St. Paul lawyer Dan Hardy has theorized that Willmar native Cushman Albert Rice was the real-life model for Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby.
Like Gatsby, Rice—the son of a banker, newspaperman, and legislator—left home at a young age, saw combat in World War I, was decorated by a small country, threw large parties, and loved clothing and cars. Rice made his money by gun running and gambling; Gatsby, apparently, from bootlegging.
According to the Holy Cow newsletter of the Halsey Hall chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research, Rice was the friend of the press-box crew at the Polo Grounds in the early 1910s. Gatsby knew the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.
Rice was born in 1878 and died in 1932—not knowing, presumably, that the past “was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar was built with funds from his estate.
