Stories from the porch: Rice reflects on a life in Tarkington

J. Andrew Rice has spent much of his life building things. He built a consulting company from a typewriter and file cabinet in the corner of his bedroom into a firm that worked with communities across Texas, helped cities turn ideas into parks, streets, water systems and public buildings, and helped launch a leadership program designed to prepare people to serve their communities more effectively.

These days, Rice is building something else — a collection of stories meant to preserve a little of the character of East Texas for generations to come. Through it all, he has remained deeply rooted in Tarkington, where his family history stretches back nearly a century and a half.

Rice is the guest on this week’s episode of Bluebonnet News Headlines and Heartlines, where he talked about his career, his writing, faith, music and the community he still calls home.

The property where Rice and his wife, Susan, have lived for 44 years was once owned by his great-grandfather, Charles M. Rice, who came to the area in 1884. The area became known as the Rice Settlement, though Rice explained that he did not inherit his property but bought it in 1982 and later acquired additional land around it.

The house itself carries another piece of Tarkington history. Rice said it was built in 1908 by Abb Jett, a grandson of Burton B. Tarkington, for whom the community was named. Rice moved the house to its present location and restored it, and it later became the unlikely birthplace of a business that would eventually complete thousands of projects across Texas.

“I actually started in this house right over in the corner of our bedroom,” Rice said, recalling that a typewriter and file cabinet were about all he needed at first.

Rice, a 1971 Tarkington High School graduate, attended Baylor University and graduated in 1975. He later earned a master’s degree from the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

His career in local government began while he was still in graduate school. He worked for Galveston County and later became an administrative assistant to the city manager in La Marque before moving into consulting.

During the 1980s, cities and counties increasingly began contracting with private firms for specialized services, and Rice saw an opportunity. He founded Public Management in 1982, helping local governments plan community and economic development projects, identify funding sources and manage those projects through completion.

The work was particularly valuable for smaller cities and counties that did not have employees dedicated to navigating complicated state and federal funding programs. Public Management eventually expanded well beyond Southeast Texas, merging with firms in Dallas and Amarillo and serving clients throughout the state.

Rice estimates that during his years with the company, Public Management worked on approximately 2,300 projects totaling about $368 million. Many of those projects were close to home and remain in use today.

In Cleveland, Rice was involved in planning for the municipal park on SH 321 and projects involving the civic center, city hall and library. In Dayton, Public Management helped secure funding for water and sewer infrastructure as well as street and park improvements. In Liberty, projects included a large water tower visible near the entrance to the city and funding for the police station constructed after the previous facility was destroyed during Hurricane Ike.

Some of the work is easy to see, while much of it is buried underground in water and sewer systems. Rice said he still gets satisfaction from driving past places where projects he helped develop decades ago remain in use.

After years of sitting through city council meetings, working with elected officials and helping communities solve problems, Rice came away with some definite ideas about leadership. He believes most people who step forward to serve their communities genuinely want to do a good job, but wanting to lead and knowing how to lead are not necessarily the same thing.

That thinking eventually helped inspire the Leadership East Texas Academy. Rice has twice served as president of the Greater Cleveland Chamber of Commerce and remains a strong believer in chambers and civic organizations, in part because they bring people together who might not otherwise have much reason to work alongside one another.

“If you don’t work at it, communities fall apart,” he said.

The Leadership East Texas Academy focuses on skills such as emotional intelligence, productive conflict and understanding different personalities. Participants begin by completing a DISC assessment, which examines dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness.

For Rice, knowing yourself is part of learning how to deal with everybody else. A person may discover through the assessment that others see him or her very differently than expected, and that can be useful when the time comes to work through disagreements, make decisions or lead a group.

Rice also does not buy into the idea that good leaders simply arrive in the world that way.

“I’m a Peter Drucker guy,” Rice said. “Peter says leaders are made, not born. And I believe it.”

His hope is that academy graduates come away knowing themselves a little better and feeling more prepared to work with other people. Not all of them will become the person at the microphone or the one whose name everybody knows, and Rice says that is okay.

Sometimes leadership is simply recognizing what needs to be done, getting people moving in the same direction and not worrying too much about who gets the credit.

That same philosophy runs through much of Rice’s involvement in Tarkington. He was among those who helped get the Tarkington Roundup started in 2003, when the community gathered for the dedication of a historical marker recognizing the history of Tarkington schools.

The marker grew out of research by Sonya Callaway, who had studied the history of the school district. Rice and others with the former Tarkington Community Development Association decided to build an event around the occasion, and the Roundup continued in the years that followed.

The Tarkington Student Foundation eventually took over the event, which has become a familiar first-Saturday-in-October tradition. There are school choirs and bands, vendors, food, the Tarkington Community Library book sale, Project Graduation activities, community recognitions and karaoke.

The karaoke contest may be the only competition where having the best voice is not necessarily much of an advantage. Votes are made through donations, and Rice laughed about grandparents who have been known to put up plenty of money to make sure their grandchild wins.

That fun is part of the point. The Roundup raises money, but Rice believes what happens between the booths, performances and activities matters just as much.

“There are people I don’t see in Tarkington except at that event,” he said.

Tarkington ISD covers a large area, and it is entirely possible for people who have known each other for years to go months without crossing paths. The Roundup gives them a place to sit under the oak trees, catch up, hear the kids perform and spend a few hours remembering why they like calling Tarkington home.

