I don’t know who the handsome subject of this photograph is, but the goofball in the back is none other than our friend Bessie Smith. She was really something.

Bonus: Paw prints near the Shepherd School!

Here’s this week’s video, featuring the estimable Dr. Keith Cooper discussing the history of the Rice University Mace.

There’s been a lot of talk around here in the last few weeks about commencement, academic processions and the use of landscaping to create the quad where it all takes place. As I’ve been working all this out I’ve frequently found myself staring quite hard at photos I’ve seen many times before, searching for clues to questions I only recently became aware of. One of these pictures turned out to be particularly arresting, although it was taken so early that it sheds no light at all on on any commencement issues. It says on the back that it was taken in 1912 and I’m totally convinced that that’s right. It shows a campus that’s still absolutely raw. I looked at it for a long time, puzzling over the two little structures at the end of the newly planted hedges. It was only after I scanned it and blew it up that I realized how much is going on here. Click on it to zoom in, then click again to expand it.

There’s an incredible amount of action in this image–and nobody here stopped to pose for the picture so much of it is blurry. I hardly know where to begin so I’ll  just point out a couple of things and let you enjoy it yourself. First, on the left side you can see a bit of smoke, maybe from burning trash, and there are a couple of horses (not mules!) over there too. More interesting to me is the sawhorse perched on top of the manhole cover right where the gravel walk meets the road across the quad.

The right side is even busier–several wagons are moving and there’s a team further out that’s kind of fuzzy but looks to be plowing right where Anderson Hall is now. Way off towards the spot where the RMC is today you can see quite clearly an entire crew working on the road. My vote for the best thing in the picture, though, goes to the small, lone pine tree that you can see if you look to the right of that crew.

So what do you think those two little structures are for?

Getting ready for commencement, of course, means more than just putting up the platform. One of the other things I enjoy every year is the general sprucing up of the campus. On the one hand this is just good maintenance policy, but on the other all the hustle and bustle really adds to the feeling that what is about to happen is a Big Deal. I admit that I may be desperate for excitement but I think it creates a charming and fun atmosphere. And thus it has always been. Here’s a picture from the commencement spruce up of 1927–they’re smoothing the gravel drive for the visitors who will soon flood the scene:

And this morning these genial fellows were carefully putting mulch around the hedges, working very hard in the already hot sun:

To add to the festive atmosphere on the quad, a tour group came through, snapping pictures of me snapping pictures of them:

Bonus: So when I walked out the back door of the Shepherd School on my way in this morning, I saw this:

A closer look reveals that they are Rubbermaid trash cans.

My day today was totally out of control, but I still have something delicious for you.

The topic of the hedges has come up repeatedly for me in recent days, most recently in the context of commencement. The closed hedges of early decades meant that there was no place to put the growing audience–this is why commencement was moved to the Chemistry Building in the mid-1930s.

Here’s the problem:

So why not open up the hedges? Because if you need a quad and you only have two buildings, something else needs to do the work. Look at this, taken by Maxwell Reade in 1938–they’ve made a quad with only two buildings on it:

But wait, there’s more! While the hedges did the heavy lifting in the middle of the campus, it was trees that were used to shape the rest of an undifferentiated piece of ranch land. Look at this and you can see why Rice’s architect, Ralph Adams Cram, called it “a level and stupid site.” It’s all the same:

The photo above was taken in 1921, but by the 1930s (below) you can clearly see that as the rows of trees planted in the early years began to mature, the empty landscape was being beautifully carved into a series of specific places. This is one of the main reasons for my fascination with the trees.

Bonus: Did you notice the sprinklers in the last picture? Sprinkler technology has come some ways since then.

And finally: I don’t do a lot of posting of other people’s stuff, but this is an important thing. Please come if you can, or send a note.

You can RSVP at https://oedk.wufoo.com/forms/farewell-to-dr-paul-pfeiffer/. Click here to send memories or photos for the remembrance book:pfeiffer_guestbook@rice.edu 

I think it’s happy for two reasons. First, because preparations for commencement means that it’s almost summer! Everyone loves summer. But beneath that, it’s also happy because it gives us assurance of continuity. That’s what these rituals are for, at least in part, and especially so for those of us who remain inside the universities after the graduates go out into the wider world.

Rice has held commencement in several places over the years and the construction and orientation of the platform has changed repeatedly. Some of the earlier sites could never be used again because the transformation of the campus has been so great. But through it all the rhythm of the semesters stays the same. If I reckon correctly, this was my 64th.

I found these two shots in the scrapbook of George Wheeler, the early biology student I’ve written about before. They were taken during commencement setup in 1917:

And here’s one from 1952, when what we now call Founder’s Court was still a parking lot:

One more picture from Freshman Week 1970. This is a really nice image. I only wish I knew who they were calling.

Bonus: I got caught in the rain today, and I am still wet right now!

As Freshman Week 1970 nears it’s end (again), I’m reminded that freshmen have a lot of  people to meet. I’ve heard nice stories of students finding people who would become their lifelong friends or even future spouses at freshman mixers, but all I can recall about those events is a vague feeling of anxiety and homesickness. These pictures look happier than that, but there must have been some sweaty palms somewhere.

