Rice History Corner

Update: After receiving tips from a couple of reader who are clearly older than I am (see comments), I now know that the “lonesome end” was one Fred Carpenter. Carpenter was also an outstanding individual. Here is a link to an excellent 1993 Sports Illustrated article about him.

Last week I got an email from my friend Nancy Burch, who sent along a fabulous picture she had recently found of preparations for the 1958 Homecoming.

Here’s what she had to say: “This was taken in the driveway of my parent’s home on Dryden, where we built the homecoming ‘floats’ for my class all four years. This one, when completed, won first prize in 1958. The theme was ‘Hanging Out the Old Gray Line,” as we played Army that year. We had a clothes line strung between goal posts with the jerseys of Pete Dawkins and other Army star players.”

Naturally, the first thing I wondered was whether we won the game and the second thing I wondered was who Pete Dawkins was. As soon as I got back to the Woodson this morning I looked it up in the Thresher. Rice had a pretty good team in 1958. (You can get a bit of a snapshot of the situation in the Southwest Conference the day before the game by clicking on the Thresher article to the right.) The Owls gave Army, which was ranked third in the nation, a run for their money, losing a tight contest when Army halfback Pete Dawkins scored with under a minute left to play. Army finished the season undefeated. Rice ended up having a mediocre season, losing two of their remaining three SWC games and ending the year at 5-5.

As for Pete Dawkins, he won the Heisman trophy that year. He was also president of his class and first captain of cadets at West Point. Then he spent three years at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and served 24 years in the Army, becoming the then-youngest brigadier general at age 43 in 1981. Somewhere along the way he earned a Ph.D. in public policy from Princeton. After retiring from the military, he had a successful career on Wall Street. There’s a great story about him, written on the occasion of the retiring of his jersey, here at the Army athletics website. You should read it–he’s really an amazing fellow.

So now there’s only one little thing niggling at me, but I have too much to do to look it up right now. In that Thresher piece, they talk about Army’s “lonesome end.” Sounds like some kind of spread offense, maybe. I’ll check it out later, unless someone can tell me what that’s all about.

The Woodson is closed this week and my family is in the middle of packing up for a temporary move while our house gets some remodeling. I’m thus forced to scrounge around inside my laptop for something interesting to show you. Luckily, there’s a lot of stuff in there, including some things I don’t remember ever seeing before!

Here’s one small thing that I got a kick out of when I found it. In the collection of leases and deeds that my colleague has been going though, there are a couple of boxes called “Financial Records.” They go back to the absolute beginning of the Institute and contain (among other things) receipts for what seem to be every single purchase, even the tiniest such as stamps and envelopes. Many of the expenditures relate to the lawsuits surrounding the death of William Marsh Rice. Many others, though, are for things needed for the early organization of the school itself, most bought while Mr. Rice was still alive. There are several folders of loose receipts, as well as a big receipt book.

These early records were the responsibility of Emmanuel Raphael, who was the first secretary of the Rice board. (Raphael’s brother-in-law, Arthur B. Cohn, was Mr. Rice’s secretary and he was soon hired to help with the Institute’s financial affairs as well.) These men were meticulous record-keepers. That’s why I laughed out loud when I saw this. In the summer of 1894 the Rice trustees decided to put the $200,000 promissory note from William Marsh Rice that constituted the bulk of the endowment into safekeeping at the South Texas National Bank. Someone, probably Emmanuel, forgot to get the receipt signed. Someone else, whose handwriting I don’t yet know, pointed this out. Maybe I’ve been in the archives too long, but I find this hilarious.

One wonders where it had been kept before. The Institute had always had its money at South Texas, which was chartered in 1890. (I know this because I also found our first bankbook.) Trustee James Everett McAshan, a prominent banker, was associated with that bank from its founding.

