James Donald Adams

James Adams died March 17, 2024, at the Knolls of Oxford, where he had lived since 2020. He was 76. Jim was surrounded by loving friends and family in his final days of life and was with his two children when he passed.

The son of Paul Adams and Mary Houts Adams, Jim was born on March 30, 1947, in Celina, Ohio, and grew up in Coldwater, Ohio, with his parents; his sister, Janet; and his brother, Douglas (“Jack”). He graduated in 1965 from Coldwater High School, where he played football.

In the fall of 1965 he moved to Oxford, Ohio, to attend Miami University. His years there fostered a lifelong love for the school. He was a member of Delta Chi fraternity and sang with the men’s glee club. He met his first wife, Sara Puterbaugh, as a junior; they married shortly after graduating in 1969 and moved to Hamilton, Ohio, where they raised two children — Jennifer and Peter — and were active members of Grace United Methodist Church. 

In the early 1970s, Jim worked as a director of activities at Miami University’s Hamilton campus and helped manage men’s athletics there, including the golf team. He also announced men’s basketball games at Millett Hall, on Miami’s main campus, until 1982. In 1977, he became an agent with the New York Life Insurance Company and later founded his own company, CFC Benefits, adding group health plans and benefits to his services. For over 40 years he found great reward in helping people care for their loved ones through financial planning. He also found meaning and fellowship in his decades of community service with the Lindenwald Kiwanis Club of Hamilton/Fairfield.

In 1987, Jim married his second wife, Debbie Trester, and was a devoted stepfather to her two children, Alissha and Lance. In 2002, he purchased and operated Cotton Run Stables, a 65-acre boarding and riding facility that took Jim back to his childhood love of horses.

Jim was an extraordinarily warm and charismatic person, and a deeply loving father. His children remember his bright and open personality, his humor, his reverence for traditions — both new and old — and his ever-present Nikon camera. They remember, perhaps above all, his love of music: singing and stories punctuated by his acoustic guitar. His children cannot remember a time in which people didn’t regularly approach them to share how much they adored their father. “We just love your dad!” was a common refrain throughout their lives — from their earliest memories with their father to their very last ones. 

He was known for his hoaxes and humor, his selfless desire to help others and his drive to succeed. He had a great passion for golf, which he played avidly for most of his life. He also loved aviation and earned his pilot’s license in the 1980s. And he sang throughout his life: at first at home with his mother, who nurtured his love of music, and then later in a special men’s quartet at Miami, in church, at weddings and, most memorably, at home before bedtime.

Jim’s parents and his brother predeceased him. He is survived by his daughter, Jennifer (Paul) Gray; his son, Peter (Michelle) Adams; his grandchildren Paige, Katie and Ethan; and his sister, Janet Lee, and her children David, Michelle, Matt and Kristen. Jim valued his family as a source of true joy and brought them light, levity and love.

Visitations will be at Paul R. Young Funeral Home in Oxford, Ohio, on Friday, March 22, from 5 to 7 p.m. and on Saturday, March 23, from 10 to 11 a.m. Funeral services will be held at Oxford United Methodist Church at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday.

Contributions in memory of Jim can be made to the Parkinson's Foundation.

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