| 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.
CHILDHOOD:
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.
COLLEGE: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.  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.
Go
to www.RickARice.com for career
information. Visit the Verse and Projects
pages on this site for additional family background. *
* * * *
30 years back...
Today I live in
Benicia, California with my wife Joanne (married 1987), daughter Gillian (born
1995) and son Griffin (born 1997). |
FOLLOW-UP: Related to that personal account above of my
relatively brief life in rural Kansas - I left for the
University of Kansas at 17 and never really went back - I
got a call recently from Atwood, Kansas resident Skip
McCain, who is referenced in my 