Rice History Corner

I had a fantastic afternoon in the Woodson Research Center today. Several things fell into place without being forced–it felt just great. Here’s the thing that was the most fun. I’ve been gathering information for a few days to write a post on the Residence Halls, which is a bit tricky. In the course of this research I began looking in the papers of William Ward Watkin, the supervising architect who was responsible for the construction  of the early campus buildings. As usual, I got sidetracked. I found a folder of photographs taken on April 16, 1912 that document a really epic Houston flood. This one here was taken from the middle of Main Street, looking towards downtown. The two little houses on the left are actually on the Rice campus. Now zoom in on it and look at what’s going on in the background in the space to the right of the first house. You can just make out the beginnings of what will be the Administration Building rising up. You can also see a water tank and next to it some sort of shed with a sign on top of it.

I realized I’d seen those things before. Here’s another picture from a completely different collection, this one consisting of construction photos. I’d been looking at this collection earlier to try to understand how the first residence halls were put together. This picture was taken in December of 1911, about four months before the flood pictures. There’s the same water tower, the same contractor’s shed with the sign on it, and the same Administration Building under construction in the background from a different angle. And here’s an irony–when I remembered this picture and went to look for it, my assumption was that it had been taken on the same day as the first one. It shows a flooded out basement, after all. (I think it’s the foundation of what’s called today the Baker Commons). But no, there were (at least) two distinct floods during the pell-mell rush to get the first buildings completed in time for the Opening. That might have been a little stressful.

There are a lot of pictures in the Watkin Collection that are worth close study and I’m excited about using them. I’ve got several questions rattling around in my head about these 1912 flood photos to work through first, though. Number One: why are there people living in those little houses? Did we not own that land yet? Or had we cut a deal with those folks to let them stay for some time on land we had already purchased? I’m very confident that the answer is pretty easily available. One thing Rice was really good at was keeping great documentation of things like this. And remember my colleague who has been working on those early financial records? He’s going to be able to help me, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

Here’s a Bonus Picture. This is roughly where the new power plant is, I think.

One day last week I was privileged to sit in on a super cool librarians meeting. Part of the task at hand was the identification of materials that might be candidates for digitization, essentially printed matter that is both out of copyright and historically worthwhile. One of my colleagues brought forth a volume called Makers of Houston, a 1912 book of photos and biographies of the city’s movers and shakers of that era, complete with little caricatures. I was happy to find Cleveland Sewall, for whom Rice’s Sewall Hall is named, included there. He looks impossibly young, and his youth is all the more striking in contrast with the other business and civic leaders included in the book, who mostly look vaguely like Civil War generals. He was from a prominent Houston family and although he first practiced law, he soon inherited a wholesale grocery firm, Gordon, Sewall and Company, which he then ran. He was also a director of the South Texas Commercial National Bank, where Rice did much of its early banking.

The only other likeness I’d ever seen of Sewall is this painting by Robert Joy in Sewall Hall, which has been the object student humor from time to time. Something about the combination of the striped jacket and the little dog seems to call out for Backpage hilarity for some reason. It’s not hard to see the boy in the man, though, if you look hard.

Sewall died quite young, at the age of sixty-two, on Christmas Day 1942. His wife, Blanche Harding Sewall, gave the gift that made the building possible in 1971. There are a number of interesting things to be said about her. I’ll say only one now and save the rest for later: I knew that she was a graduate of the Rice Institute, class of 1917, but I didn’t realize until the other day that she was already married to Sewall when she enrolled. That is so, so unusual. I’ve been looking for her in the early scrapbooks but haven’t found her, probably because as a married (and wealthy) woman she had a radically different social life than her classmates. I did find her grade reports, though, and she was an absolutely outstanding student.

I was looking through some old commencement pictures today, pulling images for a short video that will be shown at the celebration of the centennial of laying the cornerstone of Lovett Hall. It all looked pretty ordinary, really. I’ve probably laid eyes on these pictures four or five dozen times, easy. Even the people hanging off the balconies look normal to me–they did that for decades.

But there was a surprise in there. Zoom in and look at the very middle of the photo. There’s a band of alternating “R”s and owls all the way up to the top of the arch in the Sallyport. Other pictures show that it goes down the other side too. What the heck is that?? At first I though, maybe tiles? But that can’t be right. So I went and looked at both earlier and later commencements, and it’s always there (at least until commencement moved to the Chemistry Building in 1935).

I'm not sure you can see it on your computer, but Lovett is turning his head and smiling at the young woman he's just given a diploma. It's very nice.

