Life and How to Live It: Remembering Mike Adams

Introduction

Mike’s favorite story about me—his older brother, David—is that when we were kids, I would get exasperated with him and I would say, Mike, stop being such a smart aleck. What are you going to do when you grow up? You can’t be a professional smart aleck! Then, years later, he started getting paid for his satirical and irreverent articles and speeches, which did, in fact, make him a professional smart aleck, as he enjoyed reminding me.

So, okay, Mike always was a bit of a smart aleck. You could say that he was always a free speech advocate, even before he had ever heard of the Bill of Rights! This was Mike’s lifelong character trait, and there were other recurrent ones, such as his intelligence, his wit, and his ability to build and maintain relationships.

But there were also some major transformations in his life. In fact, this book is primarily the story of a man transformed.

- Academically, from a D student to an A student

- Spiritually, from an atheist to a Christian

- Politically, from liberal to conservative

- Morally, from pro-abortion to anti-abortion

- Socially, from private citizen to public figure

In the first section of this book, Learning, we will follow Mike’s life journey and see how and why these transformations occurred.

The second section, Teaching, is about Mike’s passion for helping others and for sharing what he learned—not just book learning but also life experiences.

The third section, Reflecting, as the name implies, shifts the focus to Mike’s reflections on his life and on some of the lives lost.

The last section, Extra Credit, is a miscellany for further reading and insight.

This book is based primarily on my favorite columns Mike wrote about his life. Since he never finished writing his life’s story, I would like to start off with some background, and as we go along, I will try to piece it all together into what I hope will be a fitting tribute.

For our first Christmas without our parents (2019), Mike and I wanted to take a trip down memory lane to the old neighborhood where we grew up, Clear Lake City, a suburb of Houston located next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where our parents worked. (Mike and I were born in Mississippi and briefly lived in New Orleans and Fort Worth before settling in Houston in 1969, when Mike was four years old.)

We drove and walked around and saw many familiar sights, such as our old house, our old playground, and our old ballfield. But while many things had remained the same, much had changed. For example, the single-screen movie theater—where we had seen Patton, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and countless other movies—had been torn down and replaced with a convenience store.

We attended the Christmas service at our old church—University Baptist Church—where we saw some old family friends and chatted briefly with the (relatively) young man running the audio/video, the son of another boy who had lived on our street in the seventies. Back then, we were just kids, mind you, and even though we went to church, little did we know what the Lord was raising us up to do.

By 1970s standards, we enjoyed a basic middle-class lifestyle. We were not rich, but that did not seem to bother us. Our annual vacation was a trip to see our grandparents on my mother’s side in Gulfport, Mississippi, a six-hour drive on the new Interstate I-10. Mike and I enjoyed many wonderful experiences there and had happy memories of visits with friends and family.

Twice we managed to save enough money to drive all the way to Los Angeles to see my dad’s mother and stepfather. Unlike the trip to Gulfport, from which I recall endless boring hours of driving through swampland, the drive to LA was a great adventure through the expansive American Southwest with memorable stops, such as Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, the Painted Desert, and most notably, the Grand Canyon, along the way. We all especially loved the Grand Canyon, but it made a huge impression on Mike. In fact, he made several return visits as an adult, and his Facebook profile picture was often a photo of him at that amazing natural wonder.

Later, references to the American Southwest would keep popping up in his writings. Here are some examples:

"There is a real understated beauty throughout the plains of northern New Mexico. She’s like that girl in home room that you never really noticed until your senior year."

Summer road trip fever resumes tomorrow. Friday road trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Saturday to Albuquerque, NM. Sunday, Painted Desert, Arizona. Monday, Four Corners, Utah. Tuesday, back speaking at Summit in Colorado.

Another day older and another day closer to retirement in Arizona.

I could write at great length about these road trips, but, simply put, these journeys were very meaningful to us and showed us that there are parts of America that are imperfect, flawed, and ugly—but also that we still live in a great and beautiful nation that is worth loving and fighting for. The desire to fight for a better America drove Mike for the rest of his life.

As I write this, I am sorely missing Mike and am thinking about how I would love to reminisce with him again and how I wish he were writing this book instead of me, especially as he always had a great memory for details. When we lost him, we also lost so many stories… I feel compelled to preserve the stories that he did leave behind.

When Mike passed in 2020, I knew that I wanted to publish a book that would honor him, preserve his memory, and pass along his wisdom and unique insights. I also wanted to make readers laugh, since humor was such an important part of Mike’s life. He was always laughing and making others smile or laugh, too.

Initially, I thought I would choose Mike’s best columns—no easy task, since he wrote about 1,200 of them during his career! This would be his Greatest Hits, so to speak. And yes, that would have made a good read and worthy tribute. But I quickly realized that most of my favorites were autobiographical in nature—seemingly random stories about his friends, family, and life experiences, especially from his Life and How to Live It series—and that arranging those in chronological order could create a nearly complete biography. Almost an autobiography, if you will.

I have added my commentary in order to fill in the gaps, add context, and share my insights. For the sake of clarity, my comments and observations will be in italics like this, while Mike’s words and those of other contributors will not.

It is my hope that you will enjoy this book and gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of who he was and why he was loved and followed by so many people.

