I was filling my car’s
gas tank on Friday night when my iPhone alerted me to an incoming text from my
friend Joyce Fitzpatrick. Her message,
which was accompanied by an emoticon shedding a tear, simply said “Al Adams
just died.” Within seconds a second
text conveyed the same sad news. That
one was from Tina, Al’s faithful and gregarious aide whose diligent care
allowed him to stay at home as his health declined.
I’ve thought a lot about Al since then, and although my
thoughts understandably are tinged with sadness over his passing, most of them
have been happy thoughts, because from the day I met Al until the last time I
saw him, being with him always made me happy.
I met Al in February, 1973 when I reported to Suite 1500
in the old BB&T building to begin practicing law with Sanford, Cannon,
Adams & McCullough. I had just been
released from the U.S. Navy after four years on active duty. Marilyn and I were new to Raleigh; in fact,
she was new to North Carolina. We had a brand
new baby, a brand new Ford Pinto, and an apartment sparsely furnished with a
few pieces of rental furniture. Al had
not been around when I had interviewed with the firm, but in what I later learned
was a typical gesture, he immediately took
me to his Cameron Park house to ramble about in the attic and borrow a spare
dresser and several other items.
I determined early on that the law firm had hired me
without having any clear idea about what I was supposed to do, so I began
making the rounds of the partners’ offices looking for assignments. In Al’s case an “assignment” took the form of
his rummaging through the files stacked on his desk, handing me one, and saying
something like “maybe you can figure out what to do about this.” I quickly learned that in most instances (but
not all) he already had figured out what to do, and that his open-ended
methodology and lack of instruction was just his way of measuring my skill and
assessing my judgment. He must have been
satisfied, because we worked together closely for the next 15 years without so
much as a single cross word.
Frankly, I don’t remember many details, and in some cases
even the outcomes, of the many legal cases that Al and I worked on
together. What I DO remember is the fun
we had, especially when our work took us to New York and other places where we
could indulge two of Al’s great passions: good food and grand opera.[1]
Al’s appetite was prodigious, his tastes in food were
eclectic and ecumenical, and he seemed to know the best places to eat in every
city and town in the country, from Norfolk to New Orleans to New York. The best thing about eating with him was the
palpable and infectious enjoyment that he displayed, regardless of whether he
was dining at Locke-Ober or having lunch at Green’s Garner
Grill. For Al, every meal was an event.
He was especially fond of seafood, particularly
oysters. In addition to the Grand Central
Oyster Bar, where he inevitably ordered the oyster pan roast, his New York
favorites included Gage & Tollner, a seafood restaurant on Fulton Street in
Brooklyn that had been in business since 1879.
It was located in a building listed in the National Register of Historic
Places where the replacement of the original gaslights with electric bulbs was
the only obvious concession to modernity.
In the 1980s it was not always easy to persuade a cab driver to take you
there from Manhattan, but the chef was the fabled Edna Lewis and the waiters,
who wore military-style chevrons on their sleeves reflecting their years of
service, were ageing black men from Goldsboro and other Eastern North Carolina locales. Al’s favorite dish, an appetizer, was baked
clam bellies on toast, an affectation he shared with legendary New Yorker
writer Calvin Trillin.
Al
enjoyed feeding others as much as he enjoyed feeding himself. He loved hosting his annual pre-Christmas
party, which drew dozens of friends to stand outside in the cold and eat
steamed or raw oysters and Smithfield ham on saltine crackers topped with his
famous rémoulade sauce, the special ingredient of which was Zatarain’s creole
mustard. He also loved mixing Bloody
Marys, cranking out oyster omelets, and otherwise acting as the impresario of
the Sunday brunch at his Emerald Isle beach house that traditionally marked the
conclusion (and, for most of us, the clear highlight) of our annual firm
retreats.
Somewhere along here I probably should mention that some
of Al’s gusto for food probably was attributable to the fact that he liked to
preface a meal with a martini (or two).
He believed that the only indispensable ingredient of a true martini was
gin, and that it should be kept in the freezer or refrigerator. He made me the first one I had ever had,
straight up with a twist, which is how I like them to this day.
Al also loved the opera.
