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Hello, Dr. Byrd. Professor McDaniel, good afternoon. Is it a, it's straight-up noon by my, by my clock. We're gonna call it...

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Good, good noon. Yes, good noon. Good noon. Good to see you today. You're coming to us from a, it looks like an unmarked, undisclosed location there.

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Yes. If I, if I sound more curious than usual, it is because I am at the Moody Center for the Arts, because we have a big conference here called Bound Away, concerning slavery and the slave trade. Rice is the new home for the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database.

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And I have to, or I have the honor of, welcoming the participants of that conference at 1:00, and it is the only way I could kind of help guarantee that I could both be here for this and do that. And the ceilings here are, I don't know, 25 feet tall, which explains the echo.

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Well, that's a good reason. That's a good reason, because I'm very excited about that conference. But because it is starting at 1, we wanna let our audience know that our doc talk today will probably be a little shorter than usual, will be a little shorter than usual,

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and by that, we don't just mean that we'll end on time. We're gonna, we're gonna stop our discussion probably around 12:30 so that, so that I can get over to join you there at the Moody Center for the opening of this, this conference. I know that Rice News did a great writeup of the conference.

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I don't know if you have that handy, but it would be great to share with our audience. I'm going to get a hold of it. I'll send the details of the conference as well, because people would have time to get here for later this afternoon, and then there are some sessions tomorrow at the

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Museum of Fine Arts. And one of the things I'm most excited about for this conference, and I know you are too, is that it also is going to feature some student researchers, and two of them, I know for certain, are history majors.

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Indeed. And I'm looking forward to hearing their presentations as well. It's great to see all of the various projects they've been working on outside of our classes, and I hope that, that some of our audience will be able to make it over to the Moody Center today or tomorrow for some of those events or catch the recaps later.

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So because we're gonna be finishing early, early today, and because this is our last doc talk of the semester, it's the last day of classes today for the fall semester, so we're gonna take a break along with the rest of our, our colleagues and students over the winter break before we come back.

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So we'll spend about 30 minutes, and before we leave this semester, I wanted to revisit a topic that we've talked about a couple of times on doc talks this fall, but let me start by sharing my screen, and show you the letter that I want to talk about today, but that I'm not going to talk about for a while, but I'm just gonna show it

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to you. Are you able to see my screen there? I have to come in a little. I have to come in pretty close. I will, I will zoom in on this letter in...

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Okay. I can see your screen. But what I'm looking at here is a brown piece of paper, typescript, that has typed text on it, as well as it looks like the, the marks of some pencil, perhaps, that's left from having written on another piece of paper on top of this piece of paper.

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And it's dated December 21st, 1918, and this letter comes from the Woodson Research Center in the William Ward Watkin Papers. And I know that our audience will recognize the name of William Ward Watkin, and I know Dr. Byrd that you know as well from all of the work that we did in our update this

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summer on the Founder's Memorial, that, that our readers would have become familiar there with William Ward Watkin as well, because he was an architecture professor here at Rice, and also a key member of the team that designed the campus plan and many of the buildings that are found on campus to this day.

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So by, in a few minutes, I wanna return to this letter, because the main document that I wanna talk about today is this letter that is signed by William Ward Watkin to J.T. McCants. J.T. McCants. So we're gonna come back to that, but first I wanna, I wanna give our audience

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sort of a little bit of a window into how I got to this document. And maybe this will, will help show a little bit about how historians make their way through the archives. And sometimes you stumble upon things that you weren't looking for, and this is a great example of that.

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I didn't set out to go find this letter in the William Ward Watkin Papers, but let me reconstruct for you a little bit how I got here and then see if you can help me solve a mystery that I'm trying to figure out now that I have located this letter. So...

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Is this mystery going to be a real mystery or a doc talk mystery? This is, this is, well, I don't wanna, I don't want to say, because I, I think that it may be a little bit of a cliffhanger. I think I've resolved it, but I'm not 100% sure, and I'd like your, your thoughts on it

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as well. But first, let me tell you how I got to this, this folder in the Woodson Research Center, and it actually started with doing research on someone that we've talked a lot about already on the doc talks this fall, and that is Jack Shelton, who was one of the first, if not the first, African American staff member; that's a question that

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I wanna bracket and come back to later; here at the Rice Institute. He was a athletic trainer and a groundskeeper who we saw a couple of weeks ago was a frequent presence in the early issues of the Rice Campanile and was, was well remembered by students from the football team and other athletic teams.