In the summer of 1928 the Democratic National Convention was held in Houston. This was the first time the party had met in the South since the end of the Civil War. Since the likely nominee was Governor Al Smith of New York, a Catholic and an opponent of Prohibition, party leaders believed that meeting in the South would help maintain unity. (It didn’t. Smith was defeated, of course, by Herbert Hoover in a landslide. Hoover is pictured in my blog header above, standing next to Lovett in the spring of 1925 on the side of the Physics building.) That the location chosen was Houston was almost entirely due to the efforts and the money of Jesse Jones, who had travelled to Washington the year before with $200,000 and a promise to build a new convention hall. (Incredibly, Jones apparently made these arrangements without consulting anyone, including the mayor, the business community, or any Texas politicians.)

You may not be shocked to learn that most of the delegates stayed at hotels owned by Jesse Jones, the Lamar and the Rice. But it is a bit surprising that some of them wound up in the residence halls of the Rice Institute. You’d have to believe that it was a tad uncomfortable in there in late June and Rice was a pretty long way from the new Sam Houston Convention Center downtown.

This letter from the secretary of the housing committee, along with the agreement itself, turned up in one of the “Sundry Contracts” boxes in the collection of old deeds and leases. Several things about the letter are interesting, apart from its content. First, it is addressed to the Rice Institute at the Esperson Building. The business office moved around from time to time and tracking its location is interesting to me, for no particular reason that I can think of. It stayed in the Esperson  Building for a long time, although it did move within the building. Second, it is sent to the attention of Mr. Frick and I’ve never heard of him before. Finally, the delegates would begin to arrive less than two weeks from the date of this letter! Talk about cutting it close.

Conventions require more than housing, of course. Entertainment is high on the list as well. The Institute stepped up here too, leasing out its athletic field on Main Street for the staging of “what is generally known as a rodeo exhibition.” This long contract, also found in “Sundry Contracts,” lays out a series of explicit provisions for the protection of Rice’s facilities. The rodeo seems to have been a success. It got some press coverage and it’s mentioned in several reminiscences of the convention. My favorite one is here: the recollections of Garland Hayes, one of twelve boys from Tyler County who were brought to Houston for the convention as guests of John Henry Kirby, the wealthy Houston lumberman who was also a native of Tyler County.

For more on the 1928 Convention generally, there is a nice entry in the Handbook of Texas Online.

My earlier post on William Nathan, Class of 1916, came after my accidental discovery of his scrapbook on one of the shelves near the spot in the Woodson where I like to work.  Once I began paying attention to the Class of 1916, I found one engaging story after another, some of them fabulously intertwined.  This small class  turns out be very important in Rice’s history, and many of its members remained close the the Institute and to each other for their entire lives. Perhaps I should have expected this. After all, they had to start from scratch, inventing along with Lovett and the first faculty a new university. They had heads full of stories about how the students acted back East, or in Austin, or at A&M, but they alone had to figure out what it meant to be Rice students.

The box in which I found Nathan’s scrapbook holds another as well, the scrapbook kept by his classmate, Carl Knapp, a native of San Angelo who came to the Rice Institute in 1912 to study Electrical Engineering. Every one of the scrapbooks that I’ve seen is exquisite in its own way. Unlike the memos and letters of administrators, which are often intellectually quite interesting but lifeless, these jumbled collections of pictures, ribbons, and dance cards have an immediate emotional power. Seen from this distance, within the context of the lives their compilers led, the sense of promise and loss, the sweep of change, can be piercing.

The first Rice students brought with them seriousness of purpose, but also a fun-loving spirit. One of the things that was central to working out their identity as Rice students was their enthusiastic support of the school’s athletic teams. Carl Knapp did a particularly good job of keeping track of the Owls’ performance, carefully recording every score in every sport for his four years on campus. He also kept each year’s team picture for football and baseball–his scrapbook seems to hold the only copy we have of the photo of the 1912 football team. (I’ll post it next week, as I don’t seem to have it here at home.)

Knapp’s career as a Rice undergraduate is instructive. There was a lot to be done to get the apparatus of student life up and running and not very many available hands. So despite the rigorous academic demands, he plunged into leadership roles in the emerging student activities. He was chairman of the Honor Council, treasurer of the Engineering Society, associate editor of the first Campanile, and a member of the Riceonian Literary Society. As a senior he was an assistant in mathematics. He graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.

