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BIOGRAPHY - Rick Alan Rice My biography is sprinkled liberally throughout this website. It is in my songs and stories and on my Projects page. This section offers the background in summary form.
* * * * * I was born in 1952 on Scott Air Force Base just outside of East St. Louis. I am a Libra. My father was a 23-year old Staff Sergeant in the United States Air Force, a radio instructor at the base. My mother was 20. My father had grown up as the fair-haired son of a Nebraska farm family (Walter and Besse Rice of Hays Center), and he was gifted. After excelling on exams, particularly in mathematics, he was plucked from his country school and placed in a boarding school at Curtis, Nebraska, where he attended high school. After graduation, he became the first person in the Rice family to attend college, enrolling at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Two years into his studies, at a time when his older brother Charles was away in the service, his father Walter fell ill and my father was forced to drop out of college to return to keep the family farm in business. When Walter's health improved, my father signed up for the Air Force and served during the Korean War. On a leave from the service he reunited with a McCook, Nebraska girl he had dated. From a family of seven children, she had been born in Atwood, Kansas, and had grown up on locations ranging from a Kansas farm to Oakland, California. She attended high school in McCook. Graduating three years after my father, she worked for a time in a doctor's office, then she and my father were married. Phillip Walton and Ruby Dolores Rice, August 1951. After the Korean War ended, my father left the Air Force and went to work as a television repairman in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1957 we moved again, this time to Englewood, Colorado, a new incorporated suburban development south of downtown Denver. My dad took a job doing electrical engineering for the Martin-Marietta Company, and he bought a brick home in a community heavily populated with young Martin-Marietta families. He car pooled to work every day at the missile testing site near Castle Rock, south of Englewood. I attended 1st through 6th grade in Englewood, one of the Maddox Elementary "Madmen." My summers were spent playing baseball, winters playing football. Each summer I would return to Nebraska for a week or so to stay with my grandparents Besse and Walter, and with the family of my dad's sister Lillian (Betty), the Fieldings. They had a farm seven miles outside of little Hays Center (population 240), and I had adventures there with my six Fielding cousins. We encountered rattlesnakes and skunks, rode cows, pulled calves, drove farm machinery, milked cows -- we did a lot with cows. It was an idyllic childhood. One summer I surfaced as "the city cousin" in a story in the Omaha World Herald titled "City Boy Lassos Skunk." My Uncle Court had been teaching me to throw a lasso and I lassoed a skunk, which responded as anyone but me might have expected a skunk would. After the Kennedy assassination funding for the space program began to tighten. Most of the conceptual developments that led to the missions of the 1960s had been achieved between 1958 and 1961, and after that oversight on spending became a government priority. In 1965, my father got an opportunity to buy into a hardware store in Atwood, Kansas, population 1,600. He gave up his aeronautics job (by this time he was working for Beech Aircraft outside of Boulder, Colorado) and our family moved to "The City By the Lake," as the signs outside of town announced. Atwood was at once an idyll and a nightmare. The town was quaint and picturesque in a kind of Mayberry way. At the intersection of U.S. Highways 25 and 36, it was a cottonwood-canopied village nestled next to a 43-acre lake in the cup of the Beaver Valley. There was a central courthouse square with a beautiful two-story red brick building with a bell tower. The county offices and courtroom were upstairs, and there was a jail in the basement with bars on the windows. At the top of the boulevard that ran past the courthouse square was a high school built in Kansas Stone, and downtown were four square blocks of locally owned businesses that dressed up beautifully at Christmas. It was, on many levels, a great little town. I played on the American Legion baseball team, and participated in the school football and golf programs, with some additional involvement in basketball and track. I rode my bike everywhere and skated on the frozen lake in winter and up the Beaver Creek. I hunted pheasant and quail and turtle dove. I did some fishing. More than anything, however, I dreamed of the day I could escape the place. I had grown up in suburban worlds and couldn't find much in common with my rural schoolmates. (I will never forget that my first memory of conversation between my new seventh grade classmates was two farm boys arguing over tractors. Tractors! I think one was a John Deere man, the other a Case.) What was adventure over a couple weeks in summer on the Fielding's farm was a drag as an every day existence in Atwood. The fall after I graduated from high school in 1970, I enrolled at the University