Charles Clifford Adams (1895 - 1954)

b.  3 January 1895    Los Angeles, California

m.  21 June 1916    Los Angeles, California  to Pearl (Peggy) America Garland
d.   18 January 1954    Glendale, California

Father:  Frank Benson Adams
Mother: Fredonia Maston Clifford

Siblings:  Allan Armstrong Adams
               Keith Kenyon Adams
               David Douglas Adams

Children:  Phyllis Jane Adams
                Patricia Glenne Adams
                Peggy Sharon Adams

Peggy and Cliff

[The following is an article from a publication called "Ambition: A Journal of Inspiration to Self Help," put out by International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was written about Clifford Adams in 1927. Sorry, it is very old and one corner of a page is missing.]

"Night Firing" in the Battle of Life by H. F. White

The artillery in the World War was seldom content to halt its work with the coming of darkness. The thunder of the guns continued into the night, and the sullen horizon was often red with the intermittent flash, flash of batteries hurling shells on enemy strongpoints.

The Allies never knew when to "call it a day." They kept pounding away at the job, knowing no time clock or five o'clock whistle, heedless of everything but the great task before them. And they got results - big results! Powerful enemy opposition broke and crumbled under the constant hammering of their shells, and victory perched on their banners.

"Night firing" - a never-ceasing attack on the problems that confront him - is as important to the success of any individual as to that of an army. "Night firing" sweeps away obstacles. "Night firing" paves the way for advancement. "Night firing" gets results. Many successful men testify to that, and C. Clifford Adams, well-known Los Angeles electrical engineer, is one of them.

"I estimate that my evening hours, in the past seventeen years, have been worth more than $40,000 to me," says Mr. Adams, who began at a wage of $5 a week and is now owner-manager of a large and growing business. Ever since that modest beginning he has concentrated the fire of his mental batteries, night and day, on the obstacles in his way. He is still doing it, still spending many spare hours in work and study, and he means to continue. He has no intention of giving to those mental batteries the command "cease firing." For to the man who keeps pace with progress there are always new problems to meet, fresh obstacles to overcome.

"My earliest ambition was to be a locomotive engineer," says Mr. Adams, recalling the days of his boyhood. That was an ambition shared in common with the great majority of American boys. And, no wonder! To pilot a rushing monster of steel and steam is an ambition to thrill the imagination of everybody - and many men. Doubtless Mr. Adams would have made an excellent success of the great business of railroading - his bent was decidedly mechanical - but various elements were at work to turn him to other fields of activity.

"My grandfather," he says, "wanted me to be a civil engineer. I thought civil engineering included steam and electrical work and it appealed to me. But father thought a business course in high school would give me a good groundwork for whatever line I decided to follow, so I began that."

Then a chance offered to go to work in a grocery store, and he left school to get the practical experience. He had been there some months when a friend returning from Alaska stirred him with his accounts of the chances in that northern land for men trained in motorboat repair and construction work. The lad promptly enrolled for an evening course in automobile work. And there began the long years of spare-time application that have paid such handsome dividends.

Mr. Adams chuckles as he tells of his enrollment. "When I went downtown to sign up for the course, my step-mother thought I was going to enter dancing school," he says. "She had always urged me to develop the social side of my nature, and she thought dancing school would help to do it. But social affairs never held any great attraction for me, and mechanics did, so I elected to spend my evenings listening to motor music rather than to dance music."

The automobile course interested Adams so much that in 1910 he gave up the job in the grocery store and began to follow his mechanical bent by taking a job with the U. S. Electric Company, in Los Angeles. The wage, $5 a week, wasn't much, but he was doing the thing he liked to do, and he put his feet firmly on the first rungs of the ladder of success when he took that place.

He was inquisitive about the why and wherefore of everything he did, and everlastingly active in his quest for knowledge. "I made friends with the men in the shop." he says. "and they gave me a great deal of information. Later on, when I began to take on more difficult work, these friendships were increasingly valuable.

