There’s something about Marty

The best thing about Marty Rice is he is the same person on paper as he is in real life. Reading his articles is like having a one-sided conversation in person, and it’s why he resonated so well with readers. Photo courtesy of Marty Rice.

It’s contributors like former Arc Welding 101 columnist Marty Rice who bring the PWT tag line, “The real world for welding professionals,” to life. And when it comes to welding, Rice, an Army veteran, retired ironworker, and 23-year welding teacher at the Dale Jackson Career Center in Lewisville, Texas, has done it, seen it, lived it, and breathed it all. He’s worked in the harshest of conditions, hurt himself repeatedly, seen awful things happen to co-workers, and developed a bond with students who are better off for having met him.

While Rice’s tenure as columnist in print was relatively short, he provided a spring board for the popular column now authored by Paul Cameron, a man cut from the same cloth as Rice. His most significant contributions to our welding audience can be measured in the popularity of his poignant, honest, and hilarious welding musings found on thefabricator.com, which, to this day, are our most-read articles.

The best thing about Rice is that what you read is what you get. The persona he presents in print is no different than who he is in real life.

To Err Is Human

The first article Rice ever wrote was a tribute to a friend who had passed away. He didn’t think much would come of it, especially since a former English teacher once told him that he’d never amount to much in the writing world. He submitted the article to Hobart Institute of Welding Technology’s Wide World of Welding publication and continued to write for that publication for some years. In 2001 he was contacted by an editor at PWT to write a welding-related technical article. He did, and from there he wrote a few more for thefabricator.com and The FABRICATOR. While he didn’t mind writing about the technical stuff, he was most comfortable when he was able to inject a little personality into his writing.

Rice accepted the Arc Welding 101 gig in 2004 after Elmer Swank stepped away from his Ask Elmer column due to a mounting teaching load, and his first column was published in the January/February 2005 issue. While he was honored to do it, Rice said he accepted the opportunity with “great trepidation.” He felt a lot of pressure to ensure that the advice he provided was both sound and accurate.

Like the Ask Elmer column, Arc Welding 101 was a question/answer format where readers submitted welding-related questions to Rice, who would then provide a solution.

“I got some really good questions. Most of them were from real enthusiastic people who wanted to learn and had a lot of respect for the trade. It gave me a sense of pride to help them out,” Rice explained.

It didn’t take long before the questions began pouring in from all across the world, and he spent a lot of time researching and responding to these questions.

He ran into his fair share of critics; most he could shrug off, but there was one that to this day has stuck with him.

“I think I mixed up dragging versus pushing MIG, and I said you had more penetration by pushing. Anyway, this guy wrote that he didn’t think I had been welding for very long and it made me so damn mad. Thank God my dad taught me many years ago to wait a day before responding, but I was not happy. I wrote him and told him about it and he wrote me back and said, ‘Yeah, you must be a damn ironworker.’ Turned out he was a millwright and he had been an ironworker. I wrote him back and said, ‘I should’ve known a damn millwright would be bothering me over some little thing like that.’ Well, we ended up becoming friends. I lost touch with him though. I’ve had people critique me, but that’s the only guy that actually got my goat to where I actually wasn’t happy when I wrote him back. Usually I can let it go.”

The demands of a busy teaching schedule paired with wanting more time to spend with family finally caught up to him, and Rice wrote his final Arc Welding 101 column in November/December 2006, which was also former editor Stephanie Vaughan’s final issue.

Mixing Welding With Real Life

Rice’s story doesn’t end there. He spent many years as a somewhat regular contributor to thefabricator.com, writing articles about safety, saving money, friends and loss, work ethic, all the manual welding processes, and advice for beginners. Since 2011 alone, those articles have generated more than 29,000 page views. Rice has a theory as to why his articles resonate so well with readers.

“When I write I always like to start out with something stupid that has happened to me, and a lot of people seem to find that funny. It also shows that I’m human and make mistakes just like them.”

Like in “What would-be MIG welders want to know” when he opened with a story about how he broke three toes when he tripped over his dog in the middle of the night. Or in “Newbie mistakes made, experience gained,” when he shared how, as a rookie ironworker, he tripped and fell face first on a grated walkway 20 floors up in front of his co-workers.

He’s tackled difficult subjects like job site fatalities in “Friendship and loss on the job,” and the death of a student in “Kyle and the welding instructor.” He’s gone beyond sharing his welding knowledge with readers by letting them get a glimpse inside his life and what he’s experienced.

He still contributes, albeit only twice a year. Without the rigorous writing schedule he is able to devote most of his time to teaching his high school welding students, something he absolutely loves doing. And yeah, it’s a safe bet that he teaches the same way as he writes: honestly with a little “Marty” humor snuck in for good measure.

“I always have my new classes line up and smell acetylene with the acetone in it so they know what it smells like. First, I’ll ask them if they smoke and the honest ones will tell me. After that I’ll say, ‘If you smoke, don’t smoke a cigarette for 24 hours because it will blow your lungs out.’ I can always tell who’s lied to me because they are the ones with the horrified looks on their faces.”

Over the last 20 years he’s seen safety become a higher priority in welding, particularly the ironworking trade; the transformation of power sources thanks to inverter technology; and the resurgence of trade education.

His advice for the next generation of welders is to put 10 percent of their paychecks into savings, make safety a priority (he’s got the battle scars to prove it), and to never stop learning.

“There’s so many people that just want to run through a program and go right to work and there’s so much to learn. I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years and I still learn new things. They’re going to have to keep learning to keep up with all of the new stuff.”

And thanks to Marty, we’ve all learned a lot.