After graduation, Carl Knapp served in the army in World War I and then returned to Houston, where he spent the rest of his life. He first opened an electrical business, but soon sold out to a partner and went to work for Houston Lighting and Power. By 1925, though, he had found what would be his true career: real estate. He worked for the River Oaks Corporation, first selling lots and homes in the newly opened Country Club Estates section, then becoming general manager of sales. In 1947 he formed his own brokerage and appraisal firm with Claxton Parks, a former colleague at River Oaks. He had quite a bit of success, acting at various times as president of the Houston Board of Realtors and the American Institute of Appraisers. He was also an active member of the Association of Rice Alumni and served a year as its president. He lived with his family in River Oaks and was an elder at Grace Presbyterian Church for many years. Carl Knapp died in 1971, at work in his office across the street from Lamar High School. He was 76.

This is the first official Rice Christmas card I can find, although I guess I’d be surprised if EOL didn’t send them out from the very beginning. (Note they were still living in their first Houston residence, a rented house downtown on Polk Avenue.) From what I can tell, he and Mrs. Lovett sent out this same card every year, with just a change in the date.

Christmas card technology has advanced quite a bit in the intervening years, but one of my colleagues pointed out that this is actually a pretty fancy card for the era: it’s both engraved and embossed! And I can’t resist pointing out that the embossing highlights the two-shield image that’s on the Rice flag.

The Woodson Research Center will be closed from tomorrow until we come back from break on January 3, so posting will be a bit spotty until then. But don’t go away–I’ve got some cool stuff reserved so I won’t be left with absolutely nothing to talk about. I’ve gotten more interested in the Class of 1916 and I’ll put up some surprising things about a couple of them.

And have a Merry Christmas, y’all!

While looking around for the origins of the Rice flag, I accidentally turned up another flag drawing by Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, the architects of the early campus. This one is for a Rice Institute “automobile pennant.” It’s a really nice looking design and they certainly were produced in pretty fair numbers. You can see them sometimes in old photographs of the inside of dorm rooms and it was common for students to paste small ones in their scrapbooks. I think we even have a couple of them in the Woodson somewhere.

Two things are kind of striking about this. First, the care that was taken with such a small thing is remarkable. Second, there really weren’t all that many automobiles in Houston when this was drawn in 1912. I can’t really draw any conclusions from this. Sometimes it’s just for fun.

While I was looking around in the photo files for pictures of the Rice flag, the best ones I found were in the folders related to Ken Pitzer’s inauguration. Held on October 10, 1962, this event was part of the centerpiece of Rice’s year-long celebration of our Semicentennial anniversary.

There were a lot of great pictures in there and there’s a lot to be said about the Semi

centennial, but the photo at right is the one I enjoyed the most. My first reaction was simply that it’s just a cool looking image–I can understand why the photographer took it. Then I got distracted trying to identify the people milling around somewhere in Fondren library. At first I couldn’t, but gradually it dawned on me that I did in fact see someone I know.

So I sent Ron Sass an email of the picture with the subject line “Is that you on top of the table??” Here’s his reply: “Yes, that is me on the table.  I was the Marshall in charge of getting the foreign dignitaries in proper marching order for the academic precession leading to the inaugural ceremony.  It was like herding chickens plus there was a lot of bickering as to who should be in front of whom. My school is older than your school and the French should lead everybody, etc. etc,  Great fun though and I had to climb on top of the table to get their attention (sort of).  We did finally get together and march out as if nothing had happened.” The great thing about these pictures is there’s always a story, if you can get to it.

Ron Sass came to Rice in 1958 and has had a great career here. He retired from teaching a couple of years ago, but is still very active on campus. Here’s a good article about his contributions to Rice, written at the time of his “retirement.”

Here, miraculously, is an early aerial photograph with a date on it: October 20th, 1931. It’s a really good, clear image and  it’s been taken from an unusual angle that lets us see the layout of the entire campus.

