Madelyn (Madge) Woods Adams (95 years young!) from Geneva College Class of 1944 has served the college directly or indirectly for more than 70 years. She was born at home on the family farm outside Clarinda, Iowa on September 30, 1922, the second daughter to Homer D. and Bessie McCalla Woods. After her first eight grades at the one room Olive Branch country school, she graduated from Clarinda High School in 1940, where she played the string bass. She attended one year of Clarinda Junior College before transferring to Geneva College as a sophomore. After getting off the train alone in lower Beaver Falls, she settled into McKee Hall.

World War II changed the student body of Geneva College; unless males were pre-ministerial, pre-medical majors, or ineligible for the draft, they were drafted into military service leaving mostly female students at the College. Geneva opened up the dormitories and campus housing to Air Force pilot cadets training at the Beaver Co airport, moving the existing students to area housing near campus. As the first in her family to go to college, Madge earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration in 1944 with a reputation as a 130 words per minute typist, setting the still unbroken college typing speed record for a manual typewriter! She also played drums in the marching and concert band. After graduation, she returned home where she was employed by the Army Quartermaster Corps at the prisoner of war (POW) camp in Clarinda until the end of World War II when German and Japanese POWs returned home and the camp was closed. Madge then transferred to the Veterans Administration in Kansas City, MO.

Madelyn (Woods '44) Adams

She had previously met Roy Adams at a summer camp in Topeka, Kansas while he was a chemistry graduate student at the University of Kansas. Rather than be drafted, he enlisted in the Naval Air Force, earned pilot wings, was commissioned 2d Lieutenant, and was preparing to go overseas as a PBY-2 pilot. But when WWII ended, re- entered graduate school at KU. One day, while she still lived in Missouri, “He told me he had had a phone call from Geneva College, expressing the need for a spring term chemistry teacher! But with research rather than teaching as his priority, he was unsure how to respond. He prayed about it, asking God’s will, and was motivated to accept the teaching position for the spring semester. After he had started at Geneva, during one phone call, he admitted the unexpected pleasure he found in teaching there. He also suggested that after the spring semester, “He might come to Iowa so that we could be married, then move back to Lawrence Kansas for him to complete his Ph.D. We were married in June of 1946 at the Clarinda Reformed Presbyterian Church.”

After marrying, the couple lived in Lawrence, Kansas while Roy finished his doctorate. After birth of their first son, Melville, Roy accepted a full-time teaching position in chemistry at Geneva to begin in 1948. They lived on campus in a first floor, one bedroom apartment with an upstairs bath, and welcomed their second son, Renwick in 1950. With four people in this small apartment, a large, old farmhouse on 68 acres near Darlington, was purchased for $20,000. Two more sons, Jonathan and Joel were added. While Roy led family worship morning and evening, taught chemistry at Geneva, gained funded research in boron chemistry, and led the Chemistry department to American Chemical Society accreditation, Madge packed school lunches, managed the household, attended school events, canned organically grown vegetables, fruit, and juice from the garden, trees, and vines, and remodeled the 1840 farmhouse. The farm also was home to 3 ponies, a series of cats and dogs, and a few chickens producing enough eggs to sell. Eventually, Roy and sons cleared and fenced enough pasture to replace chickens with several dozen grass-fed Hereford cattle. Madge also typed the first draft on a portable typewriter of Roy’s two chapters in the 765 page textbook on boron chemistry of which Roy was also the editor.

The Eastvale RP church in Beaver Falls was their church home with many brothers and sisters in Christ. For decades, Madelyn typed the minutes of the session meetings, baked the communion bread, and with her family attended Lord’s Day morning and evening services and Wednesday night prayer meetings. With other wives of Geneva faculty, she taught vacation Bible school and conducted women’s prayer and bible studies in Eastvale and in her home. She led Geneva women students in a chapel small group study of Ken and Floy Smith’s book, Learning To Be A Women. She hosted hundreds of Geneva College students, denominational missionaries, and academic visitors for home-cooked dinners and lodging, providing a home away from home.

Geneva has been a major part of Madelyn’s life – from her own education, to serving the education of others. All four sons graduated from Geneva College – in math, physics, pre-med, and psychology+computer science - and earned advanced degrees. Three grandchildren have graduated from Geneva. For 12 years Madge accompanied Roy on yearly trips to Europe and Asia in support of Roy’s work on the Nomenclature Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Her favorite trip overseas however was to Japan and China, rediscovering Roy’s birthplace home on Cheung Chao Island in Hong Kong province.

With Madge’s open door, kitchen and prayers, many Geneva students, faculty and guests from around the world enjoyed meals, picnics and stayed overnight at the old farm. Various Geneva campus organizations and activities have played an important part in her life – even in retirement years. Through November of 2017, she continued to enjoy monthly lunches with Geneva retirees. Three grandchildren have graduated from Geneva.

She regularly supported and attended Genevans Concerts, Homecoming, Presidential Recognition Dinners, and Scholarship events. Her sons contend that she has attended more Genevan’s concerts than anyone living or otherwise. In 1998, at age 75, she once again enjoyed marching and playing cymbals in the Geneva Marching Band at Homecoming with son Ren and his daughter Heather: three generations on Reeves Field! At the All-College Talent Show, she and Roy several times brought down the house with their musical rendition of “There’s Hole in the Bucket, Dear Liza”

More recently, Madge wanted to establish a chemistry scholarship to honor her late husband. Her sons insisted that her name be added to it. Madge provided $50,000 in seed funding for the Roy and Madge Adams Chemical Sciences Scholarships, challenging the college and alumni to raise a matching amount, upon which occasion Madge would provide an additional $50,000 for the scholarship. Geneva and its alumni succeeded in more than raising the matching funding, so this scholarship fund is now endowed with over $200,000, providing for 4 Chemical Sciences Scholarships.  She is honored to be considered worthy of such an award.

Her family encouraged to mark the occasion by writing a poem for the occasion, as she had done on various occasions in past years:

My years of life are 95,
I may reach 96!
Life’s events at this late age
Get one in quite a fix!

Yet now (and Then)
o’er seas and lands
I WILL rejoice with lifted voice:
My times STILL in HIS wounded hands.

Madge (Woods) Adams, Class of 1944