This is boggling to me. I mean, could it possibly be any more obvious? So now I’m embarrassed enough to hunt it down. Here’s a photo from another angle, which lets us see that the band is really the edge of some sort of cloth, likely canvas, that stretches in a half circle across the Sallyport to block the attendees’ view of the other side of the building. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe they thought it was distracting– there wasn’t as much to block the view of Main Street as there is today. In my own defense, I would like to point out that we all see what we want to see. I guess I just didn’t want to see that until today.

Today’s Bonus: the guy giving the 1928 commencement speech in the first photo above was John Huston Finley, then Associate Editor of the New York Times. Finley was an interesting, talented, and complicated man. He became president of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois at the age of 29. He later taught political science at Princeton, where he would have known Lovett. You can read about him here, at a bit of a crazy Scottish American website. (Interesting note, at least to me: Finely was succeeded as president of City College of New York in 1914 by Sidney Mezes, who was president of the University of Texas when Lovett was hired to start Rice. There’s some good correspondence in his files at UT related to Rice. Like Lovett and Finley, Mezes also had fairly close ties to Woodrow Wilson.) The speech Finely gave that day was published in the Rice University Pamphlets.

So it didn’t snow on Friday, or do much of anything else. The Woodson was closed along with most of the campus but I wound up coming in anyway. My niece from Chicago was here for an audition at the Shepherd School which went ahead as scheduled. (She was very politely bemused about the shut down.) Apart from the Shepherd School, which was a beehive of nervous aspirants and their parent, things were eerily quiet. I did find some good ice, on a bicycle parked next to the building.

In a comment to the post below, loyal reader James Medford posts an interesting link to historical Houston snowfalls. (I really appreciate this kind of help, y’all. Thanks, James.) He’s got to be right that the picture is from the snow in January 1918, but it seems like there might be a little more snow than the official .2 inches. They’ve gathered up enough to build what I think might be an owl–it’s not much of a likeness, but I can’t imagine what else it could be.

Finally, as we approach the centennial of Italian cypresses leaning to one side in the quad, I noticed last Thursday that one of them had pretty well toppled over. By the time I got back with my camera, some stalwart fellows from FE&P were righting the ship. I don’t mean to be a cynic, but I’m fairly sure this is going to happen again.

I’m at home already and it’s only a quarter to four–we were set loose at 3:00 in anticipation, I guess, of sleet and snow making a mess of the evening commute.

Before I left the Woodson, I went looking for the earliest picture of a snow on campus that I could find. These photos are early indeed. They’re not dated, but judging by the military uniform you’d have to guess they were taken in the winter of 1917. I found them in the scrapbook of a young woman who graduated in 1920, so it all adds up. It looks like it was a pretty good snow for Houston, too.

Since I was in a hurry to get out of the library while the getting was good, I didn’t have time to check and see if there was anything in the Thresher about this. I’ll look tomorrow, assuming we survive.

In 1970, the use of artificial grass in athletic stadiums was sweeping the country. By that summer the Monsanto company of St. Louis had laid astroturf down at 25 college stadiums. During the 1970-71 football season only two schools in the Southwest Conference, Baylor and TCU, would continue to play on real grass and Rice played only two games on it all year.

In early July, Brown & Root, which had constructed Rice’s stadium in 1950, began preparations for the change. It seems odd today, when a change in playing surfaces isn’t a particularly emotional experience, but at the time this set off a small but significant wave of nostalgia. In an article about the new surface in an internal Brown & Root newsletter, the author lamented the “hauling away of sod which held memories of the heroic feats of Owl All-Americans such as Dicky Maegle, Bill Howton, Kosse Johnson, King Hill and Buddy Dial.” Once Brown & Root scraped off that hallowed sod, it was redistributed to improve playing conditions at the practice field (the site of the old stadium), the soccer field, the outfield of the baseball stadium and the intramural fields. (About 2,500 cubic yards were moved.) The tarp that was used to cover the grass during rains was sold to Spring Branch ISD for Tully Stadium.

After the grass playing surface was scraped clean, six inches of crushed limestone was laid. This was followed by asphalt, spread with amazing preciseness to ensure that there were neither bumps nor dips. When this was finished, Monsanto took over from Brown & Root. They installed the sponge, significantly thicker than the one used in the Astrodome, and finally the turf itself, with “blades” longer than what was installed in the Dome. The whole operation cost about $300,000 and was part of a half million dollar package of improvements to the stadium that also included new lighting and air conditioning in the press box.

I started looking at all this because I stumbled across a box of slides that document the entire process, pretty much from start to finish, ending with a close inspection of the work. If I were a nicer person I probably wouldn’t find this last slide so hilarious, but I can’t look at it without laughing. It looks like somebody lost a contact lens.

