Helen Steiner Rice

Ambassador of Sunshine

Helen Steiner Rice, often referred to as the "poet laureate of inspirational verse", was born Helen Elaine Steiner on May 19,1900 to Anna and John Steiner of Lorain, Ohio. Even as a little girl, she loved to write rhyming couplets and preach about God's love to her family. Pretty, pert and precocious, young Helen became a conscientious and outstanding high school student. Her teachers, some of whom were suffragists supporting women's right to vote, encouraged the teenager to set high goals. She dreamed of attending college - her high school yearbook noted that she hoped to become a Congresswoman — but her plans changed unexpectedly when her father died in the flu epidemic of 1918, the same year she graduated from high school.

Instead of attending college, Helen became the family breadwinner and supported her mother and sister. Initially she was employed at the Lorain Electric Light and Power Company where she demonstrated how to create attractive lamp shades. Energetic and enterprising, Helen asked to be trained as a bookkeeper. Having mastered those skills, she started designing eye-catching display windows and, having proved that her insights in marketing were sound, she became the company's advertising manager. In time she was invited to be a spokeswoman for the Ohio Public Service Company and, in her twenties, crisscrossed the country giving speeches. In addition to promoting the advantages of the electric lighting industry, she also spoke about the importance of the opinions of women as consumers and about the value of women's talents in the workplace.

After several years, Helen left her job as the utilities' spokeswoman and opened her own speaker's bureau. Her positive outlook and enthusiasm for her work made her a popular motivational speaker. Her speeches won newspaper acclaim and prompted additional bookings.

In 1928, one of those bookings took her to Dayton, Ohio, where she met a wealthy young banker, Franklin Rice. Rice won Helen's heart and hand, and the two were married in January 1929. In October of that same year the New York Stock Market crashed. Franklin Rice lost all his assets in the crash and, shortly thereafter, his bank closed, and he lost his job as well. His financial ruin drove him into a deep depression.

Helen tried to offset the disaster by returning to work herself. In 1931 she was offered a job by the Gibson Art Company in Cincinnati. She became their troubleshooter, visiting their greeting card installations and making recommendations on how to improve sales. She was so successful and her outlook so cheerful that one colleague christened her Gibson's "Ambassador of Sunshine". Helen was able to improve the family financial situation, but she was unable to improve her husband's state of mind. In October 1932, while she was at work in Cincinnati, he committed suicide leaving her a widow at the age of 32.

After Franklin Rice's death, Helen decided to stay in Cincinnati and continue her work with Gibson Art. She paid off the family's debts, made friends, and involved herself in the city's cultural and civic life. When the greeting card editor at Gibson died suddenly in the mid-1930s, Helen took over the job. It was a position she held for more than forty years.

Even in those early years at Gibson, Helen perceived a need for greeting cards that would inspire others. She was told that the market favored lighter, more humorous sentiments, however, so that was what she produced. There were occasional exceptions to that rule. At the time of her mother's death in the mid-1940s, for example, she penned a condolence verse, "When I Must Leave You," that became a popular sympathy card. In the evenings at home, meanwhile, she began to write inspirational verses to friends and co-workers and to enclose them in personal notes and letters. These reflected her growing and deepening faith in God. Her rhymed Christmas cards became a tradition and family and friends anticipated this annual spiritual message. In the 1950s, Helen's talent for putting inspirational messages into verse prompted the vice-president at Gibson to approach her about signing some of her verses for use on cards.

Helen's life changed forever when, in 1960, one of her Christmas verses, "The Priceless Gift of Christmas," came to the attention of a performer on the Lawrence Welk Show. He read the verse on national television and Gibson was deluged with requests for it. Not long after, Helen was asked if she could supply another verse for the Welk Show. She gave permission for the use of a poem she had written for a religious convention. It was entitled "The Praying Hands." The poem praised the holiness of daily selfless acts of service that often go unnoticed. When that verse was read on television the inspirational poems of Helen Steiner Rice catapulted into the national limelight. "The Praying Hands" became one of the most popular greeting cards ever produced.

In the years that followed, Helen was approached to write books of inspirational verses. She gathered together into books many of the rhymed stanzas originally sent to those she loved, and she wrote dozens and dozens of new inspirational verses, all this in addition to her full-time work producing greeting cards for Gibson. Her simple, sincere expressions of profound religious truths touched hearts and lives in the United States and beyond. People from around the world began to write to Helen for encouragement and support with their personal problems. She tried to answer as many of their letters as she could for she saw her correspondence as another form of service to God. Helen believed her talent for easing human heartache through her verses was a God-given gift, one through which she could channel God's love into the world. She remained amazingly active until she was nearly 80 years old, despite the fact that she battled an increasingly painful and crippling arthritic condition. Eventually she had to give up the work she loved and the correspondence she so cherished. During her last years, she decided to set up the Helen Steiner Rice Foundation. Helen believed that through this charitable foundation she could continue, even after her death, to give both inspiration and assistance to those in need. Books, cards and other memorabilia bearing Helen Steiner Rice's verses still sell tens of thousands of copies annually and, over the years, the Helen Steiner Rice Foundation has awarded millions to charitable agencies in her name.

Helen spent her final months living in a retirement center. Those who visited her there contend that, until the last, Helen Steiner Rice remained an "Ambassador of Sunshine".