A Eulogy for Art Rice

Below is a eulogy delivered by Art Rice's boyhood friend, make that lifelong friend, Tom Dunlop, during a memorial ceremony this past Saturday.  Many of you who read my blog knew Art. Those of you who don't should know he was a man of great character who died way too young.  I will post my eulogy for Art - Tom and I each delivered one - when I return from Montana.  This blog won't capture Tom's delivery style but it will begin to help you appreciate the man, Art,  you knew or would have enjoyed knowing.

My name is Tom Dunlop, I am a writer living in New York, and Art Rice was my oldest friend.

We met forty-eight summers ago on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, both of us two-year-old sons of young parents who were renting adjacent houses in Edgartown. I am told that I introduced myself to Art by simply running from my house to his, invading the yard where he was playing, and crying out, “I’m Tommy!” I am also told that my parents were oblivious to my disappearance, that Art’s father was at work on the mainland, and that when his mother Irene saw us tearing happily around the yard, she left for the doctor’s office because she had just stepped on a rusty nail. A few weeks ago, I asked Irene about the wisdom of leaving behind a two-year-old son to play alone in his front yard with an unknown new friend of the same age, no matter how sleepy the little seaport town might have been in June of 1963. Irene replied, “Well, Alison was there to look after him.”

Alison, his older sister, was three.

I am a journalist and, like most journalists, I stand before you this afternoon with too much story to tell and too little time or space to tell it. And as journalists sometimes do, I also stand before you today with a bias and an agenda, both of which I freely admit: My purpose is to illustrate for you, in Art the kid, the spirit of dedication, of single-mindedness, of adventure, of passion, of sympathy, of justice, of fun, and of bravery that we would all later see flower so vividly and fully in Art the man.

One story does most of the job for me.

It was August of 1978. In this recollection, I’m going to use the name we knew him by back on the Vineyard – Arthur – which his father Alan, from Boston, so memorably pronounced “Aa-thah.” Arthur and I, both seventeen, were working for the Vineyard Gazette, a weekly newspaper on the Island. We both helped in the pressroom on the Tuesday and Friday mornings when the paper was published. We delivered papers, organized the storage areas, cleaned up the back shop, looked after the lawn and garden, and I was also interested in reporting and writing stories.

But the weekend the big story of the summer broke on the Vineyard that year, I was at home recovering from an emergency appendectomy. So the editor and publisher of the paper, Dick Reston, sent Arthur out to gather the facts, and if he learned anything, to come back with his notes to my sickbed, and I would write it all up. The big story on Martha’s Vineyard that summer? Kate Jackson, who starred with Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Jacklyn Smith in the television series “Charlie’s Angels,” was getting married secretly on the Island, and amazingly enough – as I look back on it now – the whole world seemed to care.

(If you have forgotten “Charlie’s Angels” or are too young to have any idea what the TV series was about, here’s everything you need to know: “Freeze!”)

Borrowing the editor’s 1969 Buick Skylark a little before nine o’clock that Friday night in August, Arthur and a fifteen-year-old compatriot drove to the hotel where the paper had been tipped off that Kate Jackson was staying before her clandestine weekend wedding. There Arthur found two sets of reporters milling listlessly around the parking lot, one from The New York Post, the other from the National Enquirer. While the fifteen-year-old chum distracted the tabloid reporters with questions and conversation, Arthur began to scout the cottages on the grounds of the hotel where, he reasoned, a TV star might try to hide out from the world press but also – at a key moment, like right before escaping to your own supposedly secret wedding – you could be discovered by the world press.

On the instant, a white Checker sedan pulled up to the first cottage Arthur was checking out. Arthur was standing right there. A beautiful woman jumped out of the Checker, rushed by Arthur, ran up a flight of stairs to the second floor of the cottage, threw open a door, and in a majestic rush, the beautiful woman, then Kate Jackson, and then her fiancée came pounding down the stairs. In a second the parking lot was ablaze with camera flashes and shouted questions. “Why can’t you leave her alone?” cried the beautiful woman as the beautiful people piled into the Checker.

Arthur took it all in, awed. “The photographers,” he said, “were on the other side of the car from where Kate was sitting and where I stood. She looked amazed, and then when she saw I didn’t have a camera, she smiled.”

