QUARRYVILLE, Pa. -- Bob Adams has something that most people do not -- a memory from 1923.
"I was just learning to walk, and I started to follow my father down to the basement -- he went down to fix the furnace," Adams says. "I started after him, and I went tumbling down to the landing and hit my head on the cat's dish."
When Adams hit his head on that cat dish, he was 2 years old.
On Feb. 15, 98 years later, Adams celebrated his 100th birthday, and he celebrated in style, with a personal car parade outside of his apartment in Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Community. Flanked by daughters Gail Miller and Regina "Regi" Chandler – and in spirit by his third daughter, Terri Jones, who died in November – Adams received a line of cars and firetrucks bearing his name on the side. Some 75 people from throughout his life came to visit while Adams, in a chair, sat outside and received them one by one.
In his 36,540 days (and counting), Adams has met kings and monumental historical figures, and he has also shoveled horse manure and mushrooms. He traveled the world as a photographer during World War II, and also traveled the same square blocks in Oxford, Pa., an infinite number of times as a bus driver. Adams watched the world move into the 21st century with his high school sweetheart, Mary, to whom he was married for 68 years. She died in 2013 at 91 years old.
Finding the path
Throughout his childhood in Oxford, Chester County, Adams was sure that he was going to be a carpenter. He had watched his three uncles, who ran Brown Brothers Carpenters and Builders, succeed. In 1931, when Adams was 10, he watched his uncles help John H. Ware Jr. move his 22-room gothic mansion a mile down the road on railroad tracks.
But the Great Depression put his uncles' company out of business. At the time, Adams was a senior in high school and unsure of his future prospects. Thanks to then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, which included a $4.9 billion agency called the Works Progress Administration, Adams was able to get a job helping to install a sewer system in Coatesville.
To Adams, anything was better than following his father into the mushroom business.
"When I was old enough, I remember going into the mushroom truck to get other mushrooms from the general area that would be sent to Kennett Square and then on to the New York markets," Adams recalls. "That wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. Picking the mushrooms and getting them ready, that was fine. But when you had to compost all the horse manure ... well, I did it."
He was also considering a future with Mary, who was a freshman when he was a senior.
"She took my eye, and I wanted to date her. My brother was also in a class with her, and he was a sort of go-between with notes. I was asking her for a date and she says, 'I would like to, but I have to wait, because I'm not allowed to date until I'm 16.' "
"I think of her every day, and it's tough," Adams says, sitting in his living room, which features several pictures of Mary on the walls.
The WPA helped Adams keep a steady job for almost a decade, until another "boss" came calling – Uncle Sam, ever on the scout for new recruits for World War II. Adams tried to enlist as an aviation cadet, where he passed the first day's written exams, but failed the second day's physical because of his flat feet. Determined to fly, Adams eschewed serving on land and on the seas and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces. He went to basic training at the future vacation hotspot of Miami Beach, which he says that, in August, with no air conditioning, was not much of a holiday.
Serving his country
Adams wanted to continue his education and he had been interested in photography, so he let his passion be known -- in his own way.
"The Air Force had a set of schools you could go to, for things like truck driving, communications, photography and others," Adams says. "You were to choose three different ideal jobs, and I put photography down for all three. I got called on the carpets for that. The officer didn't really bawl me out, but he said, 'You know, that's not really what they're in need of right now.' The greatest need was for radio communications, at the time. So, he says, if you insist on keeping photography, you'll probably finish basic training and be on 'KP' (essentially kitchen duty) for six or eight weeks before you ever get a call. You've heard the adage, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing? I got a call with two weeks of combat training to go, which was all the gunnery, all kinds of guns. I was to ship out the next day to photography school."
Adams' photography training led him from one B-17 base to another, from Lowry Field in Denver to Salt Lake City and down to Wendover, Utah, where he learned how the various types of aerial cameras worked.
"They needed practice bombings, what they called 'powder bombings,'" Adams explains. "When it exploded, it was just a white cloud, and it would disappear. I would go down into the camera well, bend there on my knees. Whenever they were going to drop a bomb, they would let me know in my earphones. So, I was waiting for that bomb to hit and take a picture of it, to know whether they hit the target or missed it. They had 20 practice bombs. When I got up out of there, I was a little bit dizzy."
After training, Adams, then 22, traveled on the British ocean liner RMS Aquitania -- a sister ship to the RMS Lusitania (known for being sunk during World War I) -- on an eight-day voyage to Glasgow, Scotland.
"Conditions were bad. It was an English ship and an English crew, and they tried to make us tougher. We didn't get the food that was on board for us; they sold it on the black market. They fed us, but when you see bugs crawling in the oatmeal and things like that ... I got a can of peaches and some apples and some candy bars, and that did me for the remainder of the eight days. We ran into a terrible storm about the fourth day out, and I didn't think that the ship would stay together. I had never seen 40-foot waves before."
