William Marsh Rice and His Institute: The Centennial Edition

3: Plans for the Institute

( 63 ) Plans for the Institute In 1886 the president of the Houston School Board was Cesar Maurice Lombardi, who had come to the United States from Switzerland in 1860 as a boy of fifteen and been educated at the Jesuit College in New Orleans. Settling in Houston ten years later, hewas soon associated with the firm of W. D. Cleveland and Company, wholesale merchants and cotton factors, and in 1877 he married the youngest daughter, Caroline, of William March Rice’s lifelong friend, Cornelius Ennis.1 In his old age Lombardi wrote a charming series of letters to his grandchildren, telling them something about his own life, and in the course of these he recounted the following story. Sometime in the mid-1880s, while traveling for his health in the western part of New York State, Lombardi noticed that “the children of the farming population in that neighborhood” were bringing home books from the nearby village of Geneseo. He subsequently learned that the Wadsworth family had assumed the maintenance of a library there that had been founded by their ancestor, and Lombardi “was impressed with the amount of service that a rich man could thus confer on his community in this and other educational ways.”2 A year or so later, as president of the Houston School Board, Lombardi found he had run up against a blank wall in his petition to the citycouncil for funds with which to build a municipal high school.The councilmen were of the opinion, moreover, that “a High School was a highfaluting nonsense anyhow.” “I was,” remembered Lombardi, “in despair.”3 WheneverWilliam Marsh Rice came to Houston, he stopped in fairly frequently at Lombardi’s office to talk about old times in Texas when c h a p t e r t h r e e Chapter three ( 64 ) he and Lombardi’s father-in-law had been young men making their fortunes . It was during one of these visits just after the city council’s rejection of his petition, in 1886 or 1887 so far as Lombardi could recall, that he resolved to seek help in another quarter. I asked Mr. Rice in my private office and locked the door so we would not be disturbed. I told him of my observations at Genesee [sic] and how they suggested to me that he, Mr. Rice, might emulate old [James] Wadsworth and go him one better by erecting a large and well-equipped high school building in Houston, where it was so badly needed. I reminded him that he had made his fortune in Houston and that it was poetic justice that Houston should become the beneficiary of his surplus wealth. I pointed out what a monument that would be to his memory, a monument that would not crumble with time, but that would persist indefinitely in the hearts and minds of successive generations, and more to the same effect. We talked about an hour.4 Mr. Rice thanked him, Lombardi continued, “for calling his attention to this matter” and promised to come to some sort of decision about it before he went back to New York. Since Lombardi heard nothing more, he managed to waylay Rice on the eve of his departure and to express his disappointment at the lack of any firm commitment. He was told that Rice had recently had business reverses and consequently had not been able to come to any decision. This answer would not do at all for Lombardi’s purposes, and Rice was finally driven to say that the younger man might draw up an outline of exactly what he had in mind and send it along to New York for his consideration. With this Lombardi had to be satisfied. Lombardi’s memorandum, had it survived, would be interesting to compare with the final charter of the Rice Institute, but all that is certain is that his outline did its work. A few months later when Lombardi was himself in New York, he called on the Rices at their Grenoble apartment : “There I found him more willing, much more willing, to fall into my plans and his wife almost enthusiastic.”5 Lombardi adds that this was in the spring of the year and that there was no further communication from Rice for another twelve months or more. Then one evening Capt. James A. Baker, who was Mr. Rice’s attorney , came to see me and told me that Mr. Rice had just arrived from [3.16.29...