It was worth a great deal to be able to consult with men of excellence and wide experience on problems of design or construction that puzzled me. The man who makes himself agreeable to his fellow workmen in any job not only makes his daily task more pleasant, but vastly increases his opportunities for self-improvement as well."

The young man began working out designs and problems in the shop, and soon discovered that a knowledge of drafting would be of great practical value to him. So he enrolled for a drafting course. There were those in the shop, and among his friends outside, who laughed at him for thus working overtime. For them, the day was done when the whistle blew. They didn't realize the value of night firing.

"I set myself a program of two hours a night, five nights a week, for study," says Mr. Adams, "and I stuck to it. After putting in my nine hours at the shop I would go home, wash up, have my supper, and sit down at once to my books. Usually I could get to my studying about seven o'clock. I worked right through until nine or a little after, and then went to bed. I had to be at the shop at 7 A.M., and I figured I couldn't afford to cheat myself on sleep.

"Saturday night I kept open for recreation, and I guess I enjoyed it twice as much because I knew that I had put in a good, full week. A certain amount of play, of recreation, is necessary to every one, but the young fellow who gives all his evenings to enjoying himself isn't going to get far. He will come to the point where he won't have much to enjoy himself on.

"Plenty of gray-haired old fellows are working along from day to day, at a small wage, because they hadn't the foresight, and the will power, to use their spare time to advantage when they were young. They work in constant fear of the blue envelope, which usually shows up sooner or later. Old and penniless! Pretty tough, but they have only themselves to blame. They were too careless with their play hours."

Mr. Adams took on more and more work at the shop, and kept up his studying, until one evening the boss said to him: "You'd better show up with a white collar, tomorrow."

"How come?" asked Adams.

The boss explained that the company's draftsman was leaving. He had learned that Adams was studying drafting, and he asked him to bring his drafting instruments and finish a job on which the other man had been working. Adams did. He finished that job and others. He was getting $6 a week then, and this was increased to $7.

"I worked for quite a while at $7," he smiles, "and, sometimes, with the press of work, I thought I was abused. But I kept in mind my Dad's advice that experience was worth everything, and I stuck to the job at $7 and said nothing. And then, one payday, I found $12 in my pay envelope instead of $7, and I decided it had paid pretty well to keep pounding away."

In 1912 Adams enrolled for the I.C.S. course in Electrical Engineering, and with increasing knowledge came increased pay and greater responsibilities. He was working in the machine shop and in the drafting room, and when the man in charge of the winding and testing department died, he took on that job, too. But that wasn't enough. He began to be sent out on field work as well, making estimates on machinery installations and changes.

In the shop he found much interest in working out new designs. This he did partly by established principles and partly by the "cut and try" method. When the work in the drafting room, and conferences over technical points, still left doubt, he "knew his stuff" so well that he could take the job into the shop and by actually making and testing of the device discover its good and bad features, and thus work toward a perfect product. The plant is still making essentially the same motor that he designed for them.

Meantime, the night work went on. He learned how to study to the best advantage. He began to use the time spent on the street car each morning and evening in study, as well as the hours at home. Keeping up his schedule of five nights a week, two hours a night, he finished the five year I.C.S. course in Electrical Engineering in three years and ten months.

"I discovered a lot of things about studying," he said. "I taught myself to concentrate on everything I did. There would come times when I couldn't seem to do this, when I would get tired or sleepy, and my mind would wander away from my work in spite of all my efforts. I found that at such times, the best thing was to drop the work, for the time being, and pick up a fiction story or some other light reading. After a half hour or so with the story, I would be able to go back to my work with new energy and interest.

"But let me say a word of warning to those who may think of trying this method - don't get so interested in your fiction that you forget to go back to work! Use the light reading as a means to an end, but don't let it throw you off the track.

"There are so many things that will throw a man off the track unless he keeps close watch. But when the temptation comes to neglect your study, just picture in your imagination, the things you want to accomplish by that study. Picture, too, where you are likely to be at 60 if you just slide along. And don't ever think that tomorrow will do as well as today to begin plugging, because it won't.