There was quite a social whirl at the Institute in its earliest days. And many of the activities would look very familiar to us today, even those that might seem a tad old fashioned. There were endless rounds of dances, teas and dinners, each to their own season of the year. There were sporting events, canoe trips, parties at bay houses and picnics at the beach on Galveston Island. It all seems far away, yet completely understandable.

Except for this one thing.

They called them “kid parties” or “little girl parties” and they were popular for several years in the teens and twenties. Groups of young women, often in the senior class, would don elaborate outfits that mimicked the clothes of small girls, play children’s games, eat cake, and carry dolls. There was much talk of fairies, etc. Many of these young women would be married within just a few years.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. When I’m looking at these scrapbooks, I see so much that feels familiar, so many things that reveal the roots of the modern Rice, that it can be easy to forget that this was a really, really long time ago. Of all the things I’ve seen in these books, these strange and unsettling pictures make it clearest that this was actually another world, in some ways totally mysterious to us.

I don’t usually post on weekends at all, so I figured I could go ahead and put up a completely (so far as I know) non-Rice related post, just because I’d like to.

Here is Father Doll. It doesn't show very well here, but he is standing in front of an enormous (and apparently fabulous) new printer.

Most of you don’t know this, but I am a very lucky person. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I went to visit my daughter and son-in-law in Omaha this weekend. (For all you baseball fans, the scoreboard is now up at tdAmeritrade Park and it looks like all the seats are installed!) When I got into town on Friday, I went to go pick her up at Creighton, where she works as an archivist for the wonderful photographer, Father Don Doll, SJ. (You can see some of his work here. For anyone who has gone on one of Rice’s Lewis and Clark trips, be sure to check out his images taken along the trail.)

Just by chance, Father Doll had recently returned from one of his frequent trips to Pine Ridge, this time bringing with him three remarkable scrapbooks full of pictures taken at Holy Rosary Mission and around the reservation from the early 1940s through the 1960s. I was absolutely elated and still can hardly believe my good fortune in getting to see these pictures. I was also lucky in that I had a digital camera in my pocket and could take snapshots of some of these images. So please squint, excuse the poor quality of my pictures, and try to imagine the joy with which I discovered them. (They look better if you click on them and zoom in.)

In a final bit of luck, I seem to be on a bit of a roll in terms of discovering pictures of Kennedys. Some of you might be old enough to remember that Robert Kennedy visited Pine Ridge during the 1968 presidential campaign, not long, in fact, before he was killed in California. There were a couple of pictures from that visit in one of these scrapbooks. Here is my favorite–not really a great photograph, but the little girl with the scissors made me laugh. It looks like she’s fixing to cut up his coat tail.

This is an early shot of the Physics Building. I can tell from the state of the landscaping and from where I found it (Elmer Shutts’s scrapbook) that it was taken from about 1915 to 1916. Note, if you will, the rather forlorn cypress trees held up by some sort of stakes.

I know that these trees were planted a couple of years earlier, because I can see them in this picture of the Physics Building going up. I’d give this photo a ballpark date of mid to late 1913, based on the state of construction. (That’s really glorious mud, isn’t it?) So it only took a couple of years before those Italian cypresses began listing to one side.

Here is a picture I took on my way to the Faculty Club for lunch today.

There are thousands of photographs in the Rice archives, but one of the things in fairly short supply are pictures taken inside dorm rooms. We always look pretty intently when we find one. (If you have any, please let me know.) For some reason, the members of the early classes took–or at least kept–more than others. And their rooms look quite barren compared to those of more recent times. They just didn’t have very much stuff.

The pictures here come from the scrapbook of a member of the Class of 1916 named Elmer Shutts. (I’ll have a longer post about him soon.) They seem typical–every room I’ve seen has been decorated with college pennants, some from Rice but more from other schools. I don’t really know what this was all about. They may have collected them from places they visited, or they may have had friends at those schools, or they may have simply thought they looked “collegiate.” And the flowers on the dresser are a nice touch. (Our man Shutts was a bit of a dandy.)

More interesting to me is this second picture. In a classic undergraduate male move, Shutts has covered a wall with pinups of attractive ladies. (These are apparently what “hotties” looked like circa 1915.) I was immediately struck by the larger framed rectangular picture near the bottom. On closer inspection, it’s clear that it is a print of Paul Chabas’s 1912 painting, “September Morn.” This nude caused a sensation, not to say a scandal, when it was displayed in New York but quickly took on a life of its own as reproductions and parodies spread and continued to spread for the next fifty or so years. I think it’s a bit cheeky of Shutts to have it up in his room, but the cultural connotations of this work became so complicated so fast that we can never know what he meant when he hung it. Upon reflection, I suppose the most likely explanation is that it’s just a picture of a naked woman.

For your amusement, here‘s an interesting site totally devoted to archiving images related to “September Morn.”