A Great Short Story

A person is not measured from the top of their head to the bottom of their feet, but from their shoulders to the sky.
John Rice, motivational speaker, businessman

Here is a story you may have overlooked. I like to read the obituaries because I’m interested in the cause of death and what they did to merited mentioned in the paper. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, when I go, the world will little note, nor remember me or what I say here. In any case, John Rice passed away early last week, he was in the record books as one of the world’s shortest twins. His diminutive stature alone is not what made him worthy of a near full-page story, it was his attitude.

Rice was a multimillionaire with an incredibly positive outlook. His quote is what leads this post. His mother conveyed to her small twins the philosophy that her boys were a couple of dimes in a bunch of nickels.

It was a sad story of an unexpected and untimely death, but it had me laughing out on Thanksgiving morning, which may have actually captured Rice's outlook on life.

One day, in the middle of watching a TV western, tiny Rice 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, his brother, 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.

I highly encourage you to read the article. One of their business ventures was to purchase a plant nursery called Tree Feet Tall that specialized in dwarf citrus trees.