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Many years after their time at Rice, they published articles remembering Jack Shelton and telling various stories about him that require some unpacking, and we saw a little bit of some of the problematic texts that are difficult to sort of break through and understand Shelton's own life.

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And so I was trying in the Woodson Research Center to do some digging about Shelton's employment at the institute, because one of the questions that we had about him from the very beginning was, can we fix the dates around which he worked at the institute? When did he arrive, and, and when did he stop working at Rice?

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We know that he died in, in 1937, and we know that he appeared in many of those Campanile issues, but I wanted to see if I could find something about his employment at the institute. So I started by looking in the Lovett papers, because President Edgar Odell Lovett gives us a collection that is, that goes back to the very beginnings of the

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Rice Institute, to see if I could find anything about Shelton there. I don't have an image of, of what I think might be the first reference to Shelton in the institute's archives, which comes from 1919; if we're not counting the Campanile; in 1919, there's a handwritten ledger that is in the Lovett papers that shows basically a

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cash book of expenses, and there's one line that lists the names Tony and, Tony Martino and Jack Shelton, on one line, and has a dollar amount next to them. And some of our, our audience members who know, who know their Rice history well might recognize the name Tony Martino because he was a longtime groundskeeper at the Rice

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Institute who was responsible for, for planting and caring for many of the trees that still, of course, define the campus landscape today. And so that made a little bit of sense to me when I, when I saw that in 1919, that they would be linked on that line, because one of the stories that was told about Shelton was

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that he also worked as a groundskeeper, particularly on the athletic fields. You can see him in this photograph reclining on the athletic fields that he took care of for so many years that the football team played on. So there was that, that brief mention in the Lovett papers of Shelton, but not a lot of

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context around it. So I was a little bit frustrated that I wasn't finding more in the Lovett papers, but I did find, together with a lot of, of other papers, typescript budgets. You know, in the early years of the Rice Institute, just as today, one of the most

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important responsibilities of the president would have been to oversee the resources of the institute, make sure that budgets were were being drawn up and kept to, and it was clear that scattered in Lovett's papers were some of the budgets that he had been sent, but only pieces of them, and not a series of those budgets for every single year.

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And so then I started to wonder, well, where in the Woodson Research Center could we go if we wanted to look more closely at the financial records of the Rice Institute in those early years? And I found two places, and these two places got me a little bit closer to learning about

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about Jack Shelton. One of those places is the Rice Institute Business Manager's Collection, and I have a few scans that I can show you here about the Rice Institute business manager, who at this time, if memory is serving me right, I might have to correct myself on this later, but at

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this time, was J.T. McCants. And you remember that I mentioned his name earlier, 'cause we're going to work our way back around to that, that document in the Watkin Papers. But one of the things that, that I found in the business manager's papers were receipts

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and expenditures and statements of income for the Athletic Association. And so let me just show you one example from box ten, folder three. You can see here a "Report on Receipts and Expenditures for the Athletic Association" between July 1st, 1926 and April 28th, 1927.

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And on this typescript page, you have, broken down by sport, the receipts from the various games that these teams played, and those would have been balanced with the expenses to show the profit and loss for, for the athletics at Rice. And you can see here, this interested me right away, under "other expenses" for the

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Athletic Association, along with laundry and stationeries and stamps and the physician's account and photographs, there's a line for salaries. And you can see that under the expenses, it's the largest amount, $8,366, spent on salaries by the Athletic Association.

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And as we scroll down, we find some other pages that break those salaries down into the names of the people who were being paid by the Athletic Association. So this second page is dated April 28th, 1927, and whereas the first page was showing us a report on receipts and expenditures for almost an entire year, July 1926 to April

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1927, this second page is just showing us a smaller slice of time, but under the salaries, you can see here, I hope that everyone can see, a reference to Jack Shelton under salaries, and it lists an amount over here, $202.50, next to Jack Shelton's name, and it lists some other people as well.

