Sumio Koga of Watsonville California interviewing Dr. Howard Rice of San Anselmo, California, on May 4th, 1981. Dr. Rice served as the moderator of 191st General Assembly, which was held at Kansas City, Missouri, from May 22nd to May 29, 1979.

Well.

I would like to get just a very brief personal history of, you know, you were born and then who your parents were and then any recollection of your childhood days?

Or is it going.

It's going back.

Well, I was born in a small city in central Wisconsin. So by the name of Marshfield, my father was a school principal in a very small town named the Bathtub was Stratford. It was one of those schools where it was kindergarten through high school, a town of about a thousand people. And my father was the principal. He was the basketball coach. And he taught all the math and science. And my family moved them when I was about. Well, my first memory of church was in that town. My parents had both come out of Methodist backgrounds. Both my mother and father. But one, we lived in this little town. There were only three churches in town. There was a big Roman Catholic Church and a big Missouri Lutheran church, and then a little tiny Presbyterian church.

Oh, is your parents name?

My father's name was Howard. I'm a Jew. It was my mother's name, Alice. And because the Presbyterian Church was obviously much closer to a methodist church. My folks became Presbyterians. Why would they do that? Small town. And I remember not not personally, but I do have a few memories of the of the pastor who baptized me being a very, uh, what should I say? He pounded the pulpit a lot and yelled. And I remember that my folks told about it later. So it isn't my own personal memory. He was removed from office by the presbytery.

Oh, my God.

And he left the church and organized his own church, a Bible church, he called it. And so the Presbyterian Church in town was very badly split. And actually.

The honey that.

I was born in 1931, this would have been probably in the mid 33 or four.

Years.

And so my folks were among the continuing Presbyterians. The majority of the congregation went with him. But the loyal minority kept the building even down. And we moved to where my father left the the education business, I think partly because he had a just maybe more reminiscing than Iraq. He had a very bad experience with both the Roman Catholic and Missouri Senate Lutheran people in town. They were the great majority of the people in town, and they both had parochial schools. And so the school board was made up of exclusively Catholic and Lutheran people who did not send their children to the public schools and who tended to want to be on the school board only to keep the costs down. And Dad went through enough political fights on that score that it finally just drove him right out of the teaching business. And we moved to Marshfield in a city, larger city of about 12,000, where my father became a part of a of a school supply store and became a salesman that month and was on the road a lot. But it's sort of an interesting story. When we moved to from the small city of Stratford to the larger city of Marshfield. Right at the time we were moving, my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my baby brother. And the hospital wanted to know our religious affiliation. And my mother really wanted to say Protestant because they wanted to look around. Now, they were going to be in a town where they could have a choice that could be Methodists again. But instead of saying Protestant, the word Presbyterian popped out of her mouth because that's what they had been in this little town for a while. And so the Presbyterian pastor. Called up and they loved him right away. And so I never looked any further. My mother always says we became Presbyterians by a slip of my tongue. Cause I guess as a Presbyterian, I would have to say that was for ordained.

Pastor.

Rather than any of our. We were Presbyterians then in this larger city. And as I said, my father was a was a school supplies salesman. He he always got home nights. He didn't travel that far. It was mostly northern Wisconsin that he served. My parents were very active in the church. Both of them are really elders at various times. My mother, not until recently, but my dad, certainly of the time on and off, was serving on the session and the head of the stewardship campaign and you know, very many things. He was also active in civic affairs. He was a city council, city councilman and head of the Fire and Police Commission and all those kinds of things. So very civic minded person. And let's see, I have one brother. The one that was born only moved there. He's six years younger than myself. We're just the two children in the family owned way.

And then when you are at sick and you know.

Oh, that's recent history. That's more recent.

I see.

I was just gonna make a comment about my family.

Yes, sir.

