March 18, 2004

By Leticia Vasquez
Staff writer

Hidden treasures are popping up all over the University of Houston campus in unusual and usual places at the Moores School of Music and the M.D. Anderson Library.

At the Moores School of Music, an old box of bundled programs were ready to be tossed when a work-study student asked Alan Austin, executive director of the Texas Music Festival, if he wanted to take a look at its contents. What Austin found were musical programs from around the world given to the school by Ima Hogg, the legendary art patron who helped establish the Houston Symphony.

“The programs were given to the university in the 1970s as a gift from Ima Hogg,” Austin said. “I think they got put away in a closet in the old building, and when we moved over to our new building, they just got put with all the rest of the boxes. No one ever looked in them.”

The programs were from orchestral concerts, operas and plays, which were presented in Europe. Among them was the program from the 1955 Wieland Wagner production of Wagner’s Der Ring der Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. Also found were two 1936 Berlin programs bearing Nazi swastikas on the front and a program from a 1930 concert from the Copland-Session series, a famous breakthrough in presenting the music of young composers.

“I don’t think there has ever been a time when we have found such extraordinary things,” Austin said.

Some of the programs were donated to the Houston Symphony in an effort to help them recoup some of their lost treasures, which were destroyed during Tropical Storm Allsion.

Others will find a new home in the M.D. Anderson Library, among other collections from Hogg and a recently discovered time capsule found by construction crews working on the library’s expansion.

Found behind the cornerstone of the first UH library building in 1950, the rectangular-shaped copper box contained a copy the student newspaper Cougar, which was dated May 15, 1950, a UH catalog and summer bulletin and an M.D. Anderson Library Quarterly Bulletin.

Among the other historic documents were course lists for registration, admissions applications and a brochure announcing available dormitories for students. A signed sheet by “Southwestern Construction Co. by McTullis, Staub & Rather, Architects: by J. Eugene Wukosch, Mason: Frank P. Burt” also was included.

“We have found no articles in the Daily Cougar at the time, yearbooks or any other documents that we have that gives us information on who prepared the capsule or who placed it,” said Dana Rooks, dean of libraries. “But, it wasn’t an afterthought, it was planned. There was a spot that was made in the back of the cornerstone for it to be placed. There is a hole that the capsule fit into.”

Crews were removing the cornerstone so that it could be placed in another area of the library. Rooks said the capsule will be preserved in the library but may show up again in the near future.

“We’re planning a grand opening celebration in February 2005, and it will probably be on exhibit at that time,” she said.