John Kice wanted to be a sportscaster, but his father wanted him to be a doctor and said sportscasters drank too much and didn’t make enough money.
So Kice, who died Friday, started out in medicine but fell in love with chemistry and became a “very sophisticated chemist,” said a former colleague, Andrei Kutateladze, an organic-chemistry professor at the University of Denver.
A service will be held for Kice at 2 p.m. Nov. 15 at Evans Chapel on the DU campus in southeast Denver.
Kice “had an encyclopedic mind and left a legacy all of us benefited from,” Kutateladze said.
He also praised Kice for his teaching abilities. It is especially difficult, said Kutateladze, to teach chemistry to students who aren’t majoring in it.
But Kice managed that well, even acting out things in class to show how something worked, he said.
Kice was dean of natural science, mathematics and engineering at DU from 1988 to 1995.
Before that, he taught at Texas Tech University, the University of Vermont, Oregon State University and the University of South Carolina.
He was “enthusiastic and ebullient and would put everything down if a student needed help,” said Hedy Witte, who was his executive assistant.
Kice’s research work was groundbreaking, and he gave lectures in the former Soviet Union, Poland and Western Europe, said his daughter Virginia Kice of Seal Beach, Calif. He also was co-author of a text on undergraduate organic chemistry.
Kice never lost his interest in sports and after retirement was an usher at Colorado Rockies games.
John L. Kice was born in Colorado Springs on Feb. 18, 1930, and went to Fountain Valley High School. He skipped some grades because he “had a remarkable mind,” said his daughter.
So, at 15, he went off to Harvard.
He wanted to be a radio sportscaster, but his father, William B. Kice, wanted him to be a doctor, telling his son that sportscasters “drink too much and don’t make enough money,” Virginia Kice said.
So John Kice began the road to medicine but on the way fell in love with organic chemistry and stayed with it. He earned his undergraduate and doctorate degrees at Harvard.
While in college, Kice was asked by his roommate if Kice could steal some alcohol from the chemistry lab to spike the punch at a fraternity party.
Kice said he would do it if the roommate got him a date.
“It worked,” Ellen Bass Kice said.
They were married June 16, 1953.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Kice is survived by another daughter, Joanne Gerst of Bellaire, Texas, and two grandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