"The thing I have always tried to do in my reading and studying is to teach myself to think. I try to get the salient facts, and to learn how to put those facts to practical application in my work. I don't try merely to learn a lot of stuff by heart. And in the manner of formulas I find it better not to cram a lot of them into my head. When I need to use a certain formula I know where I can find it, and the book is handy. Use your brain to think with, to get the meat out of what you hear and read, and not merely as a warehouse of assorted facts.

"I believe," he continued, "that the public schools would do their pupils a far greater service if they taught them to think, and to see the meaning and the practical application of the things they are studying. The brains of a lot of students are like sponges, soaking up facts and information without the slightest idea of how to use them.

"It is really surprising what a man can do with his mind if he isn't afraid to make it work. The brain is like a muscle; it grows by exercise. I found that the more I studied the more efficient I became. Things that I couldn't do at all in the beginning became easy. For example, by practice I came to be able to do the cube root of six or seven figures in my head. By concentrating I could see the figures as clearly as though they were on paper before me. What you can do with your brain depends on what you want to do with it, and how hard you are willing to work."

Mr. Adams remained with the U.S. Electric Company for five years. He was a lad of fifteen when he began; a green hand knowing virtually nothing of electrical work. When he left the company, at twenty, he was at home, and valuable, in almost any department of the business.  Night study had enabled him, in five brief years, to overcome obstacles that most men never get past in a lifetime of routine effort.

He went to Phoenix, Arizona, where he specialized in auto magneto work. He remained there five years. He kept up his correspondence courses, adding new ones from time to time. Thus he studied the subject of efficiency, character analysis, business administration, and others as well. For a time, in Phoenix, he taught a class of young shopmen, who paid him $1 per hour each for the instruction.

His I.C.S. textbooks are on the shelves of his reference library today, and they show marks of constant use. Mr. Adams never went to college, but he has a better technical library than most graduates of technical institutes, and he knows what the books contain.

He keeps his library in his shop, ready to hand at any moment. There is one large bookcase of five shelves, filled with books, and ---------------- volumes on another shelf ------------ library are the books of all the various correspondents and night school courses he has taken, and he has taken six. All of them have to do, directly or indirectly, with his business. For this member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers is a specialist. Underline that word "specialist" in red ink, for it is the secret of the success of many men of achievement - concentration on one certain line of effort, just as artillery concentrates its fire, for maximum effect.

"Let a man choose the work he likes to do, and then put the whole of himself into it, until he knows it from the inside out and from the outside in, and he will not only succeed in it, but he will find it more and more interesting as time goes on," says Mr.Adams.

"I find that a good way to avoid monotony is to try, on every job I tackle, to discover some new and better way to do it. If a man goes on, day after day, doing the same old thing in the same old way, letting his hands work while his brain sleeps, he gets sick of his job. And then he begins to think of getting some other kind of work, where he imagines there will be more interest.

"But it will be the same old story, most likely, in anything he tackles. As soon as the work becomes automatic he loses interest. If he will put his mind on what he is doing, trying to improve his method, he will do the work better and better, and it will never grow monotonous."

But of course, as Mr. Adams discovered a long time ago, you can't very well figure out better ways of doing a thing unless you have a fund of information regarding that thing, and unless you know how to think. And that brings us right back to the matter of spare time work. Mr. Adams began getting down to brass tacks with that first automobile course, and he has been digging deep into his specialty ever since.

More than $40,000 - that's the estimate he places on his spare time work. Let's figure that out. Spread over the seventeen years since he left school, it amounts to about $2,400 per annum. Of course it didn't begin yielding big money returns at once. That kind of progress takes time to gain momentum. At $7 a week this young man doubtless had moments of discouragement, when he was tempted to quit the whole thing. Then the spare time work began to pay dividends - in cold cash. It has been paying dividends ever since, bigger and bigger as the years go on.