Before Tim Rice even stepped foot in a kindergarten classroom, he was welding.
His head was too small to fit a welding hood, but a pair of goggles with a bead chain fixed that problem quickly.
By the time he was in grade school, farmers were waiting until Rice was out of school to take their broken parts to his father’s metal shop, Rice Equipment, which was then a John Deer dealer.
“There was a farmer north of town that knew I could change universal joints in drive shafts, and if he tore one up, he didn’t come to the shop till after 3 o’clock because he knew I’d be out of school. He’d hunt me down,” Rice told The Dispatch on Monday. “… There’s no telling how many of those I did for him.”
Rice’s father, Thomas, opened the metal shop inside Starkville city limits in 1948, 10 years before Tim was born. As soon as Rice could fit the goggles, his dad was teaching him the trade.
One of the first projects he remembers was fixing a Radio Flyer red wagon his brothers had left in the rain to rust.
“Daddy let me braze with the ends and pieces of the rod,” he said. “I had to braze them together to be able to use them. I brazed that whole wagon up, all the holes in it until it could hold water.”
Rice fell in love with the problem-solving his dad’s job required. That same skill would eventually lay the foundation for the work he does now as Rice Equipment’s second owner.
“I just was fascinated, just being able to connect metal,” Rice added. “I have welded all kind of stuff over the years.”
Rice took the skills he learned from his dad to school with him. When he took a metal trades class his junior year of high school, he quickly took on the role of assistant teacher, introducing his peers to aluminum welding.
“The first thing the instructor said was, ‘What are you doing here?’” Rice said. “He knew me and knew my background – that I had been in the shop welding for customers before I took the class.”
When Rice was about 12-years-old, his father got a call from then Mississippi State University baseball coach Paul Gregory, who had a problem he needed to solve. Rice rode with his father to the baseball field, where there was a batting cage on home plate.
“When we got out there, Coach was showing him the problem with the cage sitting on home plate,” Rice said. “It was so heavy you couldn’t move it. (Dad) said, ‘OK, let me take a few notes.’”
The pair went back to the shop and ordered a new pair of front tire wheels that would be used for a lawnmower that they would affix to one side of the cage. With the added help of some axles and a bracket, they were soon able to refashion the cage so that it could easily be picked up and pushed by only one person.
“Well, that started a demand,” Rice said. “The coach from University of Florida in Miami came up, saw it. He had to have a cage. Well, my dad got to trying to figure out how to go about building them, and we had to build a machine to bend the pipe.”
They ordered 10,000 feet worth of tubing, enough to build about 47 batting cages, Rice said. With Gregory acting as the salesman, the Rices sent the batting cages all over the country, from Miami and Chicago to Bend, Oregon. Rice remembers helping his dad deliver one to Starkville High School that he believes is still here.
“My dad was driving a pickup,” he said. “I was sitting on the tailgate, holding the handle down, and we drove across Highway 12 and around to the high school with the cage and delivered it that way.”
After several years, aluminum cages that fold made the “Paul Gregory Batting Cage” obsolete, Rice said. But he still got his fair share of work from the university. He remembers welding handles onto cowbells from hardware stores before the trend took off.
Now, Rice spends his days working on everything from HVAC systems to dry cleaning machines. That variety is his favorite part of the job.
“Very seldom is it the same thing everyday,” he said.
At 66, Rice is starting to toy with the idea of retirement. Though now he has a lifetime of experience behind him, he still runs into problems he has to solve.
“There’s stuff that’s difficult to do, but one of the things my dad always said was, ‘The impossible just takes a little longer,’” he said.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