One more thing. My mother's family is of Scandinavian descent. My grandfather's name was Olive Nelson. He came to this country from Sweden and my grandmother from Norway, so that my mother was raised as a as a little girl, not speaking English at all. She spoke only Swedish on that until she started go to school. And then she she learned English and forgot Swedish. Of course, a very common pattern. Lots of people with another language. And it's not until very recently that she has been kind of able to give yourself permission to to remember a little of that Swedish right when she comes out here to visit us and my wife is frequently taking her to an anchor bar. BERGMAN Film and mother will say has begun to say, I get some of those words now. She's beginning to. But I think she was made to feel very ashamed of her, of her background. She said the first English words she remembers were dumb, toe headed, sweet. And so this is a universal thing that happens to people in the United States. I'm afraid.

It's true.

My father's family are Pennsylvania Dutch. In background. We know very little about them because my grandfather just never talked about his family. We just know one thing, and that is that the family name should be spelled RTI. SS And that would be much more obvious than it's German, English or Welsh in the background. Oh, let's see. Growing up or anything particular, I think I had a reasonably normal childhood. Happy church was always an important part of my childhood. We we were regular church attenders and I think I was profoundly influenced by the pastor that was our pastor from the time I was five years old and till I was ordained, I same pastor he still living and still to me a very important person. And I remember one of the things he did that probably was part of what led me into being interested in the ministry. It was in the fifties when Senator Joe McCarthy, who was from Wisconsin, from our part of Wisconsin, was reigning supreme. And the General Assembly issued a pastoral letter, I think it was John McCarthy was. MODERATOR That was a pastoral letter to all Presbyterians, warning them about the dangers of this kind of militant anti-communism that was attacking everybody for being a communist. And our pastor preached a rather prophetic sermon on the subject, you know, very, very heavily Republican and conservative community. He took what I thought as a very brave and and noble kind of act in doing that. And I think my admiration for the for the role of the minister was greatly enhanced by by seeing him that way. I was always somebody who liked drama and public speaking all through high school, was active in in dramatics work and forensics and so on. And I think therefore had a kind of natural. Ability to to being interested in those sorts of things a minister does. I was, I think, first confronted by the challenge of the of the ministry as a way of life. When I was at Senior High Camp, as a as a as a young person, and I think made my decision at that point to enter the ministry. And as I recall, so that before I went to college, I had already I knew that I was headed for the ministry. I wasn't always sure why. I went through all kinds of turmoil and confusion about who I was and what I believed and so on. But I never remember ever questioning the call. But there was something there that was just sort of over and done with and taken for granted. There were other things I thought I might want to do with my life. I was always interested in art and architecture and sort of fancied myself being an architect or interior decorator or something like that. But I really never did take it terribly seriously. I sort of knew that that I was going to be a minister. Went to college. Carroll College. Which was at that time. The Senate. School for the Senate. Old Senate. In Wisconsin. In Waukesha, Wisconsin. And I majored in college in sociology and history. I think history has always been a first love of mine. I was the kind of kid who read history books instead of novels.

I like history, too.

And I just find history fascinating. I was I was in college that I discovered that I like to see someone in my early childhood. A teacher had told me that I couldn't sing on pitch and therefore I should not. She just mouthed the words and I never I never sang anymore after that until I got to college. And someone encouraged me to try out for the college choir, which I did. And it was through the college choir that I met my wife.

Online and distinct.

So I'm glad I was encouraged. So she was also. Her name is Nancy and her maiden name was Herb Zito ERP. She was also from Wisconsin, but from eastern Wisconsin, a city by the name of Two Rivers, the fifth child in our family. Her religious background was Congregationalist. And let's see our thing we're trying to think of in college, I was very active in dramatic work in college, even more than high school and got to play to particularly to me, important roles in and in plays. I was Romeo.

My goodness.

And I was Macbeth. And Macbeth is particularly an exciting role to play and I remember enjoying that a great deal. So college was a happy time. I made a lot of good friends. I had a roommate off through college that was a particular it has been for years a very close friend. So those were happy years. When I graduated, I graduated magna cum laude, so I did well in my grades in college, carried a scholarship all the way through and headed for seminary, McCormick Seminary in Chicago. So I stayed close to home and both college. And so I.

Heard.

Is it your McCormick graduate? Also loved my three years there and my wife went to accepted a job teaching first grade in a suburb of Chicago, suburb by the name of Mount Prospect. And I.

Just feel that mom.

And teen period I guess are PR always P.S. to the prospect.

Of prostitution.

