John Rice; one of the world's shortest twins
Hyfler/Rosner
feature article from the NY Times.
Palm Beach County Journal; A Community Mourns a Favorite Son
Who Defied the Odds and Convention
By ABBY GOODNOUGH (NYT)
Published: November 14, 2005
Almost from the day they were abandoned as newborns in a
hospital nursery here, everyone in Palm Beach County knew
John and Greg Rice.
If you did not know them personally, at least you had
spotted them in recent years whizzing along on matching
electric scooters, or honking at you from a Rolls-Royce or
another of their custom-fitted snazzy cars. You might have
seen them address a school assembly, marshal a parade, or
peddle real estate on infomercials.
They were unforgettable, and not only because, at 2 feet 10
inches tall, they were believed to be the world's shortest
adult twins.
So Palm Beach County mourned last week when John Rice, the
older twin by five minutes and the more gregarious of the
two, died of a heart attack at 53. Flags flew at half-staff
outside City Hall in Lake Worth, where John Rice lived and
sounded off at City Commission meetings, one of his
passions. Hundreds of past and current county residents
signed an online guest book on the Web site of The Palm
Beach Post, trading memories of the brothers.
Everyone, it seemed, stopped to reflect on why John and Greg
Rice were such fixtures here, as much ''a part of Palm Beach
County as the palm trees,'' as one admirer wrote. They were
rich, almost a requirement in these parts, and very funny.
But those who knew the brothers said they were also
uncommonly generous and compassionate.
''They were the ringleaders of this community,'' said
Representative Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from
West Palm Beach who often hobnobbed with the Rices. ''No
matter what adversity fell on their community, they'd be out
there rallying the troops.''
They met with a lot of adversity themselves, but luck,
ambition and potent senses of humor helped them rise above
it. The brothers were born with dwarfism -- a condition
marked by curved spines, small limbs and oversized heads --
and were abandoned by their mother at St. Mary's Hospital.
But eight months later, social workers found a foster family
for them -- Pentecostal Christians who raised them with
abundant love and gave them confidence, joie de vivre and
the urge to give back.
''Our mom sat us down and told us, 'Yes, you guys are
different, but think of yourselves as a couple of dimes in a
handful of nickels,' '' Greg Rice said in an interview this
week. ''She said, 'It's up to you to decide what you are
worth.' ''
Both foster parents died of cancer when the twins were
teenagers. After graduating from Palm Beach High School,
where they played cornet in the marching band and rode to
class on friends' shoulders, they paired up as door-to-door
salesmen and then as real estate agents, selling more than
50 homes in their first year and becoming millionaires.
They also tried out Hollywood circa 1980, landing roles in a
short-lived sitcom based on the movie ''Foul Play'' and a
reality show called ''Real People.'' But their flair for
showmanship got more mileage at home, where they touted real
estate listings on a weekend television show that eventually
aired in markets around the country. They also wrote and
starred in several dozen campy commercials for a local
exterminator called Hulett Environmental Services, battling
termites, ants and cockroaches to great comic effect.
Along the way, the brothers became motivational speakers,
preaching self-confidence and warning against self-pity at
schools, churches, workplaces and conventions around the
nation.
''They have this incredible story to tell that leaves
everybody in the palm of their hand,'' said Ray Holland, a
friend, speaking at John Rice's memorial service. ''The
message of it is it's not how big a person is that makes a
difference, it's how big they think.''
Adversity struck John Rice again in 1990, when an automobile
crash left him in a body cast for months. He insisted on
coming to Hulett's holiday party that year, albeit on a
hospital bed wrapped in Christmas lights.
''I never met anybody whose glass was so full,'' said Tim
Hulett, the company president.
Greg Rice, now the marketing director for Hulett, likes to
barbecue for crowds at his home here on weekends. But his
brother, he said, rarely came; he was too busy riding his
scooter around Lake Worth, where he lived in a yellow
cottage with a Dalmatian named Zippo, or sampling new
adventures. He went Jet Skiing, parasailing and scuba
diving, rode go-karts and three-wheelers, played harmonica
at bars in Key West and once piloted a pontoon boat to the
Bahamas.
He was active in Lake Worth, pushing for the scrappy town's
redevelopment and mischievously calling opponents ''cave
people'' -- ''Citizens Against Virtually Everything.''
''He was at every one of those town hall meetings and had a
public comment about everything,'' Greg Rice said. ''He'd
drag a stool up to the lectern. He threatened many times to
run for mayor.''
The brothers were coveted guests at civic events: the
Marathon of the Palm Beaches, the annual celebrity dog wash
at Safe Harbor Animal Sanctuary and Hospital, Lake Worth's
Christmas parade, which they emceed for years, and on and
on. Greg Rice said they called it ''paying our civic rent,''
an impulse learned from their foster parents.
''Every time you turned around,'' Representative Foley said,
''they were there.''
On the newspaper's Web site, people recalled meeting the
Rice brothers on jury duty, by a hotel pool, at motocross
races, at the Palm Beach AutoMall, even at a pest-control
convention in Hawaii.
