Rice History Corner

In the course of looking for something else, I came across some great evidence in my mule housing mystery. We have a collection of “Rice Special Occasion” photographs that came from the Baker family. Most, but not all, of these are Commencement pictures.

The one that caught my eye is a picture of the ground clearing in preparation for the construction of the Chemistry Building in July, 1923. If you click on it, you’ll see not only a pretty impressive number of mules but also a farm house and several outbuildings behind them. (You can also see that this photo has been folded in half at some point. It’s a really big picture, too wide to reproduce here. The other half shows more mules and a very empty landscape.)

I felt a moment of elation, but began to wonder again almost immediately. The first issue to deal with is that I can’t really tell what angle this picture is taken from. There aren’t any landmarks that I can use to identify the spot. But it occurred to me that because this is clearly so close to the main part of campus, there are likely to be other photos where you can get a glimpse of these buildings. Sure enough, in this picture of the 1918 Commencement you can clearly see them in the background if you click to enlarge right over the top of the car parked on the left. They look to be roughly where the Mudd Building is today.

So, is this the house with sheds referred to in the 1933 waiver agreement? I don’t think so but I’m not completely sure. The first thing that bothered me is that the blueprint with the map of the outbuildings describes a “little house,” a one-story office with living quarters and an open shed attached. The house in this picture is a big old farmhouse. Second, another waiver allowing a Buildings and Grounds worker to live in the “little house” has turned up in the “Sundry Contracts” file, this one dated in the early 1940s. (It makes no mention of mules, however.)

But if I go back to the early aerial photo of campus, which we figured was taken in the early 1930s, and zoom in behind the Chemistry Building none of it is there. It looks as if the site has only been cleared recently and you can still see what’s left of a driveway, but the buildings are gone.

So, I’m still thinking about this. Any ideas?

I’m out of town at a meeting for a couple of days, so all I have to offer right now is whatever images happen to be on my laptop. These are mostly things that I’ve downloaded to use in various talks and presentations, but there are a few that are just random images that I wanted to keep copies of because they made me laugh. Here are a couple from the Hackerman era:

Norman Hackerman was an avid squash player for his entire adult life. He was also notoriously tight with the university’s money. For years I had heard a story around campus that went like this: when it was announced that Norman was going to be the next president of Rice, the campus squash players were elated. Surely this meant that the sauna-like squash courts in the gym would now be air-conditioned! But not so fast. What happened instead was that he had only a single court air-conditioned, which was the one he played on.

I always suspected that this story was apocryphal–it captures some things about Norman so perfectly that I didn’t see how it could possibly be true. But about a year ago, looking through some old F&E papers I found a bill for installing air-conditioning for one squash court. This picture makes me smile every time I look at it. If you zoom in, you can see that he’s wearing a University of Texas t-shirt. That makes me smile a second time.

This is a Rice University PHT (Putting Husband Through) degree. It was received by one of our Woodson volunteers in a Graduate Wives Commencement ceremony that was held in Cohen House in 1973. That’s really Hackerman’s signature on there. One hardly knows what to say, but I’ll bet that was a heck of a party.

One of my guiltiest pleasures (in the archives, anyway) is nosing around in what other people are looking at. I’ve found a lot of things that way that I never would have come across otherwise. Last week one of my colleagues recalled a small collection from the Library Service Center for processing. So when I went into the back room I saw four boxes labeled “Rice University Studies Records,” which I had no idea that we even owned. This is total catnip for me–something I’ve never seen!

Once I dug around in the boxes, though, it quickly became clear that there is a good reason why I’d never looked at this before. It’s a pretty dull collection: mostly draft manuscripts of articles that were published in the journal and correspondence with the authors. But there was one small folder that contained a notebook, and here I found something of interest. (I admit it took a minute to figure out what it was.)

This notebook goes back to the origins of the Rice University Studies as the Rice Institute Pamphlets. A core part of Edgar Odell Lovett’s vision for Rice was that it was to be a center not just of teaching, but of the discovery of new knowledge. As this idea of the university grew dominant during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America saw the rise of the scholarly journal as a means to disseminate new knowledge. The Rice Institute Pamphlets was meant to be the new institution’s contribution to the world of scholarship, showcasing the work of our own faculty as well as other scholars of high reputation.

Lovett was also a very talented public relations man who understood that this publication could also serve the (perhaps somewhat less-elevated) function of advertising the new school. What this early notebook contains is lists of people and categories of people to whom copies of the journal were sent. If you click on the pages to enlarge them, you can see exactly what he was thinking. Although there are certainly academics here, most of the copies seem to have gone elsewhere: among others to recent high school graduates, Texas newspaper editors, and a very large number of women’s clubs. It seems safe to say that these folks would have found the Rice Institute Pamphlet impressive as all get-out. Smart. Very smart.