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Gaylord Johnson, T.D. Ashcraft, "Tutors and Field House Jobs" are not named, but that's $465. Now, I'm not great at math, so I'm just trusting the business manager here that they did their math correctly, but all of those salaries add up to $2,600.

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And I do know math well enough to know that's less than the 8,000 in salaries that we saw on page one. And so that's one clue that what we're looking at here is not a statement of what Jack Shelton was paid for this entire year, but rather for a part of that year, $202.

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But I knew now I was getting a little bit closer to finding some more information about Jack Shelton, and sure enough, as you go through the the business manager's collection, you can find other similar statements of the Athletic Association that show Jack Shelton appearing regularly.

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Here's another one from 1934 where Shelton is listed with, with his salary. And another one here from, also from 1934, where Jack Shelton appears down here at the bottom. And there's even a memo in this collection written by J.T. McCants. Oh, see, I knew I was gonna have to correct myself later about, about the

00:15:06.940 - 00:15:31.760

business manager, because here J.T. McCants signs his name on this memo as the bursar. And I know that if there's anyone in the audience who was a Hamilton fan on Broadway, they know what a bursar is, because Hamilton punches the bursar and sings about it in his

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first encounter with Aaron Burr. So the bursar is the one who handles the financials of an institute. Which is closely related, of course, to what the business manager would have done, but would have been responsible for, for budgets and, and preparing financial statements.

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This memo is really interesting, January 1924, because McCants writes to A.B. Cohn, the secretary of the Rice Institute, and says, "In response to your request, I'm giving below information concerning salaries paid the employees on the campus during 1923. And then it lists a series of names, and interestingly, next to those names, it gives

00:16:23.940 - 00:16:49.500

the address of the employee where they lived, and their marital status. So for example, the first line here is, G. Barraud, The Rice Institute, who is married, and earned $2,400 from the institute in 1923. A little bit lower down here we see Tony Martino, we talked about him earlier, who

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lived on 1805 Mason Street, and was married, and it shows his salary, $2,700, for 1923, and immediately under him, you can see Jack Shelton listed. And it gives his address, this is really interesting to me, it suggests we could, we could find out where Jack Shelton was living in 1923, 1106 Sherman Street, and it says he

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was single at that time. And it lists his salary for the year, $1,092. So almost $1,100. So I just wanted to give you kind of a sense of what's in the business manager papers.

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Remember, I was on the hunt for, for budgets and financial information. The other place I found that information was in the bursar records. I just mentioned what the bursar does. And the bursar records in the Woodson Research Center have more budgets that are

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serially organized so that you can find, for any particular year, what the budget discussions were for that particular year. And so let me, let me see if I can, can show you a couple of examples here from box two of the bursar records.

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If I were to go into folder three, which is the budget from 1922 to 1923, here you can see the, the, the handwritten notes that would have preceded the typescript budgets or, or income analyses of the kind we looked at earlier. This would have been the notes that the bursar, or perhaps someone at the, the

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Athletics Association, were jotting down to tally up the various expenses and receipts of the Athletic Association. So written in pencil here, we can scroll down and see on, let me see, find, we see again here a one-line item for salaries that adds up to over $6,000 for 1922-1923.

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And as we go farther through these notes, we can again find those salaries broken down. So here under salaries, we see the assistant coach. The assistant coach for the football team was paid $2,000, and Jack Shelton, who's listed here as the rubber, was paid $1,100.

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And remember, we talked about what that "rubber" means, that Shelton was doing what we would today call physical therapy massages for, for, for the football players, you know, but that's, that's kind of significant, if you compare what the assistant coach was making in 1923 versus what Shelton was making, $900 less, so maybe

00:20:01.450 - 00:20:21.760

that speaks to the significance of Shelton to the athletic association at this moment in time. And as we keep going, we can find more references to, to Shelton. Sometimes he's referred to just by name, by first name. I think there's an example down here.