If we were traveling to New York on business, he invariably would
consult the Metropolitan Opera calendar before scheduling client meetings and
depositions. Although he often said that
the plots of most operas could be the basis of a country and western song, he
was mesmerized by every performance from the moments the lights went up until
the curtain closed on the dying or dead hero or heroine. Italian opera was his favorite. A well-rendered Puccini aria could
practically lift him out of his seat.
Al attributed his love of opera to his mother. He explained that as a relatively young
widow who supported herself and him on her salary as a “Red Cross lady,” she
didn’t have the wherewithal or the opportunity to attend the opera, but every
Saturday afternoon during the season she would tune the radio to Texaco’s
broadcast of the Met’s matinee performance, filling her house and his head with
music that he grew to love. In the
mid-1950s, After Al had graduated from UNC and was serving in the U.S. Navy at
the Great Lakes Training Center outside Chicago, he took a weekend pass and
went into the city. While he was walking
around gazing at the Wrigley Building, Soldier Field and other famous sights,
he found himself in front of the Chicago Lyric Opera, where the evening’s
offering was Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffman.”
He had never attended an opera performance. He went up to the box office and asked if any
tickets were available. There were, and
because he was in uniform, the price was cheap (Al remembered that it was
around $10), so he paid and went in. As
soon as the overture began and the curtain went up, he was enthralled. “It was,” he said, “even more magical than I
had imagined. I loved everything about
it: the singing, the sets, the costumes — everything. I was hooked.
That was when I realized that they call it ‘grand opera’ because it
really is grand.”
Of the many opera performances that
we attended together, the one that occurred on December 5, 1978 is particularly memorable. After working in Boston for a couple of days Al and I took the shuttle to New York, where we had depositions scheduled the next
day. Al had the cab driver drop me and
our luggage at our hotel while he went on to Lincoln Center to see if there
were any “turn-in” tickets available for that evening’s sold-out performance of
“Aida.” About an hour later I opened my
door to a knock to find Al, his face wreathed in glee, holding up two tickets
in the dead center of the orchestra section.
“I got great seats,” he said, “but there must be something going on at
Lincoln Center, because they said we need to be seated at least 10 minutes
before the curtain. We’ll have time for
a drink, but we will have to have a late dinner.”
We arrived at the opera house to
find that the NYPD had deployed their familiar blue sawhorse barriers to set up
a check point outside the entrance, and when we had settled into our seats the
house was abuzz with rumor and speculation.
Just before the lights were due to go up, an announcement said, “Ladies
and gentlemen, please welcome the President of the United States and Mrs.
Carter, Governor Carey and Mrs. Carey, and former mayor Beame and Mrs.
Beame.” Everyone turned to face the parterre
to see Jimmy Carter, in black tie, waving from the front row. Needless to say, Al was ecstatic.
According
to Alistair Cooke, the famous BBC reporter, that night was the first and only
time that a sitting President had attended a performance at the Met. As far as I can ascertain, no sitting
President has done so subsequently.
I could go on, because writing this
has evoked even more happy memories, such as my 1988 Virgin Islands sailing
trip with Al, Betty and Heman Clark, but the point is that because Al loved
life so much, and lived it so ebulliently, there are simply too many such memories
to recall or recount at one sitting. He himself summed it up perfectly. “I have,” he said, “the best time of anyone I
know.” Indeed he did. And because he did, those of us who were
fortunate enough to be his friends had a great time, too.
[1]
Al’s
other great passion, of course, was politics — a topic that I will largely
leave to others. He had run for the state senate in 1972 but
lost in the Republican sweep that propelled Jesse Helms into the U.S. Senate
and Jim Holshouser into the Governor’s Mansion. In 1974 he made a successful run for the
N.C. House of Representatives, where he would serve five terms. In his very first term he teamed with fellow
members of Wake County’s legislative delegation Ruth Cook, Bill Creech, Bob
Farmer, Joe Johnson and Wade Smith to
pass legislation merging the Wake County and Raleigh public schools. For the next ten years he rose steadily in
the ranks of the General Assembly’s leadership, eventually serving as chair of
the House Appropriations Committee and joining forces with legendary
legislators like Liston Ramsey, Billy Watkins, and George Miller to provide
funding for public education and progressive legislation of various kinds. Of the many measures he sponsored, he was
particularly proud of the bill that set aside places for public access to North
Carolina’s beaches, including his beloved strand at Emerald Isle.
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