Rice History Corner

I’m not feeling so hot tonight so instead of the post I promised about yesterday’s Main Street picture I’m going to do something simpler.

I dug around for a while today trying to figure out who this guy was. Astute commenter C Kelly alerted me to the possibility that he wasn’t a track guy at all, but a basketball player. This has proved to be, in fact, exactly right. This is his basketball team picture from the 1919 Campanile, precisely the same shot that I found in Heavy Underwoods’ scrapbook. His name is Robb Winsborough. I don’t think he graduated from Rice, but I didn’t remember to check before I left campus. Rice wasn’t very good this particular season (1918-19), finishing 4-10, a big disappointment after going 10-4 the year before.

Just for grins, here’s the guy in the picture next to Winsborough. It’s Edgar Lovett’s son, Malcolm, who much later served as chairman of Rice’s Board of Trustees. He was married to this nice lady at the craps table at the 1982 Friends of Fondren Library Gala.

Update: I’m reliably informed that Winsborough did graduate in 1923.

I ran across this remarkable photograph a few weeks ago when someone came in looking for historic pictures of Main Street. I’d somehow never seen it before. I’m pretty sure it was taken on a football game day in 1921 by the Flying Owls. This is the only thing that would explain the long lines of parked cars on both sides of the street. Look closely, because I think I’m going to be writing about this one for the rest of the week.

Go ahead. Click on it. It's a treasure trove.

The big building in the foreground is Autry House. The smaller one behind it close to the street is a sandwich and ice cream shop called The Owl that catered to Rice students. To the right is a shed that students used for shelter when they were waiting for the trolley on Fannin to take them back into town. You can see a couple of trolley cars on the tracks just to the right. (I don’t know who owned the house behind The Owl.) This is a lot for one photograph, but I’ll have something to say about all these things PLUS some photos of Ye Old College Inn just down the street.

Today, another Friends of Fondren edition. This time, I’m featuring the 1982 Casino Night held in the library. It looks like it was a particularly wild evening:

Public Dancing at the Reference Desk!

Baby needs a new pair of shoes! Looks like Dame Fortune was smiling down on the craps table.

This is Mrs. Martha Lovett, wife of Malcolm Lovett, Sr., former Chairman of the Rice Board and son of our first president.

Just for fun, here’s one from the 1997 gala. Former University Librarian Chuck Henry peers into a spyglass. What’s he looking at??

As I was looking through the pictures I have stored on my laptop, I realized that there was yet another aspect of the landscape between the old football field and the dorms that has long since disappeared. At some point, a long hedge was planted along the path that ran between them. This hedge fairly quickly grew into a tunnel. Here’s a picture of it that I found in the scrapbook of a math grad student who graduated in 1940:

The mind reels.

You can see the long hedge here in this 1950 aerial picture of campus:

Click on this to enlarge.

I confess that I know neither when it was planted nor when it was taken out. (It doesn’t seem to be there in the picture I posted yesterday, which was dated 1919.) I’m in Omaha for a meeting right now, but as soon as I get back I’ll see if I can figure it out.

When I was going through the scrapbook that held the deeply confusing memorabilia of the two Heavy Underwoods, I ran across this picture. I have no real idea who the guy in the sharp track outfit is, but the view behind him is just great. (He’s another handsome fellow–maybe a bit knock-kneed, but what the heck–and a contemporary of the earlier, heavier Heavy Underwood. I feel sure that I can figure out his name with a little effort. Just not today.)

This is a view of the dorms that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before, but that the students back then must have seen all the time. The tree line behind him is Harris Gully, and there’s a footbridge somewhere over there that let them cross the water for the walk along a well-worn path to the residence halls.

I love pictures like this. Views that were completely ordinary for years sometimes simply vanish–nothing left but glimpses in old photographs. Here’s another lost view, one that I find very beautiful.

I think it’s hard to appreciate how lovely the Chemistry Building is without being able to get some distance away from it.

Once again great fun comes from minding someone else’s business. Yesterday morning I came in and stuck my nose into the work being done by one of the Woodson’s outstanding volunteers and I wound up learning something as well as giving myself a mystery to solve.

She was working on a small manuscript collection that contained the correspondence of Harry Marshall Bulbrook, the class agent for the class of 1916, the first class to graduate from Rice. Most of the letters were written between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s and involved class business like luncheons and reunions. Not surprisingly, I suppose, the early students had a strong camaraderie and many of them managed to stick pretty close together for the rest of their lives. Bulbrook had correspondence with quite a few of them and the letters reveal a strong sense of continuing engagement with Rice.

The fellow seated at left is Carey Croneis, former Rice provost who was chancellor when this picture was taken.

Here’s the thing that caught my attention: in preparation for the 50th reunion of the Class of 1916 they decided to design a special monogram for Rice’s first five classes, a group they referred to as the “Rice Frontier Five,” and have it made into a pin for each member. Well, first, I had never heard of this designation before and I have to say that I like it–it’s kind of snazzy. But the second thing that occurred to me was, what did the monogram look like?? There aren’t any drawings in the correspondence except for one idea that was rejected, but it’s clear that they actually carried it off and had the pins made. I found this picture in the Sallyport of Alumni President Charles Hamilton presenting Bulbrook with one of the pins at Homecoming. But I can’t see it! This is the sort of thing that will torment me until I find it. Wish me luck.