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Thought I saw one. Maybe I've gone too far. Oh, here we go. Here's the salaries, and Shelton is just listed as, as "Jack." So this, this is a

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great collection to go and try to find out some more about Shelton's experience at the institute and what he was paid. One of the things I learned, and I'm gonna get to that Watkin letter now, when I was at the bursar papers, was that there was sometimes a lot of controversy over how the

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Athletic Associations funds were handled. I know that surprises you. Imagine that. But the institute would basically budget $10,000 out of its general operating budget

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and give that lump sum to the athletic association, and, to spend on, on the various sports in the way that they chose. But frequently, halfway through the year, the Athletic Association would come back to the board and say, we don't have enough money.

00:21:29.490 - 00:21:47.280

We went through the whole $10,000 and we need 4,000 more. And it turns out that that was partly because they were banking on receipts from the individual games, so if the football team was playing really well one year, you kind of would guess all the games are gonna be sold out, the receipts would be great, but

00:21:47.280 - 00:22:08.340

if there was a down year, and by the end of the year fewer people were coming to the games, the receipts would be less, and they wouldn't have as much money, they had to go back to the board, and so this is an example of some of the correspondence between the bursar and the board and the Committee on Outdoor Sports, which was made up of faculty

00:22:08.340 - 00:22:24.990

who would kind of oversee this process. And what I learned going through some of these records, which also mentioned Shelton, was that William Ward Watkin, the architect, was playing a key role on the Committee on Outdoor Sports.

00:22:25.860 - 00:22:45.000

That, that he was a faculty member but was also deeply invested in the supervision of the Athletic Association. And given that Shelton was appearing in a lot of these papers being paid by the Athletic Association, that made me want to go to the William Ward Watkin papers.

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Are you following the trail through the archive here? I have followed it more perfectly than I thought I would have. Okay. I'll take it. I'll take it. But you can see, before we leave this, I wanted to show you how Jack

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appears again here, sometimes just by, by first name. And I think, let's see, he appears on, let's see, on image 19, I want to say. Yeah, here he is under general expense, but he's not listed by name.

00:23:26.410 - 00:23:45.130

But it does give him another role here, "rubber and caretaker, $1,100," and the rubber supplies were $150. But all of that was prologue to say, why did I go to the William, I went to the William Ward Watkin papers because I was led through the Lovett papers to the Institute Business

00:23:45.130 - 00:24:05.320

Manager Papers and the bursar records to realize that William Ward Watkin was also a curator of or in charge to some extent of the Athletic Association in those very early years of the institute. And lo and behold, when I got to the Watkin papers, I learned, and this made a little more sense, he was also the curator of the grounds.

00:24:06.370 - 00:24:34.310

So I was there looking at a folder about athletics, but, but learned that as the architect, he was also overseeing the grounds, and that's what led me to this letter, which is in a folder about Watkin's, Watkin's overseeing of the grounds. Okay. So in 1918, we have William Ward Watkin writing to J.T.

00:24:34.310 - 00:24:59.950

McCants, who we know already was the bursar, and he's writing about Tony Martino's contract. Tony Martino, remember, was the, the groundskeeper in the early years. And I'm just gonna read here what Watkin says to McCants. He says, "I have talked with Martino relative to a more definite financial

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statement of the proposition which he would make us for the coming year, and expressed our feeling that we were not prepared to pay him $150 per month. He has made a proposition which I have had him sign in brief as a basis for us to consider, which is as follows." So you get the idea that Watkin and Martino were

00:25:20.060 - 00:25:41.990

negotiating over the terms of his contract to do groundskeeping work at the Institute. So here's Martino's proposition. "He would propose to give to the institute," quote, "his own services, those of his brother, and of the Negro driver, which we have had for the past year.

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In addition, a team of two mules and one extra horse, and to provide all feed and pay, all expense of teams, wagons, etc.," all of that, "for the sum of $475 a month." Okay. Now, there's an alternative proposition that he also makes, which is Martino would just sell his mules, his horse, his wagons, to the institute for a particular sum.

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But it's clear Watkin is more interested in this first proposition, and he breaks down the detailed basis for this charge of $475 per month, $125 for himself, $110 for his brother, $91 for his teamster, who Watkin would have referred to earlier here as, quote, "the Negro driver," who had been working on campus the previous year.