The Checker groaned into gear. The Enquirer and Post guys ran for their cars. Arthur and the fifteen-year-old looked at each other for half a moment, and then sprinted for the Buick. It was a two-door sedan with an eight-cylinder, three-hundred-and-fifty cubic-inch engine delivering two hundred and eighty horsepower. Arthur had had his license for six weeks.

Ripping down village streets at speeds approaching forty miles an hour, it was the Checker first, the Post second, Arthur and fifteen-year-old third, and the Enquirer fourth. Occasionally hobbled by his all too recent experiences with Driver’s Ed, Arthur initially found himself doing things you probably shouldn’t do at key moments during a car chase, like stopping at Stop signs, signaling before turns, and letting other cars pass. When the Checker, Post, and Enquirer pulled into an empty A&P parking lot at the edge of town, Arthur was peeved to find himself in the unenviable position of fourth among four.

But there was a previously unforeseen advantage to being last at this point, because when he got there, the chauffeur of the Checker was standing in front of the Post and Enquirer cars, yelling at them. The second Arthur pulled in, the chauffeur jumped back into the Checker and pulled out. Arthur swung in right behind him. Now it was Checker, Arthur and fifteen year old, the Post and the Enquirer, heading for a state highway along a beach. “But then,” said Arthur, “The National Enquirer and New York Post passed me, and I realized, you know, these guys are serious.”

Hissing down the roadway behind the caravan, something in Arthur began to stir. It was, of course, his sense of fair play: It occurred to him that with his big V-8, he could pass the Post and Enquirer himself, spin the wheel, slam the brakes, block the road, and let the tormented bride and groom get away. But no! This was a race, and it was a race Arthur Rice was going to win!

Which is kind of inappropriate, actually, if you’re supposed to be chasing another car.

But Arthur pulled it off. At a police station in the next town, the Checker pulled in for a moment to complain to two startled young officers about the Post and Enquirer. When Arthur rolled by, the Checker backed out of its space, and suddenly Arthur found himself leading the car he was supposed to be following.

Now a moment of crisis: Would the drag race carry on to the next town, or brave the main street of the town they were actually still in? Arthur, in the lead, chose the next town. Unfortunately the Checker, in second, chose Main Street. When Arthur looped around in the Buick, he found himself last again, but now one of the cars in front of him was an Oak Bluffs police cruiser.

Some races just aren’t worth finishing, let alone winning, and at seventeen, with a license so new in his wallet it wasn’t yet laminated, and rocketing over former cart paths with a fifteen-year-old friend in pursuit of a pretty television star while also claiming to be reporters for the local paper – well, Arthur that night was wise beyond his years. It was a race he elected not to finish – the only one I know of in which he ever made that choice.

Looking back across forty-eight years, there are other stories I could tell you. At the net in a tennis game Arthur grew arms seventeen feet long and he could jump nine stories high – he smashed lobs back at you as if someone had given him a howitzer on his way up and he’d pulled the trigger on his way back down. Though the sails in his sixteen-foot Beachboat sloop were blown out like a hoop skirt, he made her go like a corsair even in the stiffest Edgartown outer harbor breeze. He monitored soda jerks making vanilla milk shakes as if he were a chemist, and they were rather dim-witted lab assistants. And if you want to know about some of the clothing he chose to wear in adulthood – well, all I can tell you is, the first seventeen summers I knew him, Arthur Rice dressed like a traffic light.

But I have run out of time and space. Happily, though, the story of Arthur Rice carries on. I see him now in his sisters, his mother, in the extraordinary person of his wife, Tina, who fought for her husband’s life with otherworldly reserves of dedication, of single-mindedness, of passion, of sympathy, of bravery, and of love – reserves that matched his own, and without which he would left us long ago.

And I see the best parts of his story living on in you, Andrew, and in you, Caroline. I see your father – man and boy – in your faces, in your smiles, in your senses of humor, of adventure, of intelligence, of bravery, and in your love for him, for your mom, and for each other. Nothing in his life of achievements made your dad prouder than you. And when your turn comes to jump into a Buick Skylark and chase a star through the night, he will be with you, as will all of us who know and love you as he did. And as he still does.