Adams was stationed at a base in England for the remainder of the war, shooting photographs of notables and royalty. He photographed Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, one afternoon as she inspected the base with her then-teenaged daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II. Their trip was arranged by Gen. James Doolittle, who would later be immortalized in the 1944 film "30 Seconds Over Tokyo."
Adams shot what he was told to shoot and shared a photo lab with four other squadrons of photographers. He and Mary exchanged letters, with Adams regularly sending photographs he took. In one letter, Mary wrote the following on a picture of Adams:
"This is a picture of the one person with whom all of my life's joy and happiness lies, and I know now that it will always be so, through life, through death, the same."
Because Adams hadn't technically seen combat (read the "Bob's Five Near Misses" story for the danger he faced during the war), he was still in possession of his parachute, made of a mysterious new material at the time -- nylon. Adams had the idea to ask Mary if she'd like her wedding dress made of the material, which she accepted.
Though the seamstress was leery, the dress was made in a little under two weeks, and the two were married in 1945, after Adams was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant. Throughout their life together, Adams would marvel at the fact that an instrument of war could later be fashioned into an instrument of love so seamlessly.
Through the lens
Returning from the war effort and settling into married life, Adams quickly formed Adams & Adams Photography with his old war buddy, Burrel Adams (no relation), in Oxford. Before long, he was taking pictures of just about anything, whether it was weddings or, thanks to a friendship with the Chester County coroner, crime scenes.
In his 45 years of professional photography, Adams held only one rule.
"I took pictures of a lot of things, but I kept saying, 'The only type of pictures that I will not take are nudes,'" explains Adams. "I was strict about that."
Mary wound up with a job as a secretary at Lincoln University, the historically Black public university near Oxford. Lincoln needed someone to supervise the campus photo lab, and Adams agreed. The job led to an incredible perk -- when speakers would come to visit, Adams was often called to take photos.
The list of names he photographed in his time there reads like a short history of the 20th century -- Duke Ellington, Albert Einstein, Vice President Gerald Ford, Julian Bond, Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr., among many others.
"It was in a very crowded gymnasium," recalls Adams of King's visit. "He spoke probably 40 minutes and had an entourage with him. At that time, he was famous among the Black race, but I didn't know much about him at the time, this was before 1960. Of course, I came to know a lot about him."
In many of these instances, Adams essentially served as an event photographer, trying to get good shots amidst the audience. However, on at least one occasion, he was able to secure private shoots with visitors.
"For Albert Einstein, I had a private setting with him after he did his speech," Adams says. "He was hard to understand, his speaking was very guttural. He gave me a private session, and I took probably five or six rolls of film with him. His hair was still everywhere, it was more white than gray. I told him the way I wanted him to sit and look. He was probably in his 50s at the time."
Whether it was visiting kings from smaller countries or countless graduations, Adams saw them all as extensions of a love for photography. Throughout his career, he estimates that he shot over 3,000 weddings, including a few after his official retirement in 2000.
So how did he end up driving buses around his hometown? In 1946, not long after his return from England, Adams was chatting with an acquaintance on the sidewalk near his home in Oxford. A man named Bill Ross, who he was familiar with, asked him a simple question that wound up taking up Adams' afternoons for the following 44 years. "He says, 'Would you consider driving one of my school buses?' I had never thought of it before," Adams recalls. "I talked it over with my wife, and then accepted the next day. In the morning, it would fit in my schedule -- I was back from the school bus by the time I opened the photo shop. And then in the afternoons, Burrel would cover the hour and a half I was gone driving the bus."
Adams and his wife lived in their home in Oxford into their nineties, until Mary's death.
"I think of her every day, and it's tough," Adams says, sitting in his living room, which features several pictures of Mary on the walls.
Adams and his daughters made the decision to have him move to Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Community, where he has lived ever since. In conversation, Adams is quick with his memory and even quicker to laugher, which accompanies everything from earnest jokes to descriptions of his brushes with death in the war. He generally spends his days watching TV, reading, checking mail and occasionally sifting through a stack of 141 birthday cards, which still grows by the day.
Recently, his grandsons helped to purchase and set up a Facebook Portal device so that he can stay in contact with family amid the covid-19 pandemic.
He describes the birthday parade as "the thrill of my life," and in a life filled with many, many thrills, that is saying something. But does he feel old?.
"No! They keep telling me that I don't look 100. And most of them say, 'You don't look over 80!'" he says with a laugh.
"And I really don't feel older than 80, except for my knees."