I believe I see Ron Sass in this first one, so this must be a reception or dinner event of some sort at Hanszen. There are both students and adults milling around–I assume the adults are associates, but I’m not sure:

This one looks like a strictly student function and if I’m not mistaken it must have been a casino night. Look how nicely everyone is dressed!

It’s not all fun and games, though. Just as in real life, everyone has to visit the cashier eventually:

Reasonably enough, one of the main points of Freshman Week seems to have been the giving and receiving of advice and orientation. I’m not completely certain, but common sense would tell you that it must have revolved around course selection and other academic matters, with a smattering of campus social lowdown. It looks like it was handled in the colleges. I sometimes get the colleges mixed up–I don’t like to go in them and these pictures were taken over 40 years ago–but I think the one to the left was taken at Brown. Which must mean that this one is in Jones:

Or vice versa.

Even more interesting are these next two. Here are the fellows at Baker, neatly dressed and wearing their beanies under the paternal gaze of Captain Baker:

Last class to be issued beanies? I'm not sure, but I think its the latest I've seen.

While over at Will Rice things were a lot more loosey-goosey. These guys could have benefitted from a portrait of Will Rice staring down at them:

Bonus: It was a glorious day on campus today: warm, sunny and every Italian Cypress standing straight up.

At some point everyone had to go get their picture taken for their identification card. This operation took place in the RMC and by the look of it, it was not anything like the painful process that one undergoes at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Everyone seems to be having a good time, including the photographer. (I especially like pictures of people who are taking pictures.)

Bonus: Here’s Alex Dessler, the founding chair of the Space Science department, taking a picture of me in the Woodson a couple of weeks ago. We had a really nice visit.

Last Friday I found an entire folder of pictures taken during Freshman Week in 1970. (I’d never seen them before, which I suspect is because they were filed rather unhelpfully under “Students.”) They’re really very good, I think. At least they evoked real feeling for me–I see them and clearly recall how frightened, lonely and excited I was when I left home for the first time to go to school, how disjointed the world was for a few weeks. It’s too hard to pull out just one or two pictures from this batch, so I’ve decided to declare this entire week “Freshman Week, 1970: The Reprise.” The images seem to track the new students from arrival through the course of the week, so I’ll try to follow along as best I can (bearing in mind that sometimes I have to guess what’s going on.)

First we see them moving in:

I think this next one was taken in Will Rice. I had no idea that students were allowed to paint their own rooms and I assume that they no longer can, but I honestly don’t know:

And finally, a little time for socializing in the RMC:

Tomorrow we’ll get our id cards.

Bonus: My granddaughter came to the Woodson with me today. She was so eager to see the photo files that we couldn’t keep her in her stroller!

Here’s the latest video, this time about the Rice Engineering Show. I admit I get a kick out of it: I was feeling quite frazzled when Brandon came over to shoot, but he coaxed me through it by making me laugh. Some might say I’m becoming a diva. They’d better not let me hear them, though.

Bonus: Imagine my surprise when I walked into the Woodson and was immediately confronted with the stern visage of General Pershing!

He must have found out that they’re putting up a plaque by that pecan tree he planted.

Extra bonus: This morning a commenter sent a link to this piece about Ruby South Lowry (’19), who I showed a few days ago with a Biology Department rabbit. If you have a minute, please go read it. A simply written story about a woman of fundamental human decency, it brought tears to my eyes.

It’s unlabeled. My guess is he’s an engineer and I know mid-70s hair when I see it.

One of the things I enjoy most about my work is seeing  people I know today as they were years before. Sometimes this is funny–hair styles, strange clothing, etc.–but other times the remarkable thing is how much they have stayed the same. I was stopped cold by this phenomenon the other day.

Back in the 1930s and ’40s The Owl magazine used to run a regular feature called “In The Spotlight.” It highlighted several students each issue, explaining why they were in the spotlight and giving a little personal snapshot. I was truly delighted to find this one.

I felt a shock of recognition when I read the first line. Both Demaris (’42) and her husband Hank Hudspeth (’40) have spent their lives willing to do the hard work for Rice without thought of recognition. Listing their contributions would be more work than I can bite off right now, but I remember especially Demaris’s years spent helping foreign students learn English. It’s heartening (but not surprising) to see that she’s always been the same fine person.

Bonus: Shepherd School bunny. See it hiding there just left of the bush? They’re everywhere, I tell you, and they seem to be getting quite large.

Someone suggested in the comments that the other side of the door with the two foot drop might have another two foot drop, thus actually making some sort of sense. That’s pretty close! It turns out to be home to a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging system used by all the members of the Gulf Coast Consortium, a teaching and research collaborative formed in 2001 by Rice, the Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

It’s a huge, heavy machine and back in 2004 they had to use a big crane to lower it into the space through the roof. Here’s a picture stolen from the Biochemistry and Cell Biology web site–if you look closely at the top of the photo, you can see the bottom of the door up in the middle of the wall.

The other day I needed a photo of the back side of the Chemistry Building for someone and I discovered that I couldn’t find one. After some thought, I realized that I may never have actually seen one. So I wandered over to take some pictures myself and discovered this door I’d never noticed:

Whoa! That’s quite a drop off, a couple of feet anyway.