And we were married after my second year of seminary. It was while I was at McCormick that I. I don't think I went to seminary with any particular vision of becoming a pastor of a church. I went to seminary thinking of myself more as a scholar, and I think my image was that I would be a teacher someday. And I I that image for part of my seminary years. I loved Old Testament studies and Hebrew, and I think I thought I might be a Hebrew scholar. Yeah. But a couple of things happened. One was in my middle year of seminary, the harmonics. Professor George Gibson.

Oh, yes.

And I called me into his office and asked me if I would be his teaching assistant and my senior year. And I found that very exciting, just to be asked to be a teaching assistant. And with my background and skills in public speaking and drama, I thought I could handle doing this in formal ethics. So I accepted. And then about two weeks later, George Ernest Wright called me and said he would like to have me be his teaching assistant in the Old Testament. And I had already, of course, accepted the analytics position. So I had to say no to the Old Testament one, even though I think if out of other things have been equal, that would have been the one I would have chosen. And I suspect had I chosen that, I would now be a professor of Old Testament some way. But because I chose the Homologs, I was more naturally then moved into the pastoral ministry area and also came under the influence of Marshall Scott, who was there with the program Presbyterians in Industry and the Ministers and Industry Program. I spent a summer of my seminary career, I guess it was between my first and second years, I think, in that program, and became interested in the inner city and urban church work, which in those in that era of that was in the fifties. I was at McCormick from 53 to 56. I had urban church was a high interest for us all. And I think I became committed then to to an urban church, a pastoral kind of ministry. When I graduated from McCormick, I was offered the role, I think it was then Bernadine Smith Fellowship. It was the fellowship given for general excellence. And I know it was worth $5,000, which in those days was a lot of money to go somewhere and study. But we were expecting a baby then, and I think I really wanted to get out of school and try my hand at something to see if I could really do the job of a pastor. And so I, I really never used the fellowship. I used a little bit of it to do some take a couple of courses in philosophy at the University of Minnesota, because I was a pastor there in Minneapolis, quite near the university. But other than that, I really never used it. And I guess kind of gave up the dream and found that I would ever be a professor and thought of myself then was exclusively as a pastor. My first parish, it was in Minneapolis, you know, it was a small, struggling inner city church in the northeast part of Minneapolis, which was the kind of Eastern European ghetto of Minneapolis. Minneapolis is basically a Protestant and heavily Scandinavian city, but not where we lived, where we lived. It was very heavily Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and there were Russians and Ukrainians, Czechs and Poles and people of those backgrounds and that, of course, Presbyterians had a little bit of a difficult time surviving. The name of the church was House of Faith, which I always thought was a lovely name for a church, much better than First Presbyterian. And I have to say, I was a pastor there from 1956 to 19, early 61. I left there in February of 61. It's not enough reflection on my background.

And then I was thinking that perhaps you could reflect upon the experiences I went through at Sausalito.

No, no, no. I was up in Astor there in Minneapolis or.

Minneapolis.

Roughly five years. And then from there I went back to Chicago.

Or Chicago.

When I had when I graduated from seminary, I remember clearly we were loading our stuff into the car and getting ready to move to Minneapolis. And my wife, Nancy, said to me, The one promise I want you to make is that we'll never have to come back to Chicago. She hated that. That part of it was that she really didn't live in Chicago. She commuted all the time back to this small prospect to teach, and she really would never quite got over feeling ill at ease in the city. But being a city person, I just loved Chicago, so I had a hard time making that commitment, but I promised I would never bring her back to Chicago. Well, after we were in Minneapolis those five years, I got a letter and a call from the presbytery office in Chicago, one from the Board of National Missions, saying that they were going to start a new kind of inner city church in Chicago. What is this, in a sense, a kind of new church development? What they were doing was they were taking three churches in this particular part of Chicago, one Presbyterian and two Methodist churches, closing all three of them, and then starting a new congregation. And, of course, some of the members would come out of those three little struggling churches. But it was a wonderful opportunity to kind of put one's best efforts into seeing what you could do starting from scratch. And so I accepted the call. Nancy went with me to an interview, and she didn't. She was convinced that that's where God wanted us. And so it was not against her will at all that we went to Chicago, but with her enthusiastic sense of call. And so that has always been true of us that I've trusted the fact that if God called me, he also called Nancy so that we had to double check to see whether that was the case here. We have got very happy years in Chicago. We were there from 61 to 68 from the beginning of 61 to the end of 68. So it's almost a year. And that's a wonderful experience. I learned a great deal. I think Minneapolis was a good preparation for us. For Chicago, it was a minneapolis is a rather pleasant city. So even in this neighborhood where where we where we were, it was a kind of port of entry community. There was a lot of poverty, but it wasn't obvious kind of poverty. I mean, the houses didn't look terribly deteriorated. There were big high rise apartments or public housing projects or anything. They were individual houses. They might have had a couple of families living in them.

