Rice History Corner

I was lounging around my office at home this afternoon, sipping some coffee and leafing through the 1924 Campanile just for the fun of it. I’ve spent quite bit of time with this  book but I caught something today that I’d never noticed before. Tucked inside are several charming sketches by John Clark Tidden, a member of the early art and architecture faculty, who I’ve written about here. Here’s the Chemistry Building under construction:

This next one is my favorite. I had to think for a minute but it’s the door that goes down to the basement of the Administration Building, just inside the Sallyport:

For comparison:

This one is easy but it contains some exotic vegetation:

And finally a mysterious figure. This likely meant something in 1924 but whatever it was it’s long gone:

Bonus: I made a quick trip to the Woodson today and came home with another box of Tsanoff letters to organize.

It really was an auspicious moment when the Rice Institute hired Coach Jess Neely away from Clemson on January 11, 1940. I can’t help but wonder why Neely took the job, which didn’t obviously look like good one, but here he is with J.T. McCants, then chairman of the powerful Committee on Outdoor Sports, having agreed to take over a struggling program:

In the way of things back then they held a dinner for Neely and the assistants he brought with him. It was held on February 7th in the Rice Hotel ballroom and of course Dr. Lovett spoke on this occasion. To modern ears it might sound simply corny but I’m not embarrassed to say that I find comfort in the order of it. We begin with the expected joke and end with the expected welcome:

Bonus: A colleague unearthed a relic–a kit distributed across campus during an earlier, less serious epidemic, containing hand sanitizers, wipes, and lozenges.

Note: I’m more or less at home for an undetermined amount of time. I plan to keep writing here but just be warned that it could get a little weird.

This is the best thing I’ve seen in a long time, actually faith restoring. I think they were all back to clean out their dorm rooms and just organized themselves. Many thanks to Grungy for the pictures.

Bonus: They drew a small but influential crowd.

A bad case of the flu in February, 1931 kept French professor Marcel Moraud in Paris longer than anticipated:

But today things got real with the coronavirus at Rice. They announced that the rest of the semester will be done online and with some carefully delineated exceptions all the students need to be out of the dorms by March 25. We in the Woodson, though, continue to soldier on, as is the way of hardcore archivists everywhere.

But some things are different even in the library. Here I am taking a picture of the new restrictions on the use of Fondren the are now posted on the front door:

The drinking fountains are off limits too:

Bonus: Still pretty outside.

One of my  colleagues in the Woodson alerted me to this today. She found a full set of drawings for a 25 foot yawl, a two masted sail boat, for the Rice Institute. I can’t even begin to suggest an explanation for this.

Sorry about the reflection of the overhead lights. As you can see this was the second time in the last few weeks that I’ve had to use the glass sheets to hold something down flat.

Bonus: This disinfecting business has gone too far.

Sometimes it’s the mundane things that prove to be the most mysterious. One of the things that we never stop to think about is the campus mail–you put it in one of those envelopes and someone takes it where you need it to go, later on someone drops those envelopes off in your box. But when you stop to question how we reached this pleasant state of affairs things get very murky. Over the years I’ve come upon only a few hints at how campus mail worked in the past, here and here, but recently I stumbled upon a turning point in the system.

This memo from the bursar’s office was in the papers of the Committee on University Welfare, a standing committee of some real power that dealt more or less with whatever needed fixing, both large and small. The handwriting at the top looks to be Pitzer’s and the message looks like the genesis of those envelopes:

And there’s more–a schedule of morning and afternoon service, with all material deviation to be reported!

The timing of the adoption of this more structured system makes a lot of sense. The 1960s at Rice were a time of rapid modernization and a growing sophistication of which regularized mail service is just one tiny aspect. More important changes, like the institution of tenure, happened at about the same time.

Bonus: It was picture perfect on campus late this morning but there were very few people around to see it.

It was established in 1971, located out in that old shack by the track stadium that seems to have housed everything from an art studio to the original Black Student Union. We have only a couple of images of it, not especially surprising given how infrequently that general area has been photographed. Here’s one of Leighton Read ’73 speaking at its opening in March, 1973:

Last week loyal reader and well known Rice history nut Mike Ross ’70 ’74 discovered two more pictures of the center, both in color, featuring none other than Mike Ross himself caught in the act of adding recyclables to the bins outside:

It didn’t take much effort to turn up this gently skeptical article in the Houston Post, its author a bit bemused at the peculiar ways of the Rice campus:

Bonus: With classes cancelled this week because of coronavirus precautions it was pretty quiet on campus today, but I did spot roughly forty or so robins milling around in front of Allen Center this afternoon. Spring can’t be far behind.

