Fifty years ago this summer a slight young man of 15 ventured into the Register asking for the opportunity to test his reporting skills.
Write something, was Emerson Lynns response to Gary Rice, who grew up on a modest ranch north of Piqua
Did he ever. It being fair week, Gary traipsed through the sideshows of an attendant carnival, cornered a vagabond and arranged an interview. The story far exceeded our expectations.
Over the next year Gary, now 65, wrote stories totaling more than 10,000 column inches, the requirement for a scholastic journalism award. Garys career was launched.
He graduated from Iola High in 1970 at age 16, and immediately joined the Wichita Eagle. Next came stints at the Kansas City Star, and papers in Arkansas and Florida and at the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman as an editor.
Gary went on to earn a doctorate in history at the University of Texas which led to 20 years teaching college-level journalism including 17 at California State University, Fresno.
Thats the short version of Rices career.
Now hes circling the globe, courtesy of A Semester at Sea, in which Rice gets to teach aboard a cruise ship.
A recent email found Gary in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly called Saigon before the Vietnam War ended.
I got away for a trip of Cambodia. I saw a section of the Killing Fields; a large, crude but very effective outdoor war museum that featured a big section on land mines; and had Flemish stew (good) and Mexican food (terrible) on Siem Reaps equivalent of Bourbon Street.
Ever their advocate, Gary got the ships electronic office to hook up a phone line so my students could phone the Doctors Without Borders Hospital in a Yemen war zone and talk to a talkative trauma nurse who said she was woke up the previous night by a bullet coming through her bedroom window.
She thinks the Doctors Without Borders logo on the roof may deter aerial attacks but, Who knows what a 12-year-old kid with a rifle might do. She says theres graffiti that says U.S. bombs kill Yemeni kids. Score another one for the Raytheon plant near Tucson, that churns out precision missiles.
Im sort of the de facto advisor for a bunch of kids who started a club, Humanizing the Headlines. Theyre pretty activist thinkers. One very cool black guy who is doing a short cruise with us gave an emotional speech about the genocide of American Indians, and said someone in Myanmar should get some guts to stop the genocide there.
The cruise continues: After Myanmar, we hit India then Mauritius and on to South Africa. Thursday he was soaring in a hot air balloon.
GARYS LIFE has been as eclectic as one can be.
