These are the last of the recent pics:
The fact that I have finished this series with a pile of pigeon crap should not be in any way construed as a commentary upon anything. It just worked out like that. Besides, it's real. It's there.
Texas Tech University has a very large campus, but it is also very attractive and consistent in style. But some of these photos reveal the signs of age and a need for repair. The older buildings need some work. In that last photo you see rotted window frames and sills. Not good. I see a lot of that rotten woodwork in the older structures, as well as crumbling masonry and grime.
This is just continuing the series taken last weekend. Many more to go... this is just an area in and around the Science Quadrangle. TTU has a HUGE campus.
The last two pics bring waves of nostalgia for me, because the area used to be part of Agricultural Engineering and I worked there once, as a part-timer, under Dr. Ulich. Whatever happened to Dr. Ulich? Nice guy. He would be retired, surely. I enjoyed the work. Now, I think these buildings just seem to be used for storage.
Grampus exists, but different things are called that. For instance, Orca whales have been called Grampus. Not likely to find an Orca hanging out at TTU though. Various naval vessels have been named Grampus but that won't get us anywhere. So how do we complete the picture? See below:
This is the Texas Tech Biology building. If we take one of the accepted "Grampus" defintions, that of bottfly larva, this is the place where we are most likely to find the Campus Grampus. And you thought I was being funny. By the way, a very strange thing and sad thing happened at the Biology Building when it was under construction, in the days when I still lived in a dorm on campus. I walked right by the scene that night but didn't find out until later what had happened. It was after dark. I was returning to my dorm from the library and I passed a knot of students outside the fence that surrounded the construction zone. They were talking in low voices and waving flashlights. They were gathered around something on the ground. That something was a dead body, a student from a nearby dorm who had leaped to his death from the top floor of the not quite completed Biology Building. Witnesses reported that the student was speaking to them in the hallway of his dorm, seemingly normal, before he turned and ran. He was followed. He was seen to enter the construction site through a breach in the fence. He ran up concrete steps in a stairway that had, as yet, no enclosing walls-- the entire building was still a skeleton, with no external walls. When he reached the top he didn't hesitate. He hurled himself into the air and fell to his death outside the fence, onto a grassy area outside his dorm. Those dorms were demolished several years ago. I think it was the Carpenter-Wells complex if memory serves. Strange incident! Hard to forget something like that. I think at that time I was in Thompson Hall...
Now it is time to post our harvest of conventional color photos, taken on the TTU campus at the very start of the Fall Semester, 2014. The dorms were opening and students were moving in, according to schedule... these pics will go up over a period of several days.
There is the campus, but where is the Grampus? Every campus should have Grampus, in some form, I think. More on this later...
