Adams and his two daughters, Marianne Snow and Kay Doucette, smile, remembering that he had exclaimed this with Marie’s father sitting within earshot, according to the story he’s told about that first encounter.

“That was back in the days when fathers escorted their daughters everywhere,” said Doucette.

Dancing with their father is a favorite memory for both daughters.

“Mom and dad were wonderful dancers,” said Snow. Both she and Doucette remember every Saturday and Sunday night watching the Lawrence Welk Show with their parents and learning to waltz by stepping on their dad’s steel-toed boots as he led them around the room.

“It was very important to dad that we learned how to dance properly,” said Doucette.

“Problem was,” said Adams, “they couldn’t find boys that could dance with them!”

Adams and Marie started their family in the same year they wed, 1948. First born was a son, Kenneth, followed by a second son, Donald. Marianne was their first daughter and Kay was the baby. Becoming a dad was a point of pride, but also a challenge.

“I never had trouble with the girls, but