The Foreign Service Journal, April 2011

68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 1 1 Mary Kellogg Rice , 100, wife of the late FSO Edward E. Rice, passed away in Tiburon, Calif., on Jan. 6. Mrs. Rice was born on Dec. 1, 1910, in Milwaukee, Wisc., the daughter of Laura Nelson Kellogg and Frederick Wild Kellogg, a whole- sale seed merchant. She studied art at Milwaukee State Teacher’s College. In 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression, when she was in her senior year in college, Mary Kel- logg was asked to serve as art director for a handicraft project sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. The project engaged unemployed women in producing useful and well- designed goods for public institutions, such as dolls, fabrics, wall hangings and furniture. They also rebound books for schools and libraries. The project flourished, becoming a model for programs elsewhere. A half-century later, when modern-day politicians debated welfare reform, Mrs. Rice wrote a book about the project, Useful Work for Unskilled Women: A Unique Milwaukee WPA Project , which was published in 2003. She married Edward E. Rice, also from Milwaukee and an FSO, in late 1942, when he was home on leave. The couple spent three months to- gether in Washington, D.C., before Mr. Rice returned to China, where he had been posted since 1935. They were reunited when he returned to Washington in 1945, spending the next four years in the Bureau of Chi- nese Affairs at the department. Mrs. Rice then accompanied her husband to Manila, Stuttgart and Hong Kong and Macau, with assignments in Washington, D.C., interspersed. All during her work on the WPA project, Mrs. Rice had put aside her own art, weaving. At her first post, Manila, she thought she would finally get back to it, she recounted in an in- terview for the Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection. She took a de- mountable floor loom with her, but, as it happened, she became an inde- pendent consultant with the United Nations and the Philippine govern- ment to reconstruct the country’s cot- tage weaving industry following World War II. As she told the inter- viewer, “It was a fascinating experi- ence. I traveled around the Philip- I N M E M O R Y