Back when men were men and shorts were short. Really short.

Looks like mid-60s to me. But where was all that water coming from?

Bonus: Lots more Tsanoff letters. Brace yourselves.

That was one of the greetings that Radoslav Tsanoff passed on to his daughter Katherine in yesterday’s letter. Mr. Glascock was Clyde Chew Glascock, who taught modern languages (German and Spanish) at the Rice Institute beginning in 1914. Here he is in a photograph taken at the corner where the Physics Building meets the Administration Building. It’s undated but I’d put in the very late teens (that could be part of the Community House in the far background):

Dr. Clyde Chew Glascock, Modern Languages, Rice Institute

Glasscock was a Hopkins Ph.D. who had taught at Yale before arriving in Houston. He stayed at Rice until 1923 and had taken a job at the University of Texas not long before Tsanoff showed up there that summer. They were very well acquainted and Tsanoff speaks of him often in his letters home. Glascock’s experience at Rice wasn’t an unusual one for a foreign language professor here in the early days. In a nutshell the problem was that anyone who was good enough for Rice to want was often too good to stay in a program that offered no chance to work with advanced students. Glascock spent the rest of his career in Austin, focusing his scholarship on folk lore. (Fun Fact: Glascock was president of the Texas Folklore Society twice, in 1915 and 1921. I was surprised to discover that Radoslav Tsanoff also held that office in 1938.)

Bonus: A reader suggests this explanation for Hackerman’s two phones. This makes sense to me.

1 is no doubt an extension of the overall University number JA8-4141 for internal calls and switchboard transfers.

2. The second is probably a direct Southwestern Bell unlisted outside line (number given only to a short list of family and close friends and the board chair) — plus much easier to make long distance calls thru 2nd line than thru the internal budget billing code number hassle for every LD call.

Just speculation but the dorm room for the Baker College President and his roommates had two phones for exactly those reasons.

Extra Bonus: I missed Go Texan Day but a loyal reader sends a pic of Willy dressed properly for the occasion.

Over the last few months I’ve been slowly reading my way through the correspondence between Radoslav and Corinne Tsanoff from the mid-1920s, just on the odd chance that a needle I’ve been looking for might be found in that particular haystack. I think it probably isn’t but my gratitude that this collection somehow survived and wound up in the Woodson has grown immensely. It is my great privilege to have such an intimate acquaintance with these wonderful people, to see first-hand their intellectual curiosity, their respect for each other and for their children, and the gentle tenderness that permeates every line of this correspondence. In legible handwriting no less.

Tsanoff spent the summer of 1925 at the University of Texas, a hot, dusty six-hour train trip from Houston. His arrival was noted in the Daily Texan:

(Ten bonus points for spotting the error.)

He wrote his wife every day during the course of his absence, and she him. If a letter somehow failed to appear one day, two arrived the next. They are warm and convivial, detailing Tsanoff’s daily routine and commenting on the news from home.

His days passed in simple and regular fashion, much of it familiar to academics today: classes in the morning, study in the afternoon, writing in the evening. What I found most interesting, though, were the things that have changed. With no electronic entertainment nearly all his leisure time was spent with . . . people. He ate dinner at the homes of colleagues, sat on front porches in the evenings chatting and hoping to catch a breeze, swam with friends every hot afternoon at Barton Springs or Deep Eddy.

Back in Houston part of the summer was dominated by a single event. The Tsanoff’s older daughter, Nevenna, was playing barefoot in the yard and stepped on a needle. This set in motion a long series of visits to doctors and what seemed to me to be nearly obsessive attention in the correspondence. Then I understood. There were no antibiotics yet.

I chose this letter for today because it was sitting on the top of the pile on my desk but really, they’re all much like this one:

Bonus: He wrote both daughters every day too. This one to Katherine describes his first glimpse of something now commonplace, someone floating in an inner tube.

Here are the girls during that summer. Nevenna is on the right, Katherine on the left.