The La Crosse Tribune from La Crosse, Wisconsin • 9

Sunday, October 29, 19789 Sunday Features He's expert at the of living Ray Bice painting into varied career C. Bice works on a watercolor painting in his study Staff Logan High School, under the auspices of the La Crosse Adult Vocational School. Eventually he not only graduated, but became chairman of the vocational school's board of directors, serving on the board for 27 years. Other boyhood beginnings came to fruition in adulthood. There were those glorious childhood afternoons of vaudeville, sitting through two matinees in the Bijou Theater to watch the magic show.

Admission was a nickel, but you could sit there all afternoon and see the second show free. The streetcar fare also cost a nickel, but with only one five-cent piece in his pocket, Bice would walk the eight-or-nine-mile round trip to save the fare. Later, during the Depression, Bice was hired to do some home remodelling and was thrilled to recognize his employer as Walter Miekle-john, a magician who had performed with Hou-dini. Meiklejohn promised to reward a good remodelling job with magic lessons, and Bice became his disciple, studying his magic tricks night after night, all winter long. During the '40s, before the outbreak of World War Bice took a job as a professional magician with Standard Oil Co.

Possibly it was a good training ground for the next career he was about to embark upon. Like politics, it too required a little gift of gab. Although today he still does an occasional sleight-of-hand trick with sponge balls, silk scarves or ropes, he confines his act now to visiting children, for his sense of tact led to selling the majority of his magicians paraphen-nalia shortly after retiring from politics. The average person remembered me for my magic and forgot what I worked so hard for. Friends kept asking me to give shows.

If I did some and turned down others, it created hurt feelings. So I sold all my equipment and retired Every spare inch of space is hung with Bices watercolors, which spill into the hall -and into other rooms. One of the most abstract is the one his wife, Mary, says is her favorite a winter scene whose muted grays and stark whites convey the frigid hush of a winter day. The controlled emotion and purity of line give it an Oriental feel. Another landscape, painted in incandescent blues and purples, was done under the tutel-edge of Louise Drumm, who gave him five lessons the only formal training hes ever had.

Miss Drumm, a former art supervisor with the La Crosse Area Public School District, held landscape classes for a small group of artists while drifting down the Black River on a 33-foot houseboat Bice and his four children completed five years ago. Virtually all the painting are representational. Although Bice claims to paint largely from imagination, the vista from the western windows of his Hiawatha Islands home is clearly a constant source of inspiration. Here, while trees splash their last golden-leaved sunshine by the shores of a placid, winding river and bluffs loom remotely in the background, its hard to tell where canvas leaves off and nature begins. Bice is presently busy with the business end of home building, developing a 70-acre tract just west of Holmen.

But he proudly points to the woodwork in his own home, which was formed with his own personal labor. Bice designed the home, was his own contractor and did the carpentry for most of the interior finishing. The Hiawatha Islands home was built in 1968, upon his marriage to Mary Rice, a widowed next-door neighbor. Bice had been the contractor when Mary and her former husband, Alfred, had built their home in La Crosse. art has mixed and magic i.

from magic, too, he says. His disappearing acts may be more memora- ble, but Bice authored legislation which has left a permanant imprint on our society. Running as a Republican, he was frequently considered an anomoly, as he championed the little man and, upon occasion made enemies of big business. He strove to improve conditions for the mentally ill and handicapped, recalling many pathetic stories from this constituents, who would come to his home with their problems. One of his proudest accomplishments in the Senate, he says, is the speed-limit legislation passed in 1949 after four years of effort.

Until then, Wisconsin had no speed limit on the open highway. Americans were coming back safe and alive after World War only to drive at reckless speeds often drunk on the highway, he says. Forced to venture twice weekly to Madison, he felt he was taking his life in his hands everytime he got the car on the road. It made my blood boil to see them risking not just their own lives but mine too, he says. Bice also fought this time unsuccessfully to raise Wisconsin's legal beer-drinking age to 21, to conform with Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois.

A strong lobby from the breweries blocked him, he believes. And then came what he calls the monkey wrench of legislation making 18-year-olds legal adults everywhere. Political battles are past, but he recalls them with an intensity which seems the hallmark of all his activities. Today, Bice has put the life of a politician and a magician behind him. But he goes about the art of living with a passion that still shows a streak of magic, because when youre with him, he tricks you into believing 82 is a very young age to be.

were bigtime if we got $3 a night. While attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison majoring in agriculture, he played with Joey Tantillo and his old-time band. He served with the Army Air Corps for three years during World War II and was a member of an Army Air Corps quartet that sang on The Major Bowes Radio Hour. While stationed in North Africa, he often played with a group in a GI club in Casablanca. Thats where I really got my first exposure with a Dixieland group.

Back home, there were stints with the Thurston Boys and the Jim Trio. I got so I could sleep in the back of a car awful easy, he adds. I never realized what you have to go through, says Hanson, talking about getting his invention on the market. Just finding someone to manufacture the dispenser was a headache, he adds. But he finally came across three businessmen who own a tool and die company in St.

Paul and who also own a plastics factory in Faribault, Minn. After a lot of experimentation to get the molds just right, Hanson says theyre ready to go into production on a large scale. There are days when I'd sell my part of it for 10 cents a share, he says. But there are other days when I wouldnt sell them for $1,000 apiece. And, he adds, he already has another idea, another use for his dispenser.

It may take a little time to develop, he adds, but hes sure his new idea would work. To an inventor, that first glimmer is all thats needed to set the wheels in motion once more. Dick Rmiker of the Tribune in his Hiawatha Islands home. And Bice was a lonely widower himself, he says. His wife, Myrtle, had died in 1964 after 47 years of marriage.

