William C. Rice liked to see things grow.

As a chairman of the music department at Baker University, he worked to develop his students into the best musicians possible.

And in his leisure time, said his daughter Janet Reed, Rice puttered around in his garden, doting on vegetables, trees and flowers.

Rice, 91, died Thursday in Chillicothe, Mo. Funeral services are scheduled for 2 p.m. today at First United Methodist Church in Baldwin.

Her father had one of the biggest gardens in the neighborhood, Reed said.

“He’d get out there early in the morning when the sun came up, and dig around in the dirt,” she said. “Then he might walk downtown in his dirty old clothes and get the mail. And then put on his suit and go to school.”

Once at school, Rice’s accomplishments piled up.

He published numerous books and articles on church and vocal music and was so well respected in his field that he served as a consultant when the Methodist Hymnal was revised.

He supervised construction of the university’s Fine Arts Building and helped design and install the organ at his church.

And he taught hundreds, if not thousands, of students during his career, 38 years of which was spent at Baker.

He was an exuberant man and a wonderful instructor, said Alice Anne Callahan Russell, who was hired by Rice in the 1940s.

“Students came back for years and years to see Dr. Rice,” she said. “He was very outgoing and had a real style with his choral directing.”

He loved helping students reach their potential, Reed said, laughing as she remembered her father’s pun-infused wit and command of the English language.

“That was another thing he liked to teach,” she said. “He was always throwing a sentence with a strange word at his students, and they’d look at him funny, and he’d say, ‘Look it up!'”

Although his tenor voice may have been his strongest instrument, Rice was able to pick up just about anything well enough to teach it, Reed said.

And yet his favorite was the harmonica.

“It was one of the first things that he played,” Reed said. “He bought a little inexpensive harmonica when he was a child, and it was his.”