Indiana Illustrators and Hoosier Cartoonists: Herman Stoddard Vice (1884-1956)

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Herman Stoddard Vice (1884-1956)

Painter and illustrator Herman Stoddard Vice was born the son of a minister on June 21, 1884, in Jefferson, Indiana, a small town west of Frankfurt. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and was an artist closely associated with Chicago. In September 1918, when he filled out his draft card, Vice was working for Jahn & Ollier Engraving Company in Chicago. (He also complained of having "crippled hands due to rheumatism.") Vice was a member of the Illinois Academy of Fine Arts, the South Side Art Association, and the Romany Club, as well as the Palette and Chisel Club and the Hoosier Salon in Chicago.

On November 26, 1908, Vice married Annette Zelna Border (née Menser) in Welland, Ontario. Both gave their residences as Buffalo, New York. (I detect an elopement.) The couple lived in Chicago during the censuses of 1910, 1920, and 1930. In 1910, Vice gave his place of employment as a pyrography company, in other words, a firm engaged in wood-burning for graphic or decorative purposes. By 1940, the Vices were in Lebanon, Indiana, where Herman was employed as an "experimental man" in a manufacturing firm, presumably the U.S. Machine Corporation in Lebanon. Vice's situation had not changed by 1942, when he filled out his second draft card. Then a manufacturer of stokers for home furnaces and burners, the U.S. Machine Corporation is now part of Stewart Warner, a maker of gauges and other car parts.

In 1948, Herman Stoddard Vice and his wife were in Marion, Indiana, and that's where he died, on November 29, 1956. Vice was buried far from home at Grandview Cemetery in Southmont, Pennsylvania, in a plot with his wife's parents. Annette Z. Vice followed her husband to the grave in 1967.