This past weekend I was in Lubbock, Texas during homecoming weekend. The Red Raiders suffered an unexpected and decisive defeat at the hands of the Baylor Bears. It was a tough loss particularly since it was homecoming, The university had far more events and activities on campus for the game and losing after all of the celebration was tough. In my post last month, I shared some photos of campus and Jones Stadium from September 7, 1996 in a post called Texas Tech Memories. I wanted to recreate some of those photos to show the difference in Jones Stadium and the other spots on campus covered in that post and how they appear now. I did not get the exact framing of the academic buildings on campus, although they are pretty close. That was on me. I didn’t pull up the post on my phone to see exactly where I had been standing when I took those photos back in the 90’s and just kind of guessed where they were taken from memory. I could have done so, and probably should have as it would have made for a better post. I blame my lack of focus on the loss. I was also unable to get the exact shot of Jones Stadium. That was not due to a lack of trying on my part, but rather the fact that Jones has been completely transformed. The spot where I took the photo in that post no longer exists. Jones was a completely different stadium then. It had exposed metal framing the way Neyland Stadium at my other alma mater Tennessee did. It was not entirely encircled with seats, with the one end zone completely void of seating. It wasn’t a bad stadium by any means, but it had far less capacity and was plain in the same way that many, perhaps most, college stadiums were at the time. In a future post, I will provide a more detailed before and after of the stadium. 

Regardless, the nearest place you can stand which gives you a similar view as the one seen in my last post on Jones Stadium can be had from the current Gate 6 entrance to Jones AT&T Stadium. The set below shows the area of Gate 6. The place where I was standing in the photo of 1996 would be to the left in this photo under the new south endzone portion of the stadium. Thus, the most similar view to that of the 1996 photo would be the one you see in the second picture. If you compare the second photo with the one from my September 8th post, you can see that the break in the wall on the far right in that photo is the same as the single one in view in this photo. That is where the stairs are located to go down to the lower seating area. In the older photo, there is a ramp in front of where you see the ice freezer in this photo. Although it has been removed, the hand rail is the same in both photos. 

The photos in this set are of the east side of the stadium in the vicinity of Gate 6.

The south end zone area is brand new. It has club, loge, and suite seating. It is a spectacular addition! The photos in this set are of the south end first from the outside, then three view of just inside the gate, and finally of the pedestrian bridge that connects the stadium to the Sports Performance Center (see below). The sixth photo is from June, 1996. I took it during my first trip to Lubbock when I was looking for an apartment for the following August. There was once a sports bubble training facility where the new Sports Performance Center now stands. This photo shows part of that structure as well as the Double T sign where it once stood on the old south end of the place. The seventh photo is a better view of the sign as well as the east side of the stadium as it was in 1996. The last photo is also from 1996, and it gives you a view of the west-side stands. 

I did not include photos of the Masked Rider statue in my September post because it did not exist in 1996. The piece stands behind the Frazier Alumni Pavilion and in front of the Marsha Sharp Center for Student Athletes just southwest of Jones AT&T Stadium. The piece is the work of artist Grant Speed and it was installed in 2000. The Masked Rider is one of the Tech mascot's. each year a student is chosen to be the new Masked Rider and they climb aboard a black American Quarter Horse and dash out on to the field at the beginning of each football game. The Masked Rider appears at all manner of other events and is a big deal on campus. All of the colleges and universities in Texas seem to have some hand sign to indicate their school. The University of Texas at Austin has the Hook 'em Horns sign, Texas A&M has the Gig 'em sign, and many others, several of which who have only recently developed them, have theirs as well. Ours has been the "Guns Up" sign, and that is what you see the Masked Rider doing here. Although the statue appears to be a male figure, many of the most recent Masked Riders have actually been women. The statue of Racer 1 at Murray State University in Kentucky reminds me of this statue.

This final set follows my previous post from September 8th in terms of the buildings and views. First is a photo of Memorial Circle and the Administration Building today. It was taken a little closer and to the left (east) of where I was standing in 1996. It is obviously a closer photo as well. The big difference between the two would be the addition of a significant number of trees in the Circle as well as the addition of a the large Pfluger Fountain. The addition of the fountain also necessitated a change in the location of the flagpoles. Whereas before they stretched along the -west axis of the center of the circle, today they stand on the west side.