''I have been away from Florida for a long time,'' wrote
Nicole Brandon of Edinburgh, Scotland, ''but my memories as
a little kid are punctuated at all the most random times by
the Rice brothers.''
Bill Cottrell of Sarasota wrote that the brothers' story
helped his wife succeed in real estate. ''Doris was a timid,
shy farm girl and felt she was in over her head,'' he wrote.
''I remember her saying: if John and Greg can overcome their
challenges so can I.''
One woman wrote that her husband used to work at Hulett with
John Rice, adding: ''He says John is the reason he is the
person he is today. 'Think Big' is what he always said. And
you know what, since then he's stopped drinking, bought a
house and invested his money.''
John Rice was leaving a bank on Nov. 4 when he fell and
broke his leg. When he went in for surgery the next day,
Greg Rice said, he had a heart attack while going under
anesthesia.
''We would talk 20 times a day on the phone,'' Greg Rice
said, ''but we never talked about if one of us died before
the other.''
Greg Rice will emcee Lake Worth's Christmas parade alone, he
said, an empty seat beside him for his brother.
Photos: Greg Rice with a photograph of himself with his twin
brother, John, who died on Nov. 5. (Photo by Barbara P.
Fernandez for The New York Times); Greg, left, and John Rice
became entrepreneurs, motivational speakers and celebrities.
(Photo by Scott Wiseman/The Palm Beach Post); The Rice twins
were fixtures in Palm Beach County. Greg, left, and John at
a 1956 wedding. (Photo courtesy of William and Helen Saxon,
via The Palm Beach Post)
Los Angeles Times
November 24, 2005 Thursday
John Rice, 53; Turned Physical Liability Into an Inspiring
Asset
BYLINE: Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer
John Rice was a self-made millionaire who, at 2 feet 10
inches, was in the record books as one of the world's
shortest twins. But neither his wealth nor his extremely
diminutive stature are what people say they will most
remember about him.
Rice and his identical twin, Greg, are household names in
Palm Beach County, Fla., where they prospered in real
estate, ran a motivational company and attained celebrity as
the improbable television pitchmen for a local pest control
company.
Devoted civic boosters, they led parades, spoke at schools,
visited hospitals and hosted charity events with a brio
unimaginable for two who struggled from birth against
dreadful odds.
So when John, the more extroverted twin, died unexpectedly
Nov. 5, Palm Beach went into mourning.
He had just completed an errand at a local bank the day
before when he slipped and broke his leg. He died while
being administered anesthesia for an operation to repair the
broken bone. He was 53. An autopsy is being conducted to
determine the cause of his death.
As news of Rice's death spread, the flags at City Hall were
lowered to half-staff. Hundreds packed his funeral a week
later, and tributes poured in to the local paper and a
memorial website.
Many of the testimonials came from old classmates,
colleagues, childhood friends and former teachers. Other
messages were sent by strangers, whose familiarity with Rice
came from random contacts: He was the Christmas elf who
handed out toys to children in the hospital; the sporty
figure who whizzed down the sidewalk on his Segway scooter;
the debonair gent who often walked his Dalmatian, Zippo,
around Lake Worth, the small town about 10 miles south of
West Palm Beach where he lived in a yellow cottage he had
renovated. He was such a fixture at Lake Worth city
commission meetings that officials kept a stool by the
podium just for him.
"John was truly a Palm Beach County institution, and for us
natives," said Bart Arnold, one of dozens of residents who
wrote to the Palm Beach Post last week. "It feels like a
part of our soul is now gone."
The Rice brothers were abandoned shortly after their birth
at a West Palm Beach hospital Dec. 3, 1951. They lived in
the hospital for eight months until Mildred and Frank
Windsor became their foster parents.
Frank, a school custodian, and Mildred, a full-time mother
and devout Pentecostal Christian, already had two children
and had recently lost a third in childbirth. They were
smitten by the tiny babies and decided to give them as
normal an upbringing as possible.
"Our mother, being wise beyond her formal education, was
able to convey to us that yes, we were always going to be
different, but it was OK to be different," Greg Rice said in
a telephone interview last week.
"She said, 'It's up to you to determine what your real value
is going to be in life. You're like a couple of dimes in a
bunch of nickels.' "
That homespun philosophy didn't take all the sting out of
other children's taunts, but it kept the brothers going,
even when Mildred Windsor died of cancer when they were in
eighth grade and their foster father Frank died two years
later.
They took regular classes, shouldered their own huge
backpacks on Boy Scout hikes and played the cornet in the
high school band. They seemed so at ease with themselves
that other people usually found it impossible to resist
their charms.
A former high school classmate, Susie Biganski Kendall, told
the local paper last week that when Spin the Bottle was
played at Saturday night get-togethers, all the girls "hoped
and prayed like crazy that they would get a kiss from John
or Greg, THE most popular boys in school."
From the start, John -- older than Greg by five minutes --
was the more adventuresome of the pair.
