Dale W Adams

~Obituary written by Dale W Adams~

It was bound to happen. As Kurt Vonnegut noted in his novel (Slapstick), a capricious technician in a secret facility in China controls gravity worldwide. On September 5, 2026, the wily technician turned up the gravity under Dale W Adams to an intolerable level, causing the old duffer to go horizontal in Provo, Utah. As a fan of Robert Service's poems, the prescient victim had earlier requested his remains be accorded Sam-McGee-like rites.

Adams' claim to fame was his birth on the longest day of the year in 1934, when the earth annually reverses its North/South tilt. Due to a defective GPS, a befuddled stork delivered Adams to the home of J. Arza Adams and Effie Warnick Adams in Pleasant Grove, Utah, instead of leaving the infant with a destitute family in Recife, Brazil, thereby altering the earth's delicate tilt.

Aside from getting bucked off a horse and breaking his arm, and nearly drowning in an irrigation ditch while a toddler, Adams' childhood was uneventful. An exception was when, at age five, he came face-to-face with mortality upon seeing his puppy flattened by a passing truck, perhaps causing him later to write this bizarre obituary.

His mother obtained a library card for him when he was six, resulting in the lad becoming a bookaholic, and his father is to blame for him liking to fish and spending time in tick territory. While a teenager, Adams enjoyed watching movies starring Marion Robert Morrison, John Todd, Wallace Fitzgerald Berry, William Boyd, and especially William Scott, aka Jack Elam. His main achievement while attending Pleasant Grove High School was finishing sixth in the high hurdles in a track meet and making money raising pigs.

To avoid the draft, citizen Adams attended Utah State Agricultural College, where he majored in fraternity pranks and AFROTC. Upon graduation—by act of Congress—he was made an officer and a gentleman in the U.S. Air Force, eventually helping to hold back the red hordes in Texas, Florida, Japan, Taiwan, and Michigan.

Anxious about having a real job, after his tour in the Air Force, he snuck into Michigan State University and muddled his way through a graduate program in economics, including wandering around Colombia for a year imposing on farmers for information and learning Spanglish—encounters there with amoebic dysentery being especially edifying. Eventually, Michigan State compassionately granted him a degree, and the University of Wisconsin, desperate for help, supported him for three years to do further research in Colombia on land reform. Adams also stuck his nose into some problematic credit programs that resulted in him being hired by The Ohio State University to further meddle in rural finance, a miniscule digression from OSU's big-time football program!

Showing he had a proclivity for moving, Adams took a year-long leave to work for the Agency of International Development in Washington, D.C. His focus there being on land reform—which the U.S. Government covertly opposed—and credit programs for farmers—which were mostly disasters. He soon lost his innocence about land reform and concentrated on proposing ways to improve credit programs for farmers. His arguments for eliminating the subsidies in these programs were about as popular among donor agencies as rabbit droppings in a gumball machine! Chastened by his experience in Washington, D.C., but a bit humbler and somewhat wiser, he shuffled back to Ohio.

Nonetheless, continuing to feel the need to move, Adams later spent a year at Stanford University. The irony of this was that he "taught" at a university in which he would never, ever have been admitted as a student, showing life is a hoot littered with ironies and paradoxes!

After returning to Ohio, over the next couple dozen years he wafted bits of economics on disinterested students, did smidges of research on rural finance, and visited numerous countries, all the while dispensing unheeded advice. As did Don Quixote, Adams tilted at numerous windmills in numerous places. A memorable gig was in Vietnam near the end of the war when he nearly fell out of a helicopter and went spread-eagle into a rice paddy. Beyond this, he enjoyed eating couscous in Morocco, umali in Egypt, Peking duck in China, kimchi in Korea, lobster in St. Kitts-Nevis, dried crickets in Taiwan, and salted ants in Colombia. The monkey brains in the Philippines, bushmeat in Ivory Coast, and dog stew in Thailand were his less favored entrees.

He claimed to be a Libertarian; his favorite foods were mashed potatoes, roast beef, corn on the cob, and coconut cream pie. His drink of choice was Rocky Mountain spring water, with a dash of arsenic in it to control internal parasites. His preferred garb was Wrangler jeans, T-shirts, and a neck without a tie. His favorite authors were Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stegner, Homer, Samuel Clements, Adam Smith, David McCullough, Edward Shaw, Milton Friedman, and Elmer Kelton. His preferred colleagues were those much brighter than him. His pet car was a 1956 Pontiac Safari. Still on his bucket list when he passed was visiting Easter Island, Yost (Utah), Socrates' grave, and Bhutan. Along the way, he especially enjoyed the scenery and food in Taiwan, the beaches in Bali, the sand dunes in Namibia, visiting pawn shops in Moscow, touring Petra in Jordan, viewing the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, admiring Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, smelling the souks in Morocco, watching the sunsets in Nepal, having air conditioning in Kuwait, gorging on wonderful meals in the Dominican Republic, visiting game parks in South Africa, teaching courses in Nicaragua, having fresh coconuts in Tahiti, leaving Bangladesh and Haiti, flying over Afghanistan, enjoying the discipline of folks in Japan, laughing at good jokes told by anyone, and mixing with Brazilians. He especially enjoyed touring various foreign countries, on occasion, with his children. Depressing experiences were attending faculty meetings, working in Gaza, visiting rural areas of Uganda at the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and seeing the suffocating poverty in many other parts of the world. Two of his pet peeves were people who often uttered "ya know" and strangers who greeted him by asking "how are ya?" His favorite aroma was the emission from sagebrush after a rare rain in Utah. Late in life, his main hobbies were watching magpies and robins hop around his lawn seeking worms and reading insipid obituaries.

I leave obituary aficionados with a chard of wisdom: avoid places where the gravity is excessive! If you feel it increasing, quickly shuffle, hop, limp, or crawl to another spot—failing to move could be terminal, thanks to that Chinese fellow.

Finally, thanks to those who made my elongated existence possible: parents, wives, kin, friends, and doctors. I'm also grateful to those—especially colleagues and family—who made life mostly tolerable, usually interesting, sometimes exhilarating, occasionally irksome, but overall, an enjoyable odyssey. Yea, I no longer must file insufferable forms on April 15th! Death has its plusses, even before St. Peter dispenses his treats or tricks.

Have a nice day!

Services are under the care and direction of Olpin Family Mortuary in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Condolences may be sent to the family at olpinmortuary.com.

Funeral services will be held on Thursday, September 10, 2026, at 12:00 PM at the Olpin Family Mortuary; 494 South 300 East, Pleasant Grove, Utah.

A viewing for family and friends will be held that morning from 10:00 to 11:45 AM at the mortuary. The interment will follow services in the Pleasant Grove City Cemetery.