If you’re interested, most of the run of the Pamphlet is available online at the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive. Its digitization was funded by the Rice Historical Society and by Tom Williams, (Ph.D., class of 2000), (who was a classmate of mine here and a kinder, more interesting man you’ll never find.)

Those who aren’t already members might want to consider joining the Rice Historical Society. They provide real service in helping preserve Rice’s history. They also throw great parties.

The other day, as is my habit, I got distracted in the archives. I like to work standing up, using a map case for my desk. On the shelves behind that case are several boxes of scrapbooks. I haven’t been very interested in the history of student life until recently so I’d never studied these particularly closely, but on this day I was tired and felt like it would be fun to look at some old pictures, dance cards, and general what-not. I pulled out a scrapbook I’d never seen before, one whose blue cover was jauntily emblazoned “William Max Nathan.”

The first thing I found in it was a copy of a long memo he’d written after serving on the Honor Council in 1914, a pretty hard-hitting critique of the honor system complete with suggestions for reforming it. Then a photograph fell out, a very unusual one, made 24 years after Nathan graduated. Taken at commencement in 1940, it shows (from left to right) Edmund M. Dupree, the first student to enroll at the Rice Institute, Captain Baker, the first chairman of the Rice board, Charles Nathan, the first child of a four-year alum to graduate from Rice, and finally his father, William Max Nathan, the first student to graduate from Rice with distinction. (Charles Nathan graduated with distinction as well.)

William M. Nathan in front of Lovett Hall, New Year's Day 1915

Curious now about Nathan, I started looking for more about him. As a student at the Institute, he was quite active. Besides his service on the Honor Council, he was a member of the Debate Society, Vice-President of his class, and as a senior he was business manager of the Campanile. After graduating he enrolled in the Harvard law school, but left to join the military during World War I. When the war was over he came back to Texas and earned his Ll.B. from the University of Texas College of Law in 1921. He seems to have spent the rest of his life in Houston, his time devoted to a successful law practice and active participation in the city’s Jewish community. (He was one of the founders of the Congregation Emanu El in 1943, and served as the first secretary of its board.)

Nathan’s son Charles was an interesting man also. Like his father he attended San Jacinto High School in Houston, where he was an outstanding student (and the state Latin champ in 1933). After he left Rice, he studied chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, earning his Ph.D. in 1948. He served in the Navy during World War II, participating in the atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. After the war, he worked for many years as a chemical engineer in industrial laboratories, then became a professor of petroleum engineering at New Mexico Tech. He too displayed a deep commitment to the life of the Jewish community everywhere he lived.  After he retired in 1989, he returned to Houston, where he died in 2001.

One of the most surprising things about the Rice Institute is that, in an era when private colleges were overwhelmingly denominational, it was secular. William Marsh Rice seems to have picked up this idea from the charter of the Girard College in Philadelphia, which was one of his early models for the Institute and which completely banned religious observations from its campus. (Not surprisingly, this restriction was more honored in the breach.) Outside of Tulane, which was unusual in many respects because of its location in New Orleans, it’s hard to think of another private college or university in the South that enrolled Jewish students, let alone so readily admitted them into the life of the school. This produced an interesting state of affairs and a sometimes complicated set of social relations. It’s too much for a blog post, but the history of religion on campus pops up regularly in the archives and I’ll have more on it later.

I had a few minutes to go dig out the 1922 Campanile for pictures of Rice’s 1921 baseball team. Besides the standard team photo and a page devoted to Eddie Dyer, there are some charming action shots of the team and their mascots. (The quality of photos scanned from the Campanile are generally not too good, although you won’t notice it unless you enlarge them. It can also be tricky to get even scans, because I don’t want to damage the old volume by bending it too much. Still, it’s probably better than nothing.) Here you go:

I got a (very welcome) comment from an alert reader on my post about the mules, suggesting that I  look at the budget records to see if I could use them to figure out how long we kept feeding livestock. This is a clever suggestion and quite a sensible one too. The problem, though, is that we don’t really have that data, at least not in a usable form. (Bits and pieces are floating around in different manuscript collections.) Rice has never had any real records management policy and so what has been preserved is largely a matter of chance. Some of the things you would assume were important enough to keep have simply vanished. Others that seem naturally ephemeral somehow manage to survive. The on-line finding aids for the Watkin University Archives at the Woodson website give a pretty good idea of what kinds of things we have, although there are still collections that don’t have a finding aid up on the web. There are collections for every president and provost, but not for every dean or vice-president, and what’s in these papers varies wildly. We also have a random assortment of things from faculty members, administrators, and departments. I spent months cleaning out the gym before its renovation, and we now have a fantastic collection on the history of athletics. There are, though, gaps in the collection, some large and some small. We have some records from the colleges, but, not surprisingly I suppose, these are erratic. There is a lot of material from the schools of engineering and natural science, far less from humanities and social sciences.