Wanting to start a new life together, rather than living in the shadow of old memories, the newlyweds decided to build on the Hiawatha Islands site. During an average winter, Bice does 50 to 100 paintings. He is a member of the La Crosse Society of Arts and Crafts and sells some of his work at their exhibitions. But many others find their way into homes as gifts. Altogether, since starting to keep track of his work in a little red book a few years ago, Bice has recorded 354 paintings.

But he has kept two of his earliest, dated 1914 and 1915, for his own collection. These two are the only surviving paintings of his youth, when there was scant opportunity to nurture a budding talent. Childhood was spent walking barefoot behind a team of horses, cultivating his family's fields north of Onalaska. The family moved back to town when he was 13, but after a year of high school he dropped out because of economic necessity. Then came World War I.

Fighting in France for $1 a day of Army pay and no GI Bill afterwards, marriage, fatherhood, two or three mortgages on the house, struggling just to keep even, left no time for painting. When he picked up a pallet finally, in his 70s, hed already had experience as a late and successful starter. For it wasnt until the year he celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary at age 46 that he finally earned his high school diploma. My three sons and my daughter had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and I hadnt finished high school. I felt like a dummy, he says.

So Bice started taking evening courses at Hanson used to play the clarinet with the Bob Hirsch Jazz All-Stars at the Place of Jazz in La Crosse. Reluctantly, he says, he has all but given up playing. We used to have a family orchestra, he recalls of his growing-up years when he and his sis Artist at work Raymond By SHELLEY GOLDBLOOM Special to the Tribune During this election year, many a politician would like it believed he can turn the state-house on its head and rewrite every law except the law of gravity. Raymond C. Bice, 1934 Nakomis looks back on the days he did one better and mastered the art of levitation.

And although many a politician ends up with egg on his face, few have deliberately broken a raw one into a hat or lifted it to collect a chick perching on his head. Bice was 72 in 1968 when he was defeated in a bid for re-election. He had served 16 years in the Wisconsin Senate and five years prior to that as a County Board member. Since retiring as an elder statesman then, and as a magician soon after, Bice has resumed another vocation, neglected since boyhood: hes become a water-color artist. But even now the brushes only get taken down in the winter months when theres more leisure, because hes too busy the rest of the time working as a carpenter, clockmaker, boat builder, home designer and land developer to devote enough time to painting.

Bice paints at a table in his study, surrounded by mementoes of a lifetime. A bust of Lincoln peers down from the top of his book shelves, its visage well-matched by his own penetrating blue-eyed gaze. Photographs of Bices family and of his own early years deck the walls, including framed copies of a 1954 Milwaukee newspapers story on Bice's magic. One photo shows his daughter-in-law, rigidly floating on air 4 feet off the floor. Another pictures a newly hatched chick replacing what had just been an egg.

Blair By PAT MOORE Of the Tribune Staff In football they'd probably call him a triple threat. But Dick Hansons not a football player. Hes a farmer, musician and inventor. In the investment world, diversifying may be the byword, but when youre a farmer it can sometimes be a bittersweet blessing. About 2 a years ago, Hanson, the inventor, got the idea for a device that makes it possible to mix and dispense any number of dry additives (vitamins, minerals, antibiotics) on forages and in the field.

He calls the device the Spencer Dispenser. (That name was selected because, though everyone calls him Dick, his first name is really Spencer.) His invention is a series of nesting rings, plus a spacer for capacity. Each ring dispenses at a prescribed rate which can be adjusted. The dispenser makes it possible to add minerals or other additives, along with a preservative, when the farmer fills his silo. It will also apply additives to the roughage as it comes from the silo, in precise amounts.

It can be purchased in several different sizes, with from two to 13 rings, and with or without a motorized unit. Hanson says it will even dispense as small an amount as a teaspoonful of an ingredient and feed it, fairly equally, to 100 cows. He hired a patent lawyer whose preliminary search revealed that the only invention even remotely similar to his that a patent was applied for was one years ago. That was an Italian invention, a barrel divided into channels that de farmer's invention is boon to cows ters, Eunice and Ila, and his brother, Bob, made music together. At 14 he played his first dance job with Kale and his Joyful Nights.

Kale was a kid from Taylor who played the drums. The others were usually the same six or seven kids who thought we rCTRI Dick Rmiker of the Tribune Staff livered sugar cubes when the crank was turned. So Hanson formed a corporation of 20 friends and relatives. The first few units are now in operation on several farms in the area. A few weeks ago his corporation voted to go into mass production of the Spencer Dispenser with 500 units.

Therein lies the rub, according to Hanson, who is still a working farmer. He has a total of about 550 acres on three farms in Trempealeau's Welch Coulee, about five miles west of Blair on County Highway N. At 59, he wonders if he should get out of farming and devote more time to promoting his invention. On the other hand, he says if hes going to find out all the uses his invention has for the farmer, he should stay in farming. One of the most encouraging things, so far, he says, was a visit from a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who encouraged Hanson and felt there was a real need for the device.

Hanson has also received encouragement at various Farm Progress Days where he has had his dispenser on display. But he knows that the real test of his invention will be what the farmers think of it. So he often sets out in his car, driving down a road until he sees a silo and pulling into the farmyard to talk to the farmer. The dairy farm he and his wife, Shirley, live on has been in the family for more than a century. You cant miss his place.

Its the only red bam youre likely to see with a white stripe around the middle. Not to mention the navy blue silo. Measuring up Spencer Dick Hanson, Blair, fills a display model of his Spencer Dispenser with additives for feeding to cattle. I I I 0mwd 'i.