Rice also credits Mollie Lambert with doing a “jam-up job” managing the event and serving as its emcee.

The Tarkington Student Foundation has grown considerably since those early years. Rice said it has raised well over $1 million and now has an endowment, with the money helping Tarkington graduates take their next step after high school.

That next step does not have to be a four-year university. Students can use the scholarship assistance for community college, vocational training and other post-secondary education.

Rice remembered one young man who asked whether he could use the money to earn his commercial driver’s license. The answer was yes, and he did not even need the full $2,000 available to him. That is what Rice likes about the program. The foundation is not trying to decide which students are most deserving based on class rank. It is trying to give young people who have a plan a little help getting started.

“Valedictorian gets the same as the last person in the class,” Rice said. “It’s just based on the desire to go and to do something.”

When Rice stepped away from Public Management, he did not settle into retirement. He already had interests in timber, real estate and other ventures, and in 2019, he was named Tree Farmer of the Year by the Texas Forestry Association.

He also finally had more time for something he had thought about doing since college — writing a book. Rice had some journalism experience from his graduate-school days, when he did stringer work and photography for newspapers. Fiction, however, gave him the chance to do what comes naturally to him: tell stories.

He began working seriously on his first novel about 15 years ago, and when the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly left him with more time at home, he finished “Seeds of Bliss.”

“I remember the day I finished it,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, I got it done. Now I got to see if anybody wants to read it.’”

Apparently, one book was not enough. Rice went on to write “What Is Unseen” and two volumes of “Tales from the Texas Timberlands,” collections of short stories inspired by East Texas people, places and experiences. All four books are part of his Texas Porch Stories collection.

The name is fitting for someone who grew up in Tarkington before air conditioning was available in most homes. Porches were where people went to get out of a hot house, find a breeze and sit for a while, and sitting for a while usually led to talking, and talking sometimes led to telling tall tales.

Rice remembers listening to his father, Jakie Rice, his uncle Bob Rice and other relatives tell stories. Uncle Bob was particularly memorable because he told his stories slowly, Rice recalled, partly because he was chewing tobacco and occasionally had to stop to spit.

Those were not formal storytelling sessions. They were simply people talking about something funny, strange or interesting that had happened, but Rice was listening. Decades later, some of those memories and the kinds of characters he knew growing up began finding their way onto the page.

The first story in the first volume of “Tales from the Texas Timberlands,” titled “A Businessman and the Cowboy,” grew from his family’s experience raising cattle in north Liberty County. Rice quickly learned that working cattle in East Texas timber country was nothing like the wide-open ranch scenes people associate with West Texas or even south Liberty County.

Sometimes, he said, you literally had to hunt the cows.

His family held a roundup every Labor Day, using dogs to find cattle hiding among trees, brush and bogs and move them toward the corrals. A cow that did not want to be found could apparently be pretty resourceful about staying behind a pine tree, and Rice still laughs telling the stories.

Much of “A Businessman and the Cowboy” is true, he said, although the names were changed “to protect the innocent.” That mix of memory, humor and recognizable East Texas characters is exactly what he hopes to preserve in his books.

At a book signing, someone once asked Rice why he writes stories about East Texas.

“Because we need some,” he replied.

He would like someone 25 or 30 years from now to pick up one of his books and get a sense of the people who lived here — not perfect people or larger-than-life heroes, but the funny, complicated and sometimes colorful people who call East Texas home.

Faith is woven into his writing as well. “Seeds of Bliss” centers on faith, while “What Is Unseen” explores hope. Rice considers the books faith-based rather than traditional Christian fiction, with characters who sometimes make mistakes and situations that are not cleaned up simply because faith is part of the story.

Long before he became an author, Rice had another creative outlet. He grew up at Rural Shade Baptist Church and later spent 30 years as its minister of music, serving in the church while also running Public Management.

Music was something he and Susan shared. She is an accomplished pianist, and while Rice led and sang, she could provide the accompaniment. Rice began singing as a small child under Cleveland music teacher Juanita Sample. He also took piano lessons, though he readily admits that singing suited him much better.

After retiring from the music ministry at Rural Shade in 2011 and later selling his business, Rice joined the Singing Men of Texas, a group of current and former ministers of music and other musicians. He sings second tenor, and the group performs concerts around the Houston area and occasionally travels for other performances.

Ask Rice to choose a favorite hymn and he has trouble narrowing the list. “Blessed Assurance” and “When We All Get to Heaven” are near the top, and a short story in the second volume of “Tales from the Texas Timberlands” takes its name from the latter and draws on some of his experiences as a minister of music.

During the Headlines and Heartlines interview, Rice proved he was still willing to sing without much warning. When asked for a sample, he settled on “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and sang part of it right there in his home.

Radio microphones are not new to him either. For about a decade, Rice joined his brother, Charlie Rice, and Jeff McClain on local radio, including broadcasts of Tarkington football games on the former KORG station in Cleveland.

The three also hosted a program they called “A Session of Blarney and Malarkey,” a name Rice readily admits was fairly accurate. There was serious discussion from time to time, but there was also plenty of laughing.

“We had a good time,” he said.

Rice is 73 now, but there is little indication that he has run out of things he wants to do. Another novel is underway, although he is keeping the details to himself for now.

He does not map out every chapter before he starts writing. He generally knows the theme, knows something about the person at the center of the story and has an idea of the journey that character will take. The rest comes as he writes.

“I want to tell stories,” Rice said.

To hear the full podcast episode, click the link below: