James Edward Adair

He was born James Edward Adair on December 19, 1940 in Pinetop, Arizona. To everyone that knew him he was "Jim Hoss." And that because of his total fascination for anything "cowboy." As soon as he was able to hold a rope he would throw a loop on anything or anyone that got close enough. His really great love was horses. He would start looking for one as soon as he got outside in the morning and would look until dark, and he would have to quit. And when he did find one he would throw a loop on it, and until he learned how to ride he would be perfectly contented just leading it around. He finally learned to get the horse close enough to something he could stand on and climb on the horses back. I'm sure in his mind he was king of the cowboys.

Actually his mind had been affected by an extremely high fever before he was a year old, which also left him with a stiff body that limited his physical activities. He didn't learn to walk until he was four years old. But when he did, you couldn't hold him still for any longer than it took him to eat or perform other necessary functions.

His mother, Mary Jane Sanders left when he was still a baby and of course with Lar helping Grandpa in the fields it fell to Grandma to take care of him. She was the only mother he ever knew and when she died he was totally devastated. Though he was limited in every way, he was far from dumb, and somewhere in the recesses of his mind he knew she was never coming back and it was almost more than he could deal with.

With her gone it passed on to Grandpa to take care of Jim and he was old, hardly able to care for himself, and Jim was pretty much on his own. One day Jim went over to town looking for a rope, he knew where a young kid kept his when he wasn't using it, and like he had so many times Jim went to his house to borrow his. This time the kid (Coy) had also put a pistol in the same place with the rope and Jim got both of them and went to find Coy. He went up to the local grocery store and ran into a girl he knew. He innocently started to show her the gun and seeing the gun she got scared and hollored and the local sheriff took the gun from Jim and took him home. A few days later the town "fathers" visited Grandpa and told him they thought he should send Jim to someplace where he would have closer supervision.

We were in Idaho at the time where Elmer was working in the mines. As soon as mom got Grandpa's letter telling her about Jimmy, we started back to Arizona, but by the time we got there they had already taken Jimmy to "Childrens Colony" in Casa Grande. Grandpa told mom that it was one of the hardest things he ever had to do, when he had to walk away and leave Jimmy there crying for him to take him with him. It made him feel so bad that he only went to see Jimmy one time after that. I suggested to mom and Elmer that we bring him to live with us in Holbrook but they were afraid something like the Pinetop incident would happen and maybe worse. We kept in touch with the school down there and they wrote and told us they had transferred Jim to Bisbee where he lived until one day he stepped off the curb at the Circle K store he frequented and was hit by a car. He died in a hospital a few hours later on March 21, 1984.

We buried him with the rest of the family in the place he had once lived and been so free in.

• The John Washington Adair Family

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