Marines Use Polished Approach

My uncle, Jack Rice, a talented writer and former Marine had a life-long love affair with the Marine Corps and over the years produced a number of feature stories about various aspects of it for his weekly column in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He often would write about what a marine might do when confronted with a civilian problem. In his own humorous style he would then speculate on how a Marine would settle the problem, often with hilarious results. His articles always ended up sounding like something Dave Berry might have written – if he had been a Marine!

One of my favorites was a two-part series about Marines that appeared in the March 12th and 13th, 1977 issues of that newspaper where he first penned an article titled; Marines Use Polished Approach followed up by; Boot Camp Leaves It's Mark, the following day. This was the first article of a two-piece series written about the Marine Corps by my uncle, Jack Rice (SSgt, USMC, deceased) for the St. Louis Post Dispatch Newspaper in March of 1977. He was a staff writer there until his retirement in 1980.

Accompanying this 1977 sattire about President Truman's efforts to disband the Marine Corps "before the gray sands settled on Iwo Jima" was a picture that Jack had taken of one of his most prized posessions, a bit faded in this old newspaper clipping but clearly a Marine Corps recruiting poster circa 1912. It took up most of the space in the center of the newspaper article and it shows combat Marines, "Soldiers of the Sea," hitting the beach on a hostile shore, challenging the viewer to test his mettle and apply to the Marine Corps Recruiting Station at 122 North 7th St, St. Louis, Missouri. "Your Country Needs You!"

That very same poster now hangs on the wall in my office at home where his campaign hat, letters and articles and his other Marine Corps memorabilia reside because I was the one he trusted most to take care of them. The one thread between us that could never be broken was the fact that we were both Marines. This feature was written mainly as a plug for the same Marine Corps Recruiting Station in St. Louis but in it he could not resist a jab at a US President he admired - Harry Truman - the man who for whatever reason attempted to disband the Marines after WW ll.

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