During the depths of the Great Depression a handsome and gifted seventeen-year-old high school athlete saw his future shattered when his neck was broken in a football game. Few at the time thought the honor student, Eagle Scout, editor of his school paper, and president of his class every year since the seventh grade would survive. But John Allen Adams did survive and was able to adapt to his severe handicap and go on to lead a remarkably successful life. His story, woven from important strands of Arkansas and American history, reaches far beyond the community of Arkadelphia in which he lived. But while family history provides a dramatic backdrop for his story it cannot account for the remarkable character of John Allen Adams, a skilled poet and a tireless worker for world peace who found within himself the resources to build a life that made a difference, a difference reflected in the testimonies and memories of those whose lives he touched.
About the Author: Through the years Charles Hughes has published poetry and fiction along with works of literary scholarship on various topics, but his two recent books, Accordion War: Korea 1951-Life and Death in a Marine Rifle Company and A Fortune Teller's Blessing-The Story of John Allen Adams explore a common theme-war and courage. The books, however, approach that theme from different directions. In the first we see the young Marines Hughes served with face death from an implacable enemy in the rugged mountains of Korea under the harshest weather conditions. In the second we see a man who has overcome a devastating injury join with anti-war friends to confront their own government and many of their fellow citizens as they speak out against a war they believe immoral and unjust, receiving for their efforts public censure, hostility and sometimes imprisonment. Today Hughes is professor emeritus of English at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. He graduated with a BA in political science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1957 and for the next nine years worked in communication intelligence for the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and later the Air Force Security Service as a cryptanalyst (Russian), instructor of cryptanalysis, technical writer (cryptanalysis), technical editor, and finally as the Chief of the Editing and Publications Branch of the USAFSS School at Goodfellow AFB, San Angelo, Texas. He left that position in 1966 to attend graduate school at Texas Tech University at Lubbock where he received an MA (1968) and a PhD (1971) in literature and linguistics after which he was hired by Henderson State where he taught up to and after his retirement in 1996, serving for five of those years as Chairman of the English and Foreign Languages Department.