth reading:

This is the drawing that accompanied it:

And the completed project:

For comparison this is what it replaced:

When it was all finished they held a dinner for the Rice board and the major supporters. All the big dogs were invited and most came. Just for kicks here’s Will Rice’s acceptance note:

Bonus: Another shot courtesy of Annette Bruer Tarver ’86.

Remember this from last week?

I got this email from Pat Dwyer, who runs Space Management for FE&P, the next day:

I was looking at this image from your post yesterday, and thinking that it may be the single story classroom linking building, looking westward, between the M.D. Anderson Biological Laboratories Building and the Keith-Wiess Geological Laboratories Building, and not Hamman Hall?

It took one second to see that he’s right.  I take much comfort from the fact that I wasn’t the only one to get it wrong.

Note to those who will be correcting my future errors: please notice how gently he did it. I really appreciate that.

Thanks, Pat!

Bonus: In other news it turns out that my hair is actually a mousy brown interspersed with a healthy amount of light grey. It’s inoffensive, I think, and I just might leave it.

Now that’s what I call ecumenical!

It says on the back that Father Gerard Joubert prayed for the Longhorns too and I believe it. I’ve been present at a lot of locker room prayer sessions and I’ve never heard a single prayer for victory.

This seems to be a group of Rice athletes (and I see the great Eddie Wojecki at far left, recognizable even with his hand up to make the sign of the cross) so I’m guessing this must have been taken before the October 28th game with Texas. We lost that one but had a good season.

I believe that Father Joubert was later the pastor at Holy Rosary in midtown and if I recall correctly he’s generally credited with the revitalization of that parish. He lived to the age of 92 and here’s a link to his 2004 obituary. He sounds like a wonderful man.

Bonus: I’ll be away tomorrow but not indefinitely. (Thanks, Chuck Pool!)