Most of our neighbors were they.

Mostly factory people. And that was true of the congregation. We had a couple of professional people there, but there are a lot of the professional people is an interesting man. I think I should tell a story. This is where he was an engineer, I think by trade and was certainly the wealthiest man in the church by far. And the first week I was there as a young kid, right out of seminary, 24 years old, he took me to lunch and he said, Pastor, you're going to find this out from somebody else, or you might as well. For me, my pledge is one third of the entire budget of the church, and I guess I must have looked a little gray and ashen. And he said, I just want to reassure you that there's no way that you could make me give up, make giving that pledge. There's nothing you can say or do that would stop me so you don't have to be afraid of me. And he said, I don't want you to ever give me any special attention or treat me any differently than you treat anybody else in this congregation. That pledge will be there. Whether I like you or don't like you, whether I agree with you or don't agree with you. So do do what you think must be done. Disagree with me if you need to and that pledge will be there anyway. It doesn't have to do with you. It has to do with my commitment to Jesus Christ. And I've always admired that man. Isn't that a wonderful attitude?

Tremendous.

I learned a lot from him and we did disagree. He was in many ways the most conservative man in the church. And so we did disagree, but never was that pledge ever taken away. I thought that was simply a kind of a witness I wish there were more of at church today in 1960. This is just funny reminiscing here. But in 1968, I. That was the election of President Kennedy and Kennedy Nixon campaign. And I remember seeing in the Minneapolis newspaper all kinds of ads signed by ministers who were concerned about the possibility of a Catholic in the White House. I had been raised with pretty negative feelings about Catholics in a very heavily Catholic part of Wisconsin. But I think there was something about that that I didn't like. And the more I heard about it and the more I listened to the radio and saw these preachers coming out against Kennedy because he was a Catholic, I guess the more I, I got upset. I was also I was raised in an atmosphere where Catholics were not to be dealt with very much. I was raised by parents who were avid liberal Democrats. Both my mother and my dad were Roosevelt Democrats. And so I guess that I came by that kind of naturally. So I called the Kennedy for president headquarters one day and I said, Is it I'm a Protestant minister? Is there anything I could do to help counteract this pressure? And they said, Why, yes, come right down. So they wanted to be right away. So I went down to the office and they said after we had talked a while, they said, we would like to have you go on television the night before the election. Well, I was with Senator Gene McCarthy, who was then a Democratic senator from Minnesota. And we'd like to have you go on. We've got a Lutheran minister that will join you. The three of you go on and do an hour long special on religion and the White House to try to counteract this this anti-Catholic anti Kennedy feeling. So the night before the election, I was on television for an hour with this Lutheran minister who, by the way, lost his job the next day as Congregation Fire. And and Senator McCarthy had sort of the most exciting political adventure I ever had was the election eve. Therefore, that night, watching the returns, we did it in the McCarthy's home and at the Humphrey's and Freeman's and the whole kind of Minnesota Democratic operation. And of course, Kennedy did carry Minnesota. He did not carry Wisconsin or the polls in the states around Minnesota that he carried Minnesota. And so I like to think I helped have that happen.

God, yeah.

