Perlie Park (P. P.) Adams

1874 - 1956 

Perlie Park Adams, known throughout his life as P. P. Adams, was chorus director and voice teacher at Alberta Industrial Academy, now Burman University, where he also taught Bible classes, from 1910 to 1917. He was an evangelist prior to this appointment and after leaving AIA taught in another academy and pastored in Seventh-day Adventist churches in California.

Adams was born on June 25, 1874, in Washington County, Iowa, one of five sons of John Williams and Mary N. Hare Adams. Like his four brothers, he followed in the footsteps of his father, becoming a minister, following completion of the ministerial program at Union College in 1897. He initially worked with his father in Iowa and then traveled with him to California in 1901.

Adams met and married Abbie Dail, a former student at Healdsburg College, forerunner of Pacific Union College, in 1903. Both were musicians and used their talents in evangelism in Fullerton and Ontario, California, until after his ordination in 1905, when they were invited to go to British Columbia, Canada. He worked there as conference secretary and treasurer as well as missionary secretary.

Five years later, he and his wife began teaching at the AIA, now in its second year at a new location and offering grades eleven and twelve for the first time. They were hired to create a music program, which they did in the next seven years as the school grew from 63 to 223 students. They brought with them a piano, the first at the school, on which she gave lessons in hymn playing for 50c each. She also gave lessons on a reed organ and he taught Bible classes, taught voice, and directed the chorus.

In 1917 they returned to California, where he taught Bible at San Fernando Academy for the next six years. When they closed the school in 1923 to avoid competition with the newly started La Sierra Academy, now La Sierra University, he resumed doing pastoral and evangelistic work in central California. Following his retirement in 1942, he and his wife moved to Pacific Grove, where they continued to work occasionally in evangelism until 1946. They were living in Yucaipa, California, when he died on March 10, 1956,at age 82.  She was living in National City, California, when she died nine years later on March 13, 1965, at age 84.

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Obituary, R&H,  April 26, 1956; father's (J. W.) obituary, R&H,29 January 1942; news notes in other issues of that magazine and the Pacific Union Recorder, dating from 1907 to 1956; Faculty listing in and information from Edith Fitch and Denise Dick Herr, Changing Lives, The Hilltop Experience, Canadian University College centennial history, 2007, pg.26; 1880 and 1900 Federal Census Records.