Part One

Learning

The Three Pirates, Mike, Jim, and Scott, all grown up.

Me sitting in Mike’s car, taking a picture of the school on what would be his last visit there, and the last time I hung out with him.

Chapter 1

Three Pirates Look At 40

Originally published in 2004.

Mike and I were nearly polar opposites. I’m an introvert and, growing up, I mostly kept to myself. Mike, however, was always very sociable and funny. He had no trouble making and keeping friends. Here, he writes about his two oldest friends.

I will never forget the day I met Jim Duke. We were waiting in line to use the restroom at G.H. Whitcomb Elementary School in Clear Lake City, Texas. Well, that isn’t exactly true. We were actually waiting in line in a contest in the boy’s bathroom. We were both trying to be the first second-grader in school history to actually use the bathroom over the urinal, despite the fact that it was about six feet wide. We had been drinking water all morning long. Jim and I have always been ambitious.

That contest was interrupted when an emergency landed one of the contestants in an ambulance. I won’t describe what happened after one boy held it in too long. Besides, I was in the stall trying to convince Jim that the first ‘o’ in the Fort Howard label on the toilet paper dispenser was really an a. We still argue about it to this day. Jim and I have always been intellectuals.

When Scott Maxson moved to town two years later, Jim and I got over our grammar school foolishness. In other words, we started acting like bona fide juvenile delinquents. I wasn’t there the day that Jim and Scott lit the ditch on fire behind Scott’s house, but I do remember hearing the sirens when the fire department arrived.

Nor was I there the time that Scott and Jim used tin foil to make fake nails that stuck out of the cracks in the street in front of Scott’s house. It was pretty funny, until the guy in the El Camino truck (or was the El Camino a car?) spun out of control trying to swerve out of the way of the ‘nails’ in the road. I was also glad I wasn’t there when he hopped out of that El Camino and chased them through the neighborhood.

I should be careful about making fun of Jim. He knows that I once got arrested at a party with a sixteen-year-old girl. Every time I try to defend myself by pointing out that I was only seventeen at the time, he talks about the second time I got arrested. That was after I relieved myself on the side of a car. I didn’t know that it was an undercover cop car. And I sure didn’t know that there were two undercover cops inside the car at the time. Come to think of it, I don’t think my parents ever found out about it. I hope they aren’t still reading my columns.

When these things come up, Scott never comes to my defense. When he tells the story about a bunch of guys beating me up in a parking lot when I was seventeen, he leaves out the part about him running away crying just minutes before (this account may not be entirely accurate, by the way). But he likes to remind me of the time I threw him in a pool at a party on his first date with Stephanie. He got me back later, when he stuffed a chicken breast under the carpet inside my 1970 GTO. By the time I went on a date with Amy four nights later, that chicken breast smelled pretty rotten. I thought I had just run over a possum or a raccoon. All night, Amy kept asking me why my car smelled so bad. We never went out again.

Of course, I got Scott back later when he was out on a date with a girl from Austin, Texas. I called and left a message calling myself ‘Fabian’ saying Remember me? We met at a gay bar last Thursday night. Thanks for the back massage before I hung up laughing. Scott was dumb enough to play his messages later that night when he took the girl home to his apartment. He spent the rest of the night convincing her it was just a joke. It was okay, though. They ended up dating for two years. We all laughed about it later. I get messages from Fabian to this day.

Eleven years later, Scott planted the ‘men seeking men’ section of the local personals under the passenger side visor of my car. Tandy found it on our second date. She also found the Playgirl centerfold he planted in my Pottery Barn catalog. When I was single, I always tried to put something on the coffee table that my dates would enjoy reading. That was going a little too far.

When I look back on endless nights of drag racing and burying that GTO speedometer at 140 mph, I feel lucky to be alive. The most dangerous thing Jim ever did until then was to get into a fistfight with a bush. The bush won, as I remember.

Whenever we get together, we talk about the good times. Not the time that Bubba was stabbed at the drive-in movie theater. Not about the times that weren’t so good or the things that really hurt. Not the lies we told or the promises we broke.

We just think back to the promises we kept; the promise never to grow old and the promise never to stop laughing. And, above all, never to let old friendships die.

Old friends are blessings from God. And so are fortieth birthdays. Happy Birthday, Jim.

When Mike passed, Jim and Scott were still two of his best friends and served as pallbearers.

Mike was a loyal friend to many, and anyone who actually knew him, loved him. Relationship building is a lifelong endeavor—and Mike had mastered that art.

Mike also once said: I caught up with an old friend tonight. We’ve been friends since 1972. This is the first time in a decade that one of our phone conversations was over in less than two hours. My advice is simple. Hang on to your old friends and make time for them, regardless of what life is throwing at you. When you talk with old friends, you realize that your present troubles are often meaningless. Keep focused on an eternal perspective. Never let it go.

From the 1983 Clear Lake High School yearbook.

Parked in front of our house.

Chapter 2

My 1970 GTO

Originally published in 2009.

This book opens with stories that are light-hearted and funny and show that Mike was a great person to be around. But we will see that Mike’s stories were not just for idle entertainment, as he was often trying to make a point. Feedback from his students included comments on how they liked Mike’s stories and how he used life experiences to get his points across in class.

For example, here is an actual test question that once appeared on his