One day, in the middle of watching a TV western, he dashed
outside to the bicycles that had languished on the porch for
years because the twins -- then in grade school -- were too
short to ride them.
He'd been engrossed in a shootout scene in which one of the
characters got away by jumping off a balcony onto his trusty
steed.
"A little lightbulb went off in John's head," Greg recalled,
and the next thing he knew was that his brother had taken
one of the bikes and propped it next to the bumper of the
family car.
He positioned the pedal high, then climbed up on the bumper
and jumped, pushing down on the pedal as he aimed for the
seat. After many falls, he managed to maintain enough
momentum to pedal to the end of the driveway and turn wide
to return to the top. Soon Greg was launching himself in a
similar manner, teetering, crashing and trying again until
he, too, got the maneuver right.
"John was always the test pilot for me," Greg said. "That's
the way we did a lot of things in life."
It was John's idea, for instance, to try real estate. He and
Greg had been honing their sales skills since they were high
school seniors selling cleaning and personal care products
door-to-door. John would take one side of the street and
Greg the other, checking at the end of each block to see who
had sold the most.
By the early 1970s, after a year of community college, they
were training other salespeople for the company. When he got
tired of the travel involved, John proposed that they switch
to real estate and sell homes in Palm Beach.
They set a goal the first year of selling 50 homes. They
sold 57. Eventually, they started buying and selling houses
on their own. According to Greg, that's how they made their
first million dollars.
In the late 1980s they launched their own Sunday morning
real estate show, called "Television Home Hunt," which
featured decorating, home improvement and moving tips in
addition to homes on the market. The half-hour program was
airing in 30 cities around the country, including Los
Angeles, before the Rices sold it in the early 1990s.
That show led them to the pest control business. They had
approached a local exterminator, Hulett Environmental
Services, to advertise on the program but Hulett couldn't
afford to produce its own commercials. The Rice brothers
offered to make the ads in exchange for a stake in the
growing company.
Greg became Hulett's marketing director, while John wrote
the commercials. Both of them starred in the ads, which
featured them as wacky sendups of various types of household
insects. In John's favorite spot, they are termite Elvis
impersonators who sing -- to the tune of "Hound Dog" -- "We
aren't nothing but a termite, eatin' all the time...."
In other spots, they battled bugs in outer space and
termites on Noah's Ark. Greg portrayed the voice of
reason -- "Let's call Hulett!" -- while John was the
do-it-yourselfer whose bumbling always led to disaster.
Since 1990 they produced 45 ads, which won industry awards
and were seen in several states, including California, in
versions customized for other pest control companies.
The Rice brothers also appeared on "Real People," the "Maury
Povich Show," "That Quiz Show" and in 13 episodes of "Foul
Play," a sitcom that featured them in roles as landlords.
In between those jobs, they ran their businesses. They
founded a motivational company called Think Big and a plant
nursery called Tree Feet Tall that specialized in dwarf
citrus trees.
Along the way, John learned to ride a personal watercraft,
snow ski, parasail, fly a plane and make stained glass. He
played the harmonica with bands in local bars.
"John just loved every minute of every day," said longtime
friend Michael Kintzel, whose West Palm Beach company
produced the Rices' bug ads. "He loved to make people laugh.
He just had fun. His size never got in the way of anything."
In 1990, he was hit by a driver who ran a stop sign. The
accident fractured one of the vertebrae that connect the
skull to the spine. He wore a full-length body cast for a
year, then spent 18 months in the hospital for physical
therapy.
"He had to relearn just about everything," his brother said,
including how to walk and feed himself.
Greg said he never once heard John complain or pity himself
during the arduous recovery. "That was just another test,"
John said of the accident.
When the holidays grew near, John wheeled into the Hulett
Christmas party with festive lights strung on his hospital
bed. By the end of the decade, he was back doing all the
things no one expected of a person who was barely 3 feet
tall, such as piloting a pontoon boat to the Bahamas.
Pontoons are generally thought of as party boats for rivers
and lakes, not for travel on the open sea.
The one John bought didn't even come with a radio.
Nonetheless, he and three stalwart friends safely crossed
the 50 or 60 miles from West Palm Beach to the Grand
Bahamas. The return took twice as long because of rough
waters, but they made it in about 11 hours.
The feat was vintage Rice.
"A person is not measured from the top of their head to the
bottom of their feet," he often said, "but from their
shoulders to the sky. It all depends on how big you think."
At his funeral, billed as a "giant" celebration of his life,
500 mourners were in attendance. At his graveside, a dozen
bagpipes performed "Amazing Grace."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: In addition to selling real estate, John
Rice was a motivational speaker, hosted a TV show and was a
partner in a pest control firm. PHOTOGRAPHER: Associated
Press PHOTO: JOHN RICE: John, right, with twin brother Greg,
who said, "Our mother, being wise beyond her formal
education, was able to convey to us that yes, we were always
going to be different, but it was OK to be different."
PHOTOGRAPHER: John Viles Fox
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