Shortly thereafter, there was some a call from the Democratic headquarters asking me if I would consider running for Congress because there was a congressman from Minnesota at that time by the name of Walter John, kind of a famous man. He was a deeply religious man and very committed to to Shanghai, China. And the Democrats had a hard time ever taking that seat. They couldn't seem to be who they thought. If they ran a preacher against him, it might help. But at that point in time, I was already interested in the possibility of the job in Chicago. So I like to think that life might have been different if I had taken them up on it, because the person that did was Walter Mondale always. And so I think, well, Walter, if it weren't for me, you might not have been vice president. So in any event, Chicago was really very exciting. As I said, this was a neighborhood on the near west side of the city, very much of an inner city neighborhood, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Chicago, a neighborhood that had it never been anything but a basically a slum community, I mean, had been built for laborers originally for for the Germans for immigrants into Chicago area.

Was that now the.

Southwest side was called Pilsen Peerless SC in the area just on the on the bank of the Chicago River. And the neighborhood had gone through one change after another. The Germans were followed by the Irish who came in to build the railroads. And so the a lot of the tenements were built for the Irish railroad workers, and the Irish were succeeded by the Slovaks and the Lithuanians. And then the Czechs came in, in great numbers, and that they really gave the neighborhood its name and its identity. And and then when we were there in 1961, the neighborhood was becoming Hispanic. There was a small black community and some Appalachian white. But the new influx of people was people that was being. To come in was Hispanic. By the time we left, it was a dominantly Spanish neighborhood and now is almost 100% white. So part of the job there was to to begin a ministry that would not simply take those members of those three little churches that had been closed, but with them extended outreach to the black and Hispanic communities. And we were able to do that. So during that time, I was there. We had developed a congregation that was integrated black and white. And then we began services in Spanish and ultimately had a had a bilingual congregation. And by the time I left, about a third of the congregation were Spanish speaking. It is not 100% white because the young man who was my assistant there succeeded me. And he was a Mexican-American, well, a mexican from Mexico, but a McCormick graduate and did his fieldwork there. He was a comic and was a very, very able man. And so we succeeded in building a congregation. We built a new building that was one of the well run. The architectural prize of the year, I remember, is the best public building in America. It's tiny little church building, but just delightful, charming building.

Who was the architect?

Edward Dart was his name is now deceased, but a very creative architect. And the the the people, of course, that were part of that congregation and therefore, the building committee was not. There were very few professional people in that neighborhood. The only ones that were there were social workers. So it was very much a community of blue collar workers, and they were out of their blood and it looked like a church. That was one of the things they made very clear. And it was it didn't look like a church. It had real charm and still it's just a lovely building. They've added to it since I've been gone to build a unit for day care.

How much does it cost?

Oh, I think it seems to me it was like $150,000. That was all. And these the people of the congregation were only about 200 members paid an incredible proportion of that way, more than the Board of National Missions thought they would be able to do. But they it was the first new building in 50 years in that neighborhood, and it was an important symbol. All the other churches had left, all the other Protestant churches had moved out of the neighborhood. So this was the one church left. And it was a it was a symbol, of course, of our intention to stay and ministered to the community. So those were great years of we. When we first moved to Chicago, we lived in a in a large development housing, middle income, housing, development, quite a ways from the church. It was the only place they could find it for us. So I think it was about two and a half years we lived there. It was a very integrated development, very nice apartment buildings, but the children in the project were almost all black. And so our first experience moving from very white Minneapolis was to see our oldest daughter start school as one of two white children in her class. And that was an interesting experience for us. We learned a lot and I think became much more sensitive then to the whole issue of race in America. Through that experience and through all of our time there in Minneapolis or Chicago, we left Chicago in 68 just as the Democratic Convention was going on that famous convention, the confrontation in the streets and so on. It was a difficult time to leave. I don't think we would have left Chicago then, and I'm not sure I would have left for Midwest ever if it had not been for multiple sclerosis. But by the time it was in the early sixties that I began to have my first difficulties.

I see. Yes.

And went through a long time of not knowing what it was, but of being going to one doctor after another and going through a lot of tests. And ultimately the diagnosis was multiple sclerosis. And my, um, my neurologist then said to me that I needed to get out of the Midwest and away from winters because every winter my condition would get worse and then it would improve a little in the summer, but not enough. And you just simply said you will prolong your life and your usefulness if you get out of this climate.

Yeah.

