Now, you've written several books and booklets, and so what are some of the titles and what are--$$Okay, one of them is that one, "Get Up With Something on Your Mind", all right. The, I wrote a lot of what I call "self-help" guides which are 14, 28 page, little documents, specific, "How to Have a Successful Internship Experience", "How do you go into a company and perform very well and get invited back the next summer so you don't have to worry about it? You might not go back, but you want the invitation to come back. So you, I want you--I wanted my students to have the attitude, if you don't--invite anybody back, it's gonna be me. When I'd leave Revlon's in the summer, the personnel guy would always tell me, "If we hire anybody, Adams, you're Number One". I knew that leaving. So when you leave--so we wrote a book on that, how to do that. We wrote a book how to master the graduate school process. How do you go to graduate school and finish yesterday? How do you get finished in a hurry? What does it take to get finished? We wrote a book on "Career Management 101" about how to sit down and plan to find a job and then get the job that you want and then go to work and perform well and get promoted, and don't have to worry about it. You don't have to--you don't have to worry about the economy being bad. If the place runs, I'm gonna have a job. If I don't, I go somewhere else and get myself another one. So you just don't have to worry about that. I never worried about that, never worried about a job. So I, I tried to give people the nuts and bolts, easy ready, self-help stuff on how to get to the next step of where you're trying to get to. When I first started doing graduate education, we didn't have things written in the language that's--what is a PhD? Most people don't know what it is. What's the difference between a PhD and an MD and a, and theological doctorate? What, you know, a science doctorate? What's the difference in those things? So we had to demystify graduate education, I call it. So a lot of what I, what I wrote was that. How do you decode what students need in a very simplistic kind of way so that one, they'll read it. It's readable, and it's quick and it points directly to the question that they most like have.$Okay, so, now did you know--Lymon Beacher Brooks was the president of Norfolk State.$$Of Norfolk State.$$Now, what was your relationship with Lymon Beacher Brooks?$$He was, he was the president when I was a student, and I was a student leader. So he was--by the time I got to be a senior, he had taken a particular interest in me. I wouldn't have called him a mentor at that time, but he had taken a particular interest in me. So he knew me well by the time I was a senior and would ask me to do little things. I got invited to little things. I might of got invited to a reception that somebody else didn't get invited to or something. When I graduated, I went to work at Jay Cox Junior High School which is right in the general area, right where Norfolk State is. And by that time, I had gotten back in the restaurant business. So I ran a fast food, Carl's Drive-In, my senior, my junior, end of my junior year and all of my senior year at Norfolk State [University]. I was night manager.$$Yeah, the Carl's--$$Carl's Drive--fast food, like a McDonald's--$$Okay.$$--but right on the campus, literally, almost, you know, I mean right by the campus and right across the street from the high school, Booker T. Washington High School is right across the street. So--$$Okay, I didn't wanna get you graduated yet from Norfolk State.$$Okay.$$Let's go back there for a minute. Like what was your major in--$$Biology. It was biology and I was a biology major. And I, I picked that simply because it had good equipment that I had never had a chance to use. I was going to be a history major. In fact, I sent my application in to be a history major. And I got down a week early just to look the place over and get set up and everything. And as I was walking around, I walked through the labs, and I liked the way the labs looked. I changed, went back down and changed my major to biology.$$Did--now, was there a particular teacher in biology that helped you, I mean that--$$In high school?$$No, in, in--$$Oh, well, the teachers, the faculty were good, but I didn't know them at the time. I mean I just changed my mind, just, just changed my mind because of the equipment sitting around. I just--you could walk through and see it at that time. You didn't have to have everything locked up.