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Now this is in 1918, right, and that tells us that what Watkin is giving us a window onto here is the work of an African American teamster who was apparently working with Tony Martino from the very earliest days of the institute, not named here, but we do learn a little bit more about the driver, because Martino was insistent on keeping this

00:27:09.660 - 00:27:27.640

particular driver. It says here at the bottom, "Tony's opinion is that this would operate all right as long as he has a driver as capable as the one he has at present, who is very careful." We learn here something about the teamster, that Martino highly recommended him.

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He was very careful. And then Watkin goes on to explain the, kind of compare these two propositions: buy all of the mules and the team, or pay this $475 per month. And he, he mentions again this driver later on in in this particular letter.

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And I wanna read another part of this, this letter where Watkin is talking about all of the labor expenses under the present contract for keeping the grounds. He says, "I would propose that we offer the plumber Marshall, in connection with the power plant, an increase of $20 a month." And he says that this has been

00:28:23.660 - 00:28:45.610

done before, previously done, quote, "by the jointly employed darky," end quote. So there's, there's possibly another reference here, I'm not sure if this is talking about the same driver who was working for Martino, or perhaps another staff member that Watkin, that Watkin was talking about.

00:28:46.690 - 00:29:09.690

So this letter excited me when I found it, because I wasn't looking for it, but it seems to be talking in 1918 about some other members of the Rice Institute staff, who would have dated to the same period as Jack Shelton or, or Jenny Petit, who we've talked about earlier.

00:29:10.200 - 00:29:28.260

And the mystery to me, Dr. Byrd, I mentioned to you earlier, is, who, who was this driver? Can we identify who the driver was? And here, the fact that I knew and had looked through some of the papers in the

00:29:28.260 - 00:29:48.410

bursar's records was helpful because I was looking at something in the bursar records that I didn't know what I was seeing until I found that Watkin letter. This is, this is in folder one of box two of the bursar records in 1920. And here what we have is J.T.

00:29:48.410 - 00:30:04.900

McCants writing a letter. I'm freezing up here a little bit. Here's the bursar writing to A.B. Cohn again, and he's talking about Tony Martino, and he, he says, it might be good

00:30:04.900 - 00:30:31.510

for Cohn to have for his files information concerning our present agreement with Tony Martino for maintenance of the grounds. "This check is distributed as follows: wages to Tony Martino, $175; to Gabriel Martino, $125; to William Osborn, $91; for the use of one team and wagon, $30; for hay used as

00:30:31.510 - 00:30:46.560

feed, $20." Do any of those figures ring a bell to you, Dr. Byrd? Yeah, I feel like that $91 does. That $91 in Watkin's letter back here was for the teamster.

00:30:46.820 - 00:31:10.230

Now, the other, the other sums are a little bit higher, that's partly because this is 1918, and this other record we're looking at is from 1920. Okay. But what that suggested to me is the possibility that maybe William Osborn, who's named here...my, my computer is slowing to a crawl.

00:31:10.560 - 00:31:42.460

I think I'm overtaxing it, and maybe your patience as well. But, but William Osborn, who was receiving $91 here in 1920, could that be the name of the teamster that was referenced in Watkin's letter, not by name, but by racial classification, as, according to William Ward Watkin, "the Negro driver."

00:31:43.450 - 00:32:03.870

So that's what I wanted to, to pose to you is, do you think that's a reasonable inference to make, and what would the next steps be? I mean, this is a little bit of a cliffhanger, because we would, we'd want to see if we could find more records to increase our confidence in that, in that

00:32:03.870 - 00:32:28.170

identification, but what do you make of, of Watkin's reference to Martino's driver? So, I wouldn't, I wouldn't bet against it now, right, I would be inclined to bet for it if I had to go one way or the other. I also think folks who have watched you work in previous doc talks, and have committed

00:32:28.170 - 00:32:57.090

some of your process to memory, will have an idea about what's coming next, at least when it comes to how you will begin to circle around Mr. Osborn to try and, try and figure, figure, to know who he is with, with a little greater confidence. So I feel there might be some census work coming up here soon, if we, if we

00:32:57.090 - 00:33:17.090

return to this in part two, and, and I'm I'm curious if you'll find a teamster in the vicinity who is classified at around this time as... William Osborn. Negro and Osborne, yeah.