of Kansas. I was 17 and gone from home forever. I loved the University of Kansas, but performed dismally. The Viet Nam War was still raging. I was in the draft lottery in 1971 and, as I recall, drew 157 in a year when they took up to 125. (There were 366 numbers representing each day of a leap year, which were pulled from a "hat" and people were selected for service based on their birth dates and the order in which the numbers were drawn.) I don't recall feeling any connection to that serendipitous lottery event or having any anxiety about it at all, which is a tip-off to my mental state at the time. (Also, I was in college and student deferments were available -- just ask Dick Cheney.) I was lost in a wonderland of hyperbolic sights and sounds. The Lawrence, Kansas area was alive with anti-war activities. Village Voice/Hippie Poet George Kimball was on the ballot to become Sheriff. I would go to the Jayhawk Cafe and the Bierstube and find myself drinking with Yippies, who seemed to me to be wearing American flag-inspired war paint. They scared the hell out of me. (They were followers of Abbie Hoffman's "Youth International Party" whom I took to be 30-year old volunteers to the youthful-female liberation program.) The girls, however, were gorgeous and there was a guy who would come in the night to your dormitory and place marijuana in your mailbox. His identity was not known, but everyone called him "Weed Man" because he would leave a note with the pot that said something like "Greetings from Weed Man." Weed Man's stuff wasn't particularly good, but I always thought his gesture was of a high quality. That somehow the dorm police didn't intervene on this practice must say something about the climate of the times in Lawrence, Kansas. It was a hippie town and if you liked that type of thing, which I did, it was great. It was also incredibly distracting! I rarely went to class. My classes were all screwed up anyway, because I didn't know how to read the enrollment book, didn't really have an advisor, and found myself taking whatever classes I could get into, sometimes without the benefit of the prerequisites. I was tossed out for poor academic performance, readmitted on the strength of a self-explaining essay (not unlike this one), then eventually tossed again. I lasted two-and-a-half years, then retreated to dismal Hays, Kansas where I graduated with an English-Journalism degree in 1975. (Fort Hays was the recently-deceased Mickey Spillane's alma mater. There in the journalism department they still kept yellowed pages of stuff he had written while there as a student. I always thought the existence of this material was either somebody's silly good fortune to have found something from a celebrity in a box in the back, or extraordinary prescience on the part of somebody else, because based on my reading of the writings Spillane was not obviously headed toward success.) Fort Hays Kansas State College, as it was called then, was not at all distracting. It also held a much lower academic standard than had KU, but for some reason I attended to my studies religiously and flourished as Editorial Editor on the college newspaper. I wrote outrageous things, even suggesting that American foreign policy wasn't entirely altruistic, and was occasionally reprinted in newspapers around the state as an example of just how screwed up some Kansas students had become. I went on to graduate school at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana (David Letterman's alma mater) and pursued a master's degree in journalism. Muncie was another really sleepy place, but the journalism department at BSU had some strong faculty members. I was particularly influenced -- and this is going to sound like a joke -- by a professor named Dr. Larry Horney. He was a Princeton dandy but a very good teacher of writing mechanics. There was also a professor there named Sheldon Kagan, whose brother Paul (Paul Kagan Associates) was already an influential media consultant. Sheldon's specialty was the business of publication management and he was an intellectual mind twister, very effective at introducing a variety of ways to visualize whatever was there to see. I gained preliminary approval to submit a novel in lieu of a dissertation to complete the masters program, and I continued to work on a collection of stories I had already begun, which I called "City By the Lake." It was a Sherwood Anderson "Winesburg, Ohio" inspired book that struck me as doable given my development to that point.
Go to www.RickARice.com for career information. Visit the Verse and Projects pages on this site for additional family background. * * * * *
Today I live in Benicia, California with my wife Joanne (married 1987), daughter Gillian (born 1995) and son Griffin (born 1997).
30 years back...
HOME • BIO • MUSIC • LITERATURE • VERSE • ESSAY • PROJECTS • LINKS You are on the Biography page |
With
grad school classes completed, I took a job on a small daily newspaper in
Winchester, Indiana -- the News-Gazette. I had previously held paid part-time positions on other
publications, but with this position my journalism career was officially
launched.
More importantly, with "City By the Lake" I was what I considered to
be a real writer, on my way to becoming a novelist.