I’d have to say that it has been the Rice staff that has done the most to preserve our history. Department coordinators, secretaries, building tech guys, and FE&P employees have been–and continue to be–the guardians of old records, scientific instruments, and memorabilia. For a long time the Woodson was severely constrained by space limitations and couldn’t take much of this material into the collections. Since the construction of the Library Service Center out on South Main Street, however, we have the space to store the papers and other items that are historically valuable to the university. There is still quite a bit of stuff floating around out there–we just found over 50 boxes of papers on the 5th floor of Lovett Hall–and I am now constantly beating the bushes looking for it. I’ve found things in basements and attics, under bleachers and stairwells, and once even inside a wall. Alums and the children of alums bring things in on a fairly regular basis, including scrapbooks, photographs of campus, and correspondence. I even get phone calls from total strangers–an exterminator once called wanting to know if we’d be interested in some old china from Sammy’s that he’d found in an abandoned building. (Yes.)

So I’ll conclude with an appeal: if you have anything related to the history of Rice (or the history of Houston, which is also a focus of the Woodson’s collection) that you’d be willing to share with us, please let me know. I’m happy to come to you to take a look at it. I can’t design experiments to get more data on the history of Rice, I can only find more stuff. (This is why I get so excited when we stumble across a couple of boxes of financial records from the early 1900s.)

By the way, one thing we definitely don’t need is Campaniles. We have lots of Campaniles. Unless, of course, it’s a Campanile from 1970. Intact 1970 Campaniles are not easy to come by!

Another interesting thing has surfaced in the “Sundry Contracts” boxes, something that really made me stop and think. It’s a waiver, executed in 1933 by a former Rice employee.  He had worked for Tony Martino on the grounds crew and left after an injury. Here’s what’s interesting: he, his wife and their two children were living in “the little house on the Institute campus, near the mule stables.” This is the first I’ve ever heard of either a little house or any mule stables on the grounds. But of course it makes complete sense. There are dozens of photographs of mules (and horses) at work on campus. They are pulling wagons, mowers, plows, and other construction equipment in pictures dated from the earliest days of the Institute until at least the end of the 1930s. They had to have lived somewhere.

Attached to the waiver was a fascinating drawing. It’s a blueprint, so it’s bit difficult to read but I’ll post it anyway. (If you click on it, you’ll get a bigger version that’s much clearer.) It shows a pretty elaborate set of buildings for the care and housing of this livestock, including a horse barn with a loft, several mule sheds, watering areas, and a blacksmith shop. It’s an impressive set-up and I can only wonder how I’ve managed to miss its existence until just now.

Still to be determined: where the heck were these buildings?? How long did they stand? When did we last use mules? There isn’t a place I can just go to look this up, but I’ve already started scrutinizing pictures in a new way, thinking about these questions that hadn’t occurred to me until now.

The waiver, by the way, allowed the family to keep living in the Institute’s house even though he was no longer employed there. He fed and watered the mules in lieu of rent.

Rice’s first homecoming was held on Thanksgiving Day, 1919. Although in some respects it resembled a modern homecoming, the small size of the alumni body made it an altogether more intimate affair than what we see today. (In 1919, Rice had 147 graduates.) It also had a more serious, even at times somber, tone. The Great War had ended only the November before and Rice had not escaped its effects. Both faculty and students had enlisted and served in the military and the campus itself resembled a military camp for part of the war. Talk of the war and its aftermath dominated much of this reunion.

The celebration began with an academic procession in the morning, followed by a sermon in the quad by the Rev. Peter Sears, rector of Christ Episcopal Church. That afternoon, Rice delivered a comprehensive thrashing to the Arkansas football team, winning 40-7. (The 1919 season was a happy one for Rice. Under the first football coach and AD, Philip Arbuckle, the Owls went 8 and 1, losing only to Texas.)

