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I'm Ralph Martin Novak, Jr. went by the name of Marty. Graduated in 1973 with a double major. History. Anthropology was in Lovett College as a uh freshman in 1969 I was at Lovett the year it opened, the uh, freshman were assigned through the normal procedures. Uh

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Typically by Tony Payne who handled assigning incoming students for all the colleges at that time. Uh I worked with her on that when I was a junior and senior with a part time job in her office, we would get all of the accepted freshmen, uh sheets.

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I would sit on the floor in the office, divide them up by major and then we would go through and we would start with a stack of, for example, uh science, engineering perspective majors and we would just do one per college. Here's one for Baker, here's

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one for Levitt, here's one for Wiess Will Rice work our way through and then we'd go to the next batch of majors. The idea being in that way, we would have a cross section of all the different majors at each of the different incoming classes for

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a college. Uh, didn't uh, treat the athletes any different. We spread them across the colleges in the same way in 1969 as they started that college, of course, while the freshmen were new to rice, the upper classman, the sophomores, juniors and seniors were all volunteers from

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the other colleges. Uh, which if you think about it is a little bit unusual group because anyone who say a junior or senior who wanted to leave their college to go to a new college was either hoping for a better newer room or else they, in

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most cases hadn't made a lot of connections with their own college. And so they were willing to leave often, uh for reasons unknown, sometimes because they were known as being difficult. And certainly the first year or two of Lubbock College was, uh, we were known to

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be a little bit unruly, uh, that worked itself out over the three or four years. I was there as we kept getting new classes of freshmen. But early on in Lovett's history, we had a motto attached to us by both people at Lovett and people at

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the other men's colleges. And the motto was the toilets are cleaner at Lovett. And this has to do with the fact that we faced main street and while main street didn't have as much traffic as it does. Now, we were still at the turn for ambulances

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and police going to the ben uh emergency room Charity Hospital and because of the uh drug use among certain members of the uh college community. At that time, the joke was that every time you heard a siren on main street, the drug users at Love's rushed

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to the bathroom to flush their drugs down the toilet. And so eventually the motto, I guess you'd call it a meme today was the toilets are cleaner at Lovett. The other big thing I remember or all the water balloon wars we had, uh, with Baker, with

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Weiss. Sid Richardson opened while I was an undergrad and, but it was difficult to have a water balloon war with Sid Richard Richardson because of their height. But most of the time we fought with Wiess and we had an advantage because we were six floors and

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they were up on the roof of what was their cafeteria lounge. The fights were always spontaneous and a stress reliever, which meant the biggest fights always occurred during dead week is people would shoot water balloons back and forth. The typical surgical tubing, uh, with a cup

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and water balloon. A, uh, there was one time though that, uh, guys got the idea. Love it. I'm filling a couple balloons with gasoline and then trying to fire bottle rockets across. Uh, word got around pretty quick and the master came up and asked us to

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please refrain from that now and in the future. Uh, one of the other things I remember which may seem a bit strange, but as I said, while main street was busy, it wasn't as busy. And so occasionally at twilight or the early evening, we could hear

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the lions at the zoo roaring, which was not so often that we became used to it. People would always uh comment on it when it was an evening. You could hear the lions roar, but it was kind of a, in a weird way, kind of a

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comforting sound. I spoke with one of the librarians here. Uh I mentioned that the Abbie Hoffman incident. So I'll talk about that briefly. Abbie Hoffman was in Houston. Uh There was part of the free speech, of course, those meetings get togethers tended to be pretty rambunctious

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and the rumor started spreading that Hoffman was going to come on to the Rice campus to deliver a talk. And so administration made a decision for that weekend to close the campus to people not affiliated with Rice. And to do that, they had to basically put

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people at each of the entrance ways, each of the street ways that entered into the campus. Uh each of the colleges, the men's colleges, I don't know, but I assume maybe at the women's colleges were asked to have volunteer schedule where uh students would check each

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car coming in. Of course, that everybody is worried about the potential uh for an incident involving that. So it's not a surprise that every entrance always had three or four. plainclothes, Houston police who were trying not to indicate they were police, but we knew they were.

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And often there was a, during the daytime there would be a uniformed police officer there. I served on one of those patrols and it essentially consisted of every time a car tried to enter the love parking lot, we stopped them. We asked them for identification and

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if they didn't have it, we politely told them to turn around and leave and we had no incidents during the couple of hours. I served on that on that patrol. The last memory, I guess I'll share tradition is that the Owl House used to be in

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the quadrangle between Wiess Baker and love it. I noticed yesterday walking around that it's gone and I'm assuming that for a variety of reasons, there's no longer a live, uh mo owl mascot on campus. I kind of and in some ways miss seeing a live owl.

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I do remember as freshman year we had, of course, the person who dressed up as Sammy and at football games, each of the men's colleges, the freshman group was required to provide freshmen who would do owl bowing to Sammy and a fiberglass replica of Sammy. We

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had little beanies with our group graduation year, 73 blue, gray and white. I still have mine. And so we would wear these beanies, uh, be down on the sidelines and participate in a bing for 15 or 20 minutes. Before we would be rotated out to another

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group of freshmen. The last memory I'll recall is just the fact that every faculty member tenured or not, department chair or not was required to teach classes. And so when I look back at the, uh, people who taught the class, you know, I had Harold Hyman

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for freshman American history and Katherine Fischer Drew for a sophomore medieval history. And then I was a Greco Roman history major as far as you could be. I took lots of greco-roman courses and had Floyd Seward Lear as a professor there, Lear was quite old. He

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was Emeritus when I, uh, first took him as a junior, I believe. And we always joked, he taught one class a semester and it was always at 9 a.m. Monday, Wednesday Friday. And then he did his office hours, uh, immediately hour after and then he was

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gone. Actually, I wonder if the class was 8 to 9 every Monday, Wednesday Friday. I think the class was now thinking about it. I think the class was 8 to 9 every Monday, Wednesday Friday and then his office hour and then we went home and the

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six or seven of us who were routine and in his classes always regretted he wasn't a late sleeper.