Rice - Background

The Rice Institute was established in Houston based on a bequest from William Marsh Rice. There is a tremendously interesting backstory on Willie’s will and his murder and the efforts to make sure the money went to the establishment of the Institute. Look it up. (The Murder of William Marsh Rice by Spellman)

My first encounter with Rice was on a Cub Scout field trip to Houston from Beaumont. Our cub pack rode the train from Beaumont to Houston and then took a bus south on Main Street enroute to the Herman Park Zoo.

We got off the bus near the main gate to Rice and I asked the den mother what was inside the gate. Her answer was something like, ‘That’s Rice Institute where the really smart boys and girls go.’ My response was, ‘Oh, cool, I’ll go there.’ Her response: ‘you are probably not smart enough.’ I guess I showed her.

In my family there was no question of whether the three kids were going to college; the question was which college.

Neither mom nor dad had gotten a degree and they experienced the holdbacks in opportunity for those folks without degrees.

I was interested in the service academies. There were a series of youth novels about guys who went to West Point, Annapolis and the nascent Air Force Academy. These were gungho books probably commissioned to drum up enthusiasm for the service academies. I really had no thought about what happened after the academy experience, just that the academies were very competitive and provided a great education.

The academies also emphasized physical prowess and that sort of scared me off. I have never had great sports skills and my hand-eye coordination is less than perfect. As a hard core nerd, I was also interested in the science-Brain schools: MIT, Cal-Tech, Berkeley, Rice. By this time Rice Institute had become Rice University.

When I came down to it, Rice won out in my mind and I applied.

Two of my older classmates attended Rice: Charlie Helpinstill (Now known as the musician Ezra Charles) and Homer Walker. Both fellow band nerds. I got to spend a weekend at Rice visiting Charlie in the spring of my senior year.

Probably my best friend in high school was Daniel Patrick Sullivan - Pat. He and I were neck and neck for the best grades and we loved science and math.

At French High School, there was a test given to determine class ranking. I came out valedictorian, Patrick was salutatorian and Judy Walker was high ranking girl (she was Homer Walker’s younger sister). Pat also applied to Rice and we both received our acceptance letters in late March or early April of 1964.

Rice is organized about the College System similar to Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. There are no fraternities (other than the honor fraternities) at Rice and everyone is assigned to a college. Each college has an on campus dorm and dining facility. Par and I were assigned to Wiess (the pronunciation is not German, but rhymes with Rice.)

I was doing a little organizing of the ‘stuff’ in my desk and I stumbled across my copy of The Student Handbook of Rice University. This is relatively unique for me since I am close to zero on the ‘packrat’ scale.

I left Beaumont for the big city of Houston in 1964 to matriculate (25 cent word) at Rice University. The freshman class of 1968 showed up a week early for Freshman Week and along with our beanies and roommates we received our Handbooks.

The class of ’68 was unique in that we were the last class to matriculate (wow - twice in a few sentences) under the ‘original will’. Rice was established based on the will of William Marsh Rice, a businessman who made his fortune in Texas and who was assassinated by his valet in 1900 (another great story here - google it).

His will set up Rice as an institute of higher learning and the endowment was such that the students who were admitted to Rice attended tuition free. An unfortunate provision of the will was that Rice was segregated.

In 1964 a very bright board of governors went to court and ‘broke the will’ to eliminate the segregation policy (yeah) and to begin to charge tuition (yaarrgghhh.) Anyhow my fellow classmates and I were the last class to receive a top notch education from Rice without being burdened with tuition. In 1965 the color barrier became porous and the student body began its journey to the diversity seen on campus today.

The student handbook has a map in the center that represented the campus at that time. Wow! What a difference. While the ‘quad’ in ’64 was almost what it is today, the rest of the campus has changed dramatically.

You can locate Wiess College by locating the T-intersecton where the road from the upper right intersects the road heading out to the upper left. The College was like a 50’s motel and it is gone now replaced by a high rise to the south.

The big open space at the top of the map is almost completely full of buildings. This is a more current version of the campus. The arrow from 10 crosses an empty field where the old Wiess College was.

Due north of where Wiess was is the Rice Memorial Center where Kathy and I were married.