Sure enough, if you click to zoom in you can see several small buildings in the most heavily wooded section along Harris Gully, near where Reckling Field is today. I can’t see everything because of the trees but the structures that I do see seem to line up with the blueprint that originally got me going on this.

I’m pretty satisfied with this answer because it generally makes sense. What bothered me was this: how could I not have noticed an entire group of buildings that existed for decades on a small campus? The answer is 1) none of the people who left papers behind had any interest in talking about this, being preoccupied with things like building an academic institution and 2) there are very few images that show this relatively empty part of campus in this era. Quite sensibly, people who were making photographs wanted pictures of the impressive buildings rather than mule sheds. So, it adds up.

This is an interesting picture in many other ways and I’ll give it much further study. Just for one example, you can really clearly see the curved line where the railroad spur had been. And are those row crops in the area to the right of the mule sheds??

Due to a groundswell of demand, here is a photo of the Rice flag that we found the other day. This was taken by my intrepid colleague Amanda Focke, assistant head of Special Collections in the Woodson Research Center.

The only picture of a Rice flag that looks shiny like this is the one the color guard is displaying at the Pitzer inauguration. Usually it looks like a pale linen. I also wonder if the wreath was always blue. I think it would look better in green.

Here is a scan (also made by Amanda) of an early iteration of the idea. It was drawn by someone in the office of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in 1912. 

Until a couple of days ago, I didn’t know that Rice had ever had a flag. I was scanning some photos of early commencements, staring at them mindlessly while I waited for something to download, when I noticed this flag that had never caught my attention before. If you zoom in on it, you’ll see two shields surrounded by a laurel wreath. One is the Rice shield, the other is a Texas shield. It’s really quite pretty.

So now I wonder: where did it come from? and where did it go? The first question was easier to answer, although not without some false trails. There was actually an information file in the Woodson titled “Rice Flag,” but all it contained was a twelve-year-old research note wherein we informed a sixth grader who was writing a school paper that Rice didn’t have a flag. (Oops.)

One of my clever colleagues, though, remembered that we had some small watercolors made by the designer of the Rice shield, heraldic expert Pierre de Chaignon la Rose. Sure enough, he had painted both Rice and Texas shields. We also found a drawing of the flag itself in the collection we have from Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, the architects for the first buildings on campus.

Delving a little deeper, I turned to Dr. Lovetts’s papers and found his correspondence with la Rose. Lovett had wanted both the shields to be incorporated into the academic seal of the Institute. La Rose, however, rejected this idea in no uncertain terms–it would violate the rules of heraldry because Rice, as private institution, had no formal ties to the State of Texas. Still, Lovett really liked the idea of using both shields and la Rose acknowledged that this could be done in other insignia, just not in the academic seal itself. Both shields are, in fact, represented on the cornerstone of Lovett Hall and I think this must be the origin of the flag as well.

But what happened to it? A close look at commencement pictures shows the flag there from the teens until 1933. It rained in 1934 and graduation was held in St. Paul’s Methodist Church.  In 1935 commencement was moved to the front of the Chemistry Building (where it remained for many years) and the Rice flag disappears and is replaced by the Lone Star. The photographic record from the 1940s onward is pretty spotty–there’s no longer any consistency in term of what shots are taken from what angles, so it’s hard to be sure whether it never appeared again or not. The next time I can find it is at the inauguration of President Kenneth S. Pitzer in 1961, and here it shows up in spades. In this photo you can see it in three places: flying on Lovett Hall, on the podium by the Sallyport, and as an insignia on the front of the speaker’s dais. Since then, I have no idea what happened to it. I’ll keep looking.

Yesterday I ran into Greg Marshall, a Rice alum who works in University Relations, and asked him if he’d ever heard of a Rice flag. Not only had he heard of it, he said he had one in his office. (He doesn’t know where it came from, by the way–it arrived in a large campus mail envelope with no indication of who sent it.) I confiscated it immediately, of course, but it looked funny to me. It had gold fringe all around it and none of the flags I’d seen had that. But when I blew up this picture from Pitzer’s inauguration, I discovered that the Rice flag held by the Color Guard was fringed.

I like it. I think we should start using it again.