Sophomore Year

My second year at Rice was a step up into more engineering courses and fewer liberal arts courses. Math was Advanced Analysis, really just a more advanced calculus course,

Logic - in the Philosophy Department, Advanced Physics, Engineering Mechanics, Engineering Computational Lab and German.

School was harder this second year. Commuting to campus was worse than I had imagined. Squabbles with roommates led to a dissolution of the 4 way apartment. The second semester Steve Treadwell and I moved to a one bedroom on Swanson Street (across the street from the Cecil street apartment).

I liked my German class - a lot because the prof, Doug Milburn was a really good teacher. There was a German club, Eulenspiegel - Owl Mirror - that had beer nights with German singing.

The Engineering computational lab started me on my lifelong career in computing. E. C. Holt was the teacher. Our computer was an IBM 1620.

This was the computer for the undergraduates to use as we learned FORTRAN - FORmula TRANslator. This computer occupied a 20 X 30 room in the Abecrombie Materials Science Building. The computer ingested Hollerith Cards and ejected Hollerith Cards.

The cards were prepared on and IBM 029 Card punch console. I think there were only two or three of these, so they were a bottleneck.

Typically we would use a deck of cards to load the FORTRAN compiler. The compiler would process our FORTRAN programs from our deck of cards and produce a deck of cards with the object code. Then we would load a deck of cards to enable the the object loader which would, in turn, load and execute our object cards. Our output would come out on fresh cards which we ran through a tablulator to get a printout of our results.

Quite a process!

Holt started the first class by passing out the IBM 1620 FORTRAN manual and assigning us our first program. Solve the Quadratic equation. The manual was worthless for a beginning FORTRAN student. Some of the smarter guys (does not include me) bought the McCracken FORTRAN book. That book really helped and I eventually borrowed a copy and became mildly proficient in FORTRAN. Over the year we did about one program a month - now that would be one per week.

In the fall semester I dated Brenda Tix, (now Brenda Hayes).

One of my fellow trumpet players in the band was Nelson Hatt. He was beyond incredible as a talented musician. He was in the class of ’66 and worked part time at the Houston Speech and Hearing Center. Since he was departing to go to the University of Pittsburgh to work on an advanced degree in psychology, he recommended me to Dr. James Jerger, his boss and the director of the research unit at Houston Speech and Hearing Center, as his replacement.

Backing up a little, I had my ’55 Ford with me in Houston for the entire sophomore year. It was barely reliable and I was hot for a new car - preferably a V8 convertible. My folks showed up with this simple four door, 180 slant six, blue, bottom of the line car.

This is the only photo I have of the Valiant.

They drove away in the Ford and disposed of it (I never asked what they did with it).

This car was brand new and it served me well and then served Kathy and me in our first couple of years of marriage. It was not air conditioned. I have photos of Kathy sweating in the front seat. This was the car we had when Britany was a baby. We took her to the drive in movies and warmed her bottle on the exhaust manifold. We drove this car to St. Louis at least once.

Also at the end of my sophomore year, two of my band friends, Craig Zeien (trombone) and Jim Roberts (trumpet) approached Steve and me to join them in renting a house near Rice. Sounded like a good idea so we jumped at the chance. We rented a three bedroom, unairconditioned bungalow at 1303 Branard.

See how nicely I kept my room!

Today the house belongs to the University of Saint Thomas and is directly across the street from the Rothko Chapel and down the street from the Menil Collection. At the time it was just a relatively run down house in a fading neighborhood.

The photo is from 2017 and it looks a lot better than it did in 1966. We paid $200/month rent which worked out to $50 each - not bad. Steve and I each had our own bedrooms while Craig and Jim shared one.

There was a single parent family next door. I forget the mom’s name, but she worked at Rice. She had two teenagers, a boy and a girl and a preteen girl named Laura. We sort of adopted the family and did odd jobs for them, mostly keeping her car running.

That summer I bought a Mamiya Sekor 500 DTL SLR camera, again ‘on time’. This really revived my photographic hobby.

I keep mentioning Steve Treadwell. He is a really smart guy and we were roommates in the Cecil apartment, the Swanson apartment, the Branard house and the Bartlett apartment (poverty pocket). He was gracious enough to give up his part of the Bartlett lease so that Mrs. Kathy Golden could move in.

This is Steve in the Branard house.

One final stupid purchase ‘on time’ that I made in the fall of 1967 was a motorcycle - a dornocycle. A Suzuki X6 Hustler, 250 cc two cycle with a six speed transmission that would do wheelies in both first and second. Fun and tremendously dangerous.

The photo shows Dan Crane and me at the Rice Beer Bike Race in 1967

Me in this period.