With the annual Friends of Fondren Library gala coming up this weekend, we’ve been looking through a lot of pictures and other materials that document the history of that group.  I hadn’t realized that it was founded in 1950–it’s one of those organizations that is so solid it seems to have always existed. Click on the announcement of its founding to the left and you’ll be able to read a lovely statement of the group’s mission. It’s remarkable to me that over so many years they have stayed so true to their original purposes. It’s also remarkable that they’ve been so successful. Their hard work and faithfulness to the vision of the academic library has helped build a truly fine rare book and manuscript collection at Rice.

There's Neal Lane again, casting a skeptical eye over the whole operation.

There are hundreds of photographs of Friends events over the years and some of them are a real hoot. What caught my eye, though, were these pictures of a tour through the library in 1986. This tour was given to acquaint members with the new technologies that were beginning to change the library. My favorite photo is this one to the right. It’s such a distinct moment: while everyone is examining what the new computer can do, the old card catalog still sits over their shoulders.

Bonus Picture:

Could that be Vice Provost and University Librarian Sara Lowman in the purple dress?

I find this photo sort of inspirational. This is, of course, Neal Lane, one of Rice’s most respected scholars, former NSF director, and Science Advisor to the President of the United States during the Clinton administration.  The picture was taken at the 1990 Friends of Fondren Library Gala and he was Rice’s provost at the time.

It looks like a sweet ride. I’ll bet it was red.

I spent yet another day today working through the pile of unidentified pictures from Public Affairs. I’m getting close to the bottom of the pile, but I’m nearly cross-eyed from trying to sort all these out–most of them are slides and I wind up twisting and squinting up into the light to get a better look at them. Because I’m getting close to the end, what’s left of the pile is now almost completely random. There are still hundreds of images of buildings, people doing things or just walking around, and a wide variety of scenic locations on campus. They’re just all mixed together. Here are a few that interested me, in no particular order, which is exactly the way I found them.

Here’s something you can’t see anymore, as there is now a residential college on top of it. I must have seen at least four hundred pictures of Lovett Hall in this collection and hundreds more of the academic quad, but I believe this is the only image of this spot that exists in the archives. There are a lot of places that haven’t been photographed at all.

One thing that’s kind of tricky is labeling things so that someone else will know what the label means fifty years from now. What do I call this?

This is actually a little embarrassing. Sometimes I’ll run across a shot that was taken from an angle that’s unfamiliar to me and I just can’t figure out what I’m looking at. I was completely stumped by this one. I actually sought help! I won’t tell you what we were guessing, only that our guesses were preposterous. It wasn’t until I uploaded it just now that I realized it’s Del Butcher Hall seen from the intramural field. Sheesh.

I put this one in because it has a helicopter in it. It looks like it might be a Veteran’s Day observation.

With luck, I’ll have something more coherent to say tomorrow. No promises, though.

And thanks to Intern Kaleb for scanning these slides!

I was looking for something in an early scrapbook this afternoon and I got caught up in some serious strangeness. The scrapbook belonged to a guy who played football at Rice in the middle of the 1920s–the John Heisman era, in fact. He was apparently quite good, an All-Southwest Conference center. The book was filled with newspaper clippings and various memorabilia. The piece that caught my eye was this letter. I think it was written to his father by a friend of his in Dallas who had seen Rice play Trinity the week before. It’s pretty funny and definitely worth a read. The writer’s assessment of the quality of Rice’s team was spot on. We lost the game he watched 13-0, and did indeed squeeze out a win in the next one, beating Arkansas 13-9. It was pretty much downhill from there. The Owls finished the season 4-4-1.

But when I looked at the pictures in the scrapbook, they absolutely didn’t make sense. They clearly had the guy’s name on them, but they were just impossible. Look at this picture over here. There’s no way that was taken in 1925–it’s before the fieldhouse and stadium were built. (I don’t know if you can tell here, but this is an exceptionally nice image, one of the crispest I’ve seen from this period.)

So I sat and stared at it all for a long time. It slowly dawned on me that there might be items in the scrapbook that belonged to two different people. But that didn’t seem right either, because the name was the same throughout. I sat and stared some more. (I’m not saying how long this took, but it was pretty long.) Was it possible, I wondered, that there could be two people both named “Heavy Underwood”?

It seems unlikely, but readers, it is true.

This is John “Heavy” Underwood, Class of ’22, of Honey Grove, Texas. (And no, I don’t know what he’s got going on with his helmet there.)

And here’s a sketch from the 1926 Campanile of Wash “Heavy” Underwood, Class of ’27, brother of John. They took to calling them “Big Heavy” and “Little Heavy” to avoid confusion, but I found out about it too late. I guess Mom or somebody just put all their pictures in the same place for safekeeping, never anticipating the havoc this might wreak on some hapless historian. They both could play, by the way.