$$So it just kind of caught your--$$Just got a feeling, got a feeling that I'd like to do this. So I decided to major in biology. And so there was a good group of us who started out together, freshmen, freshmen. The freshmen class in biology was a pretty tight group. And so I made it through the freshman year. It was a struggle. I was behind. When I say I was behind, I hadn't had advanced chemistry. I hadn't had a good lab. I mean I had a chemistry class, and the teacher was good, but we didn't have no equipment. You know what I'm trying to say. I'd had a good biology class, but I didn't have no equipment, so I didn't know how to use the equipment and stuff. So I was behind, and so it was, it was harder than I thought it was gonna be. And I went home, and I was talking to my mother for Spring break my freshman year. She asked, "How's it going?" I said, well, it's going alright, Mother, but I'm not doing as well as I thought I was gonna do. So she said, she said, are you passing everything. I said, yes, ma'am, I'm not failing nothing. I'm just not doing as well as I thought. She said, "Are you studying hard?" And I was studying, so I said, yes, ma'am. She said, "Are you giving it your very best?" And I, you had to, you couldn't, you couldn't fib on that. You had to, you had to think about that. I mean am I, you know, am I giving it my best? And, you know, in hindsight, I probably could have given it a little bit more, but I mean I wasn't slacking off. I didn't miss no classes, I didn't cut class. I didn't leave early on Friday, none of that. So I was studying. And I'd study with people, and I went to tutoring and everything. So I said, I said, yes, ma'am, I'm, I'm doing it. She say, you go on back down there. You gone be alright. You keep giving it your best. She said, your best is good enough. You don't have to do no better than that. Your best is good enough. I put that in my book. That was good advice. "Your best is good enough." So I went back. The second year, my wife came as a freshman. And I was taking chemistry by that time. I didn't take freshman chemistry my first year. And she had had advanced chemistry. And she was on the other side of the, on the table on the other side that you could look through. And I could see her all the time. And she was brilliant and good looking. So I decided, hey, you gotta--you gonna have to hang out with somebody (laughter). It might as well be somebody who's good looking and who can do some chemistry. So we started dating, and we dated off and on all the way through, although I had a couple of girlfriends at the time. But I mean she, you know, we dated. And by the time we were juniors, we were pretty serious, and seniors, we were, we were--she was my girlfriend by the time we were seniors. And so we graduated together. But I went through. I was a, I went out for track, decided I couldn't do all of it. I couldn't work. I tell kids that you gotta decide what you can actually do. And I had to put it in the right order, so I learned how to prioritize even as a freshman. My number one priority was to have a job. You don't have a job, you can't go to school. I mean I couldn't--I had to support myself. So I had to have a job. This job was steady. It didn't pay well. It only paid .75 cents an hour, but I could, I could get 30 hours in just on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Nobody wanted to work on Sunday. I worked every Sunday almost. I worked 12 hours on Saturday the whole time I was at Norfolk State. I'd go in 8:00 o'clock on Saturday morning, and work till 8:00 Saturday night. And so I could take care of myself. School would end in May. The next day I was on the bus back to New Jersey, and usually, I'd get out in the middle of the week. So let's say, I always finished on Wednesday or Thursday. By Friday, I was back in New Jersey. By Monday, I was back at work at Revlon's, and I'd work right up until Labor Day, whenever school was--I wouldn't even go home. I'd come back here to school, and then I'd take a long weekend and go home just to holler at everybody. But most times, depending upon when school opened and how long they'd let me work. And so at the end of the year, there, but, of course, they would be closing down, and a lot of kids would wanna take some time off. Sometimes I'd work 16 hours a day. So my last check would be big. I'd, I'd get, you know, double-time, time and a half. I'd work (laughter), I'd put in all the hours I could put in so I could get a big check. They'd mail it to me after I was gone. I'd get back to school, so I'd have a big check. Sometimes my last check would pay my tuition 'cause tuition at that time was 270 a half a semester, I think, 270--about $500.00 a semester, a thousand dollars a year, a little bit less than a thousand dollars a year. I could pay that. So I didn't have to borrow money. I paid my way through. I--from the time I left home, I never wrote home for a nickel. I never wrote home for a nickel from the day I left home in 1958. I can say that. I've been able to support myself from that day.
