Proctor and Gamble

Crest is made by Procter & Gamble. When I have a choice among this class of home care products, I consistently opt for P&G products - e.g., Tide laundry detergent.

Why I select P&G products goes back to 1968. But the whole story starts in 1891. Rice University was chartered in 1891 as the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art, based on a will from its founder, William Marsh Rice, though it did not open its doors to students until 1912.

The original charter specified free tuition and that the institute was for the “white inhabitants of the City of Houston and State of Texas”. My admission to Rice in 1964 was under this charter. My class was the last class to be tuition free and segregated.

The Rice Board of Trustees recognized that Rice could not continue to be segregated and hope to remain a top tier institution of higher learning. There were manifold reasons behind this decision and clearly access to federal funding played a part in the decision.

Rice University “broke” the will’s stipulations through legal means, with the Board of Trustees passing a resolution in 1964 to amend the charter and enable the admission of students without regard to race and to charge a modest tuition (the definition of modest can be scrutinized).

This was a formal process to challenge the founder’s original conditions, rather than a single event of “breaking” the will.

I hold those visionaries in high regard. Anyhow, my tuition free status continued except there was a hiccup. I was in a five year professional master degree program that granted a rather meaningless bachelor of arts degree in engineering at the four year mark and the meaningful masters degree at the five year mark.

There was some wrangling among the engineering department, the administration and the board with the result being that the tuition free status of people in the five year masters program continued via a special grant through the five years.

Meanwhile, I was chugglng along on my fifth year degree work while working about 25 hours a week at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center. The part time work supported my beautiful young wife and extraordinary daughter.

So here we were barely getting by and I think someone in the engineering department noticed. I think they went to the financial aid department and put me in for some financial help.

This resulted in my being named a Proctor and Gamble Scholar with an $800 stipend! This was amazing financial relief at this point in our married life. I never looked into whom I should be grateful - a real mark of my immaturity and selfishness at that time. Aside from the much needed and much appreciated cash,there was an additional side benefit. The P&G Scholarship liaison official visited Houston in the fall and spring semesters and took the Scholars and their spouses (if applicable) out for a great meal at a top notch restaurant.

Kathy and definitely enjoyed the experience. We had steaks and lobster at Ye Olde College Inn across South Main from the University. The restaurant eventually yielded its real estate to a parking garage.

At one of the meals the P&G person, who had marvelous people skills, made a self effacing comment. He had struggled to learn what a hyperbolic paraboloid was. Of course, I knew what it was. He explained that P&G was test marketing a new snack product in the shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid, packaged in a vacuum sealed can. He suggested we should watch for it in our local market. It was to be named Pringles!

So loyalty to P&G and paying back the scholarship motivates my choice in the domain of home care products.