The second, third, and fourth photos are the Mechanical Engineering Building, now called the Mechanical Engineering Building South thanks to a new structure which was built behind it to the north. The shrubs from 1996 are gone, but the large tree to the right of the main entrance is still there. You can see the Double T sign on Jones AT&T Stadium on the right in the third photo. The building on the right in that photo is the Terry Filler Petroleum Engineering Research Building which was not in existence in 1996.

The fifth and sixth photos show the spot where the English-Philosophy Building once stood. Today, the area is the end of a pedestrian mall extending to student housing to the west. The sculpture you see here is "Lapstrake", the work of noted artist Jesús Moroles. You can watch a video about the piece wherein he discusses the piece here. Although you really cannot tell it in these the piece is massive, standing twenty-three feet. It was odd to stand here admiring this piece while trying to remember exactly what it was like to be there when the English-Philosophy Building was still standing. There is a connection between the artist and another building on campus. Moroles created the Houston Police Officer's Memorial in the Buffalo Bayou Park area in Houston. Many individuals donated funds for this memorial, and among the larger donors was the  Neva and Wesley West Foundation. Wesley West was the second son of James Marion West. James Marion West was a Houston-based oil, lumber, and ranch tycoon, who served on the Texas Tech Board from 1935 to 1941 and was president of that body in 1940 and 1941. West Hall on the campus is named in his honor.

​The next six photos are of the Electrical Engineering Building. The first two do not match any of the photos in my September 8th post. But, I love the arches so common on the older buildings at Tech I had to include them. The sixth photo shows the building looking northward. The dedication plaque is in the last post on the south end of these arches. The eighth and ninth photos are close to being in the same spots and angles as those from my earlier post. 

After lunch today, I was reading some of the news outlets for higher education and I ran across a piece noting that Duke University was celebrating its centennial this year. The centennial part caught me by surprise. After all, the university traces its roots back to the Brown School which was founded in 1838. Indeed, Duke's seal carries the 1838 date. That would mean, of course, that Duke is 186 years old, not one hundred. As I read the piece, I realized the centennial commemorates the massive donation by James B. Duke on December 11, 1924 which transformed it from the small quiet school known as Trinity College to the powerhouse research university it is today. Every year is an anniversary of some sort, of course, and when I thought about it, I could come up with twelve colleges and universities which are celebrating their centennial this year. The first one that came to mind was High Point University, since it is just a little over an hour's drive from Duke.

I think its great when colleges and universities take the time to celebrate important milestones. If you have read this blog, you know that I have academic memorabilia of all kinds, and although it is not a huge percentage of my collection, I do have a number of items related to anniversaries. I completed my master's degree at the University of Tennessee in 1994, the bicentennial year of the university. I picked up a number of items for the anniversary back then. One of them is the first item you see below, a short photobook on the bicentennial. As it happens, everyone who graduated that year has a memento of the event as all of our diplomas not only carry the anniversary date but the official bicentennial logo as well. You can see it on my diploma in the second photo. Its odd to think it, but since it is 2024 it has been thirty years since that all of that happened. As I noted in early posts this year, I visited the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill this spring. While there, I stayed at the university's on-campus hotel, the Carolina Inn. It is a lovely hotel and the people there were great during both of my stays. As it happens, the Inn is celebrating its centennial this year, a fact noted by my room's key card as seen in the third and fourth photos. Last year, my doctoral alma mater Texas Tech celebrated its centennial. I have a number of items from that celebration including the book you see in the fifth photo. Last year was also an anniversary year for the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). UMSL is a young institution, and it was celebrating its sixtieth anniversary last year. I was on campus and snagged the sticker with the official anniversary logo on it you see in the sixth photo. Texas Tech, of course, is the flagship institution in the Texas Tech University System. Another of the five universities in that system had its fiftieth anniversary, or its semicentennial, in 2019. The Texas Tech Health Sciences Center Lubbock was fifty that year, and I picked up the t-shirt marking the anniversary you see in the seventh and eighth photos during a visit. I have a number of other things associated with numerous college and university anniversaries, far too many to take the time to photograph for a quick post. Many of them are lapel pins, something I have a lot of for colleges and universities in general and not merely for their anniversaries. A good example would be the last photo in this set, an anniversary lapel pin for Mount Union College (now the University of Mount Union) which was celebrating its ​sesquicentennial in 1996.

Anyway, the Duke story started my thinking on these things. Happy anniversary to Duke and the many other colleges having an important milestone year in 2024!