So I went through a period of updating a dossier and trying to to get a call somewhere where there would not be winter. But because I at that time I did, I didn't need to use it came to get around partly partly to prevent myself from falling because I used to fall a lot. But also the cane was also a sign that I wasn't drunk because I sort of staggered when I walked and people would think I had been drinking or something and I wanted not to convey that impression. I was still walking just with the cane when I came here in 1968. But the condition did deteriorate then to the point where I needed to use crutches. And then shortly after or it was about ten years ago that I fell down a flight of steps and apparently that took care of whatever remaining strength there was in my legs, because that was the end of it, my ability to use crutches. And so I've been in a wheelchair ever since.

And then which did you come to?

I came here to the seminary. I had met Dr. Come, who was present in the seven area General Assembly in Minneapolis. I think that must have been in 66. 68, I guess. I guess it was because 67 I was a commissioner to the Portland Assembly, the one that adopted the confession of 67. I was a commissioner also from Minneapolis Presbytery to the assembly. I believe it was 58 in Indianapolis. So 67 was my second time as a commissioner, which was fairly unusual. I was pretty young yet to attend a commissioner twice. I don't know quite how I did that, but then it.

Certainly is still true.

I don't know. I don't think I even tried to get elected. I suddenly was there from Chicago Presbyterian and proper of a Presbyterian.

So many.

Years. So anyway, that was exciting. Both both times to become a commissioner. I had also. In terms of I'm just going on here in terms of my national church responsibilities because I was in both Minneapolis and in Chicago, in an urban church that was supported in part by the Board of National Missions. I used to go to National Mission staff meetings. Well, I see now they'd have all the urban church pastors together for conferences, and I served on the National Committee on the Nature of the Ministry, which was going on in the late fifties and sixties. I was active in Presbyterian Synod, especially in Minnesota, chaired the Church and Society Committee. I don't think that's what we called it in those days. Social education is what we call in those days. I would send it chairman of the committee and therefore met the some of the national staff people. And so on those days I served on a national committee called to sort what was it called, renewal and extension of Ministry RTM. And that's when I first met Arnold. He served on that committee with me. And the goal of that was to try to look at ways in which renewal was going on in churches and how we might extend that renewal to other churches. I don't know how successful it was, but I remember I learned a lot about the National Church and developed a high respect for people in national staff positions. I respect that I kept for the rest of my life in 1967, while I was a commissioner at the Assembly in Portland. The most personally exciting thing that happened to me was one day we were meeting. This is a kind of a funny story of me. In the middle of the meeting we were observing a fast I think it was for the Vietnam War. I'm pretty sure it was way back there. Sure it was. And I've never been any good at fasting. So I had squirreled away a candy bar beforehand and I remember biting into the candy bar and cracking silly. I felt like God was punishing me for breaking the fast, I think. Right, because the pain was just intense. I remember. And so I had gone out of the room, left the assembly floor to go out and take an aspirin while I was out of the room. I was elected to represent the United Presbyterian Church at the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala. Oh, my goodness. And when I came back into the room, my older college and seminary roommate was a commissioner that year too, and he came running up to me and said, Congratulations, you're going to Sweden? And I thought he was teasing me. And then when I got back to my seat, my fellow commissioners sitting on either side of me said the same thing. So I gathered that it had happened while I was out of the room and it was very sad. I couldn't believe where my name had come from that I should be elected because there were only 14 delegates to the World Council representing the whole Presbyterian Church.

Yeah.

So where I, how I got into that mix, I don't know. But that was a very, very exciting adventure for, for me. Nancy and I went together to go to Sweden that summer of the summer of 68.

That was the first time.

The first time I'd ever been abroad at all. And of course, the assembly lasted for about a month. We didn't get around Sweden very much. We were pretty busy in Uppsala the whole time, but then Nancy and I took a few weeks. I don't remember how many it was, I think maybe once a month and travel up into northern Sweden where my grandfather had come from and cross into Norway and. Took a boat down the coast of Norway and ended up in Copenhagen. Nancy's people were from her mother's family, from Denmark, so we got to see a little bit of all three of those countries.

And that great.

Came back to the states. And about two weeks later moved to California. That was our one summer. It was quite a summer.

Just looking at that tape. Right.