Student tour guide and Symbolic Systems major DAN SCHWARTZ recently posted the following on the tour guide chat list. We thought the rest of the campus community would appreciate it, as well:
“I was in a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore in Seattle on a family trip last week, and I picked up an archived National Geographic from 1929. Considering it was more than 80 years old, most of it was black and white. I flipped to the 10 ‘featured color pictures’ in the center, and lo and behold, I came across an old picture of Memorial Church!
“….I think the caption is especially interesting (keep in mind that Hoover had just been elected President in ′29, and this is shortly after the WWI era):
” ‘President Hoover’s Alma Mater, at Palo Alto, is justly proud of Stanford Memorial Chapel. The mosaics depicting the Sermon on the Mount are the work of Salvati of Venice. This is the fourth set. The first was destroyed by the earthquake and fire, the second was lost in a Venetian factory bombed by an Austrian airship, and the third went to the bottom of the Atlantic when a submarine sank the vessel that carried it.’
“Just trying to add a little ‘color’ to your MemChu talk.”
Thanks to C. JOHN FRIESMAN, director of visitor relations, for sharing this nifty story.