In the evening the group reconvened for a seated dinner in the commons, which “fulfilled every expectation of what an ideal Thanksgiving feed should be.” Captain Baker served as toastmaster and each speaker talked of the war. Physics professor H.A. Wilson, who had served in the anti-submarine service, talked about the growing role of scientists in warfare. Stockton Axson of the English department described the humanitarian efforts, in particular the work of the Belgian Relief Commission, in easing the condition of Europe’s civilian population. German professor Lindsey Blayney, who had been a colonel in the American Expeditionary Forces, called for the nation to face its postwar problems as forthrightly as the AEF had faced its fight. Rice alums–both male and female–described the performance of Rice students in the field. In a discussion of “Religion at the Front,” another alum drew a sharp contrast between trading a promise of future piety for physical safety on the battlefront and coming to a real understanding of our place in the universe.

Finally,  after some brief remarks by President Lovett, the long day ended with a midnight bonfire. The reunion was considered a great success, and plans to make it a tradition were soon laid. This seems to have worked out pretty well.

In the archives, just like in life, one thing leads to another. As I’ve been trying to get a better understanding of the Heisman episode at Rice, I’ve been poking around in our voluminous collection of materials on athletics. (Much of this came out of the gym a few years ago before the renovation.) I still don’t have Heisman sorted out, but I did run across some surprising things that led me for a few hours down an altogether different trail. (This is an everyday experience, by the way. This is the perfect job for a magpie.)

While looking through Dr. Lovett’s files, I ran across something that made me laugh. I immediately scanned this letter from a hotel keeper in Sherman thinking it would make a funny little post about well-behaved Rice boys.

Then, for no real reason, I started to wonder about the game. The April 29, 1921 edition of the Thresher tells us that Rice lost, falling 0-3 to the Kangaroos of Austin College. The game was slowed by weather delays and the second half of the scheduled double-header was cancelled because of rain.

I checked the Woodson’s photo files to see if I could find a picture of these well-mannered lads, but there was only a picture of Eddie Dyer, who had been the losing pitcher in that game at Sherman. Curious about why he would have been singled out, I began leafing through the Thresher and quickly discovered that Dyer was something special. The week before he had thrown a no-hitter against Baylor and he was named to the SWC All-Conference team three years in a row, from 1919 to 1921.

Dyer’s career after he left Rice was really remarkable. He signed with the Cardinals in 1922 and pitched until he hurt his arm in 1927. He continued to play as an outfielder until 1933, but it was as a manger and baseball executive that he made his most important mark. Dyer was instrumental in helping Branch Rickey build baseball’s first real farm system and then managed the Cardinals to their 1946 World Series win over the Red Sox. He completed his Rice degree in 1936 and coached freshman football here (during baseball’s off-season) for several years. After retiring from baseball he had a very successful career as a businessman. He died in Houston in 1964 at the age of 64. (For a lot more on Dyer, see here.) By all accounts he was a fine man, intelligent, friendly and easy going, just the sort who would have drawn the praise of a small-town Texas innkeeper who had had his fill of obnoxious ballplayers.

As we get close to the end of the semester, it’s been quite busy in the archives. Students are trying to finish research papers and everyone else wants to wrap projects up before the rush of the holidays. Last week was particularly wild, but during a brief respite there was one very pleasant moment of serendipity. Not two hours after I put up the post about Zevi Salsburg, a gentleman came in looking for a copy of the operations manual for the R1 computer. He turned out to be Sigsby Rusk, a Rice physics Ph.D. who had become the head of the computer project in 1966. (Rusk was also the source of the photographs that are included in the short history of the Rice computer.) We had the manual he was interested in, as well as a couple of boxes of other documentation and some photos. I spent some thoroughly enjoyable time talking with him about the computer and the people involved with it and looking through some of the pictures.

It was all interesting, but the thing that really caught my attention was an accident–one of the photographs seemed to be out of place. Rather than a picture of the R1 or its crew, it shows Tom Bonner (in coat and tie) of the physics department standing near part of the van der Graaf accelerator that was so critical to mid-century Rice’s strength in physics. With him, bent over the apparatus, is a man that Mr. Rusk identified as Frans Vander Henst. I had heard of Vander Henst, often, but this was the first time I’d ever knowingly seen him.

Staff members, no matter how important their role, often completely disappear from the historical record. This is nearly true of Vander Henst. Unlike the faculty who worked in the department, only the smallest traces of him remain in the archives. Here’s everything I know: He came to Rice in it’s earliest days. He arrived in 1920 from Holland, where he had been highly trained as a scientific technician, and took charge of the physics shop. He retired 48 years later, having overseen the transition from relatively simple machinery to nuclear reactors. His name appears in the directory and we have a copy of his obituary. (He died in 1992 at the age of 94.) Most of the people who told me stories about him are now themselves gone, and there is only a vague memory of him on campus anymore. What is remembered is that he was kind of a joker. The only thing that gives any sense of what his importance may have been are the “thank yous” in the acknowledgment sections of a great many Ph.D. dissertations and scholarly articles.