On further investigation, the sign confirms this:

Maybe it’s just me, but it strikes me that the sign might be on the wrong side of the door.

Quite a while ago I ran across this note from J.T. McCants, the long time bursar, to Tony Martino, Rice’s gardener. I got a pretty big kick out of it so I saved it for no particular reason:

It made me laugh because it perfectly captures a feeling I’ve had more than once since I moved to Houston: I’ve gotten so used to most of trees keeping their leaves all year that it’s possible to panic a little when the one in our front yard starts to shed them.

But I somehow got to thinking about this today while I was walking around campus. What specific trees was he talking about? I started looking and it didn’t make sense. Here’s what I saw last winter in between the old and the new dormitories:

Those look like live oaks to me and they most certainly don’t lose their leaves in the fall. Hmmmm. So I went to the pictures and by pure chance I found an early 1930s aerial shot that was taken during the winter.

If you zoom in you can see that the trees in that spot are bare. And so are the trees along the road on the other side of the dorms–those are still cedar elms and they definitely still drop their leaves every winter. So they must have replaced cedar elms with live oaks at some point.

When? I don’t know. But it had to have been well before the late 1950s when Joseph Davies took this picture:

This was a most unexpected development. There is much to ponder.

Bonus: There has been quite a bit of new tree planting going on recently and it’s been a pleasure to see them go in. I’ve made it my mission to ensure that any future historian who wonders about the trees will have a way to figure it all out.

A week or so ago I gave a talk about early women’s athletics at Rice. This turned out to be an enormously challenging topic. There was almost nothing that could be easily found– certainly there was no file anywhere labeled “Girls Sports”–and so every bit of information had to be discovered one thing at a time. I may have startled my audience a bit when I admitted that there was far more I didn’t know about it than I did. Mostly what I did know was about tennis–the Girl’s Tennis Club was one of the earliest organizations on campus and it managed to sustain itself for decades on not much more than enthusiasm. Here they are in 1916:

There was also a little bit about golf–not in any way official, but rather a sport that the girls participated in privately. I found this in a Rice scrapbook from the late teens. It was probably taken at the old Houston Country Club as Hermann Park golf course didn’t open until the 1920s:

In the course of my talk I indulged in some speculation: it seemed to me that the early Rice women must have been engaging in other athletic pursuits off campus. My best guess was that they probably were swimming too, most likely at the Y. Well, today I ran across a 1919 clipping in a different scrapbook that shines some light on this and also makes clear that the young women most definitely wanted more chances for participation in athletics. It turns out I was pretty close:

But South End Junior High? What the heck is that? It turns out to be the place that later becomes San Jacinto High School, quite close to the Rice campus.

Bonus: The Biology Department used to raise rabbits on campus. I’ve seen glimpses of rabbit hutches here and there in old scrapbooks, although I couldn’t find one this afternoon. I did, though, stumble across a picture of a member of the class of 1919, Ruby Belle South, holding one of those rabbits. That might be a corner of a hutch behind her.

At least, I think it’s some kind of computer. The label on the photo says “1950 IBM Business Show, Houston, Texas.” Whatever it is, it seemed to catch the attention of President Houston (facing the camera). There’s a pretty thick file in his papers called “IBM machine,” although I haven’t had time to look at it yet.

Bessie Smith Update: I ran across this on Friday while looking through the 1919-20 Threshers. After re-reading a bunch of Campaniles, I’ve come to understand that Bessie Smith took many of the images that we have in the archives from the late teens and early twenties.

Bonus: I’ve seen an unusually large number of rabbits on campus recently. I hope they’re not up to something.

There are a lot of people who have no idea that for many years commencement was held in front of the Chemistry Building. I’ve never seen any discussion of this change on paper but I’m pretty sure I know why they did it. Here’s a photo of the commencement ceremony in 1931:

See the problem? It’s starting to get really crowded–the audience stretches along the entire back side of the Administration Building. But because the hedges are totally closed there isn’t anywhere else to put more people. I don’t know if it never occurred to them to open the hedges or if they were just totally committed to that particular arrangement. In any case, something needed to be done. The front side of the building was an unsuitable parking lot, but the front of Chemistry was wide open. Here’s a picture (taken by our old friend Maxwell O. Reade) of the setup for the 1938 commencement that shows what I mean:

There were no hedges and, unlike the same spot today, no trees in the way. And look at the size of the canopy compared to the one in the first shot. It’s enormous! And shade was really important when they regularly held commencement in early to mid-June. The first time they did it was in 1935 and here’s what it looked like underneath:

Just for fun, here’s the stand, complete with a gigantic Texas flag and a smaller Rice flag on the podium:

Standing, left to right: William Ward Watkin, Hubert Bray, Harry Weiser, Edgar O. Lovett at the podium. Nice group.

And speaking of processions, the first time I ever opened this file the first thing I saw was this, which really threw me for a loop:

That’s just crazy.

Bonus: Here’s Reade’s picture of the hedges, taken, I think at the same time. I wish I could see how they got in there to cut the grass.