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When he was five the family moved to his father's second pastorate in the little (pop. 6,635) town of McMinnville, Ore. One Sunday there, Ted sat in church listening to an evangelist his father had invited to preach. "He finished, and he asked for true believers to come forward," says Adams. "Without even knowing I was doing it, I stood up and I saw my father standing there waiting. It was only three or four steps up there, but even as a six-year-old I thought to myself that they were terribly important steps. If I had waited 50 years more I could not have made a truer commitment than I made that day as a child." Afterward, his father warned him that some of his playmates might tease him about it. "If they do," he advised, "tell them Yes, I've been baptized, and I only wish you had been, too." Decision in Hammond. The Adams family moved to a pastorate in industrial Hammond, Ind. As a high-school student there, Ted found his life work. "I was reading, of all things, the life of Billy Sunday. When I finished, I went upstairs to think about what I had read.
And while I sat there, the Lord asked clearly: 'Do you want to be a preacher?' and I answered: 'My Lord, if that's what you want me to be, that's what I will be.' So the decision was made that afternoon, and I never doubted it again." When Ted graduated from high school, he decided to wait a year to be able to go to college with his younger brother, Earl.
At his mother's behest, he spent the year in Chicago becoming a chiropractor. (Today Ted Adams' family boasts that he is the best neck-snapper and vertebrae-cracker in the Baptist ministry.) In 1921 Ted and Earl (now an official of the National Council of Churches) graduated as Phi Beta Kappas from Ohio's Denison University, and Ted immediately enrolled at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, where his father had studied. His first call was to the Cleveland Heights Baptist Church, and within a year 26-year-old Pastor Adams had married Esther Josephine Jillson, a small, energetic girl from Beaver Dam, Wis. Three years later, he moved to Toledo, where the delegation from Richmond found him.
Though they had no intention of accepting the offer, the Adamses felt they must pay First Baptist the courtesy of a visit. The pulpit committee put its best foot forward with a bang-up dinner at Richmond's Hotel John Marshall. The customary blessing was followed by fresh grapefruit, which, to everyone's horror, turned out to be liberally spiked with liquor. Ted Adams (who has never taken a drink) merely laughed, and everyone managed to get it down. When the dessert appeared, it turned out to be fruit floating in rum. Says Esther Adams now: "We thought it was a wonderful joke." When they got home to Toledo, neither of them was yet convinced that they should move south. Three or four nights later Ted Adams was in his study when "suddenly I knew I just had to go." He went upstairs at once and told his wife.