00:33:17.100 - 00:33:40.290

Right. No, I think that's a, that's a, that's the next, that's the next step for sure. I think what I, what this shows to me, and hopefully shows to our audience too, is the difficulty that researchers can face, even answering a simple question like how much was Jack Shelton paid over the course of his time at the Rice Institute?

00:33:40.470 - 00:34:07.160

Who were the first black staff or laborers or employees at the institute? We find these references and fragments in letters like Watkin's from these very early years, but we have to piece them together with sources from various collections, because if we, if all we had was Watkin's letter that refers to Martino's driver, and

00:34:07.340 - 00:34:32.400

talks, gives us a sense of, of the care that this driver took in his work, because Martino was really intent on, if not keeping this driver, then one at least is good. You remember him saying to Watkin. But beyond that, it's difficult to know very much about the driver.

00:34:32.400 - 00:34:57.240

It is possible to know more about Watkin's view of the driver. Some of that some of the derogatory language that, that I quoted from that letter, where Watkin was using, in the second case, an epithet from, from that period to refer to, to one of the people who was working on campus at the time.

00:34:57.600 - 00:35:20.490

We can, we can gather some information about Watkin's view and Martino's view. We can gather something from the salaries, possibly by comparing Shelton's salary to, to other salaries at the time, or Osborn's pay to Martino's pay. But it's difficult to, to do something even as seemingly simple as identifying the first

00:35:20.490 - 00:35:41.160

in this case or identifying the name of somebody who we know was there and was was working on campus. Well, I appreciate all of that, and I know our audience does does too, as well. The only, the only thing I'm going to take issue with is your use of this word

00:35:41.160 - 00:36:02.830

difficulty. I'm only gonna take issue with it because I, on the one hand, I do see how difficult this this work is, how time-consuming it is, but I also sense some joy in your, in your doing it. So, so that's the, that's the, that's the only thing I would bring to the fore.

00:36:02.850 - 00:36:33.090

I think one of the other interesting things about labor relations, or at least that your work opens up, is this, I don't wanna call it a contradiction, but I can't find the word right now. But, but Watkin's, Watkin's simultaneous kind of use of contemptuous language around black labor at this time, but, but also some evidence of, of

00:36:33.460 - 00:37:02.040

the necessity of dealing with the skilled nature of this labor, despite this propensity to, to, to refer to black labor in these derogatory ways. What I didn't see in the letter, and maybe it exists, 'cause we, we, we couldn't spend a lot of time with it, is that Watkin and McCants and others don't, don't take issue,

00:37:02.040 - 00:37:20.610

or don't allow themselves to take issue, with Martino's characterization of this teamster, right. One potential response to this would be, "I don't, I don't care what Martino thinks about his teamster, let's get this, let's get this salary down to $30." Like, that, so that's

00:37:20.610 - 00:37:36.900

what I didn't see in, in there, and not seeing it says something. That's right. Yeah, that's right. That there's a, there's a value to that labor, and there's a recognition of its importance on campus.

00:37:37.710 - 00:37:52.440

But I use the word "recognition" advisedly, because, while they, they acknowledge it, I think that we still, and this is part of the work of our task force, have work to do to fully recognize it. Yes.

00:37:52.440 - 00:38:06.840

And this is, this is a piece of that that I'll, I'll be continuing to work on with the help of, of the great people over the Woodson Research Center, following the breadcrumbs through, through some of these collections. I don't wanna keep you, though, from your introductory remarks.

00:38:06.840 - 00:38:25.860

I'm gonna rush over to the Moody Center for the start of this great conference that's gonna get underway, and I wanna thank all of our audience for joining us on the doc talks this fall. We're looking forward to starting up again as the semester in the spring starts, the first week of classes.

00:38:25.860 - 00:38:35.570

We'll be back. But in the meantime, we wish everyone a happy holiday season and a restful winter break. Good to see you, Dr. Byrd.

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See you, Dr. McDaniel.