John V. “Pete” Adkins was born Sept. 9, 1924 in Wellsville, a Adkins. The Great Depression hit “I remember as a family,”
Pete said, “we had some hard times. A lot of farmers were going broke, and our family happened to be one of them. My folks found out there were
plant and my mother worked at the International Shoe Company. They were workaholics, they knew how to make a dollar. Things got vived the Depression.” care of me the best they could when mom and dad were working. They were good sisters, they looked after me. Then, as we got older, we all had a job.” Pete got his “butt” paddled a few times in grade school, but “it was nothing serious, just things kids would do in school, like teasing girls. Of course in those days, they had you bend over and grab your ankles, and they’d warm your (butt) up with that paddle.”
“I went to work on my bicycle, peddling papers. Then I had an uncle who When he got to ninth grade, he wanted to play sports (football, bas-
ketball and track) and his parents asked him, ‘What about your job?’” newest job at a dairy farm, then went to school, and then played his sports.
worked and worked. We were pretty tough, fundamentally.” Weighing After high school, he joined the Navy when he was 17 and served for 27 months, living on the beach and receiving signals from his ship to relay orders to the troops.
Adkins said he wasn’t in any actual combat situa- tions, but he constantly car- just in case. Those situations were close at hand. He lost several friends and high school classmates in the but during combat on a dif- ferent island.
After his time in the Navy
at Culver-Stockton in Canton, Mo. Yes, he played foot- Harrington, but that was not the most important thing that happened in college. He met Lorraine Fenner. “She worked for a lawyer down there in Canton, that’s how we survived,” Pete 69 years, before Lorraine Adkins passed away in 2017. “She was a great wife, and we had a good time to- gether. I miss her every day,” Pete said. “I still can’t cer, and there wasn’t any way to stop it. “We’d just been in Hawaii a couple or three months when we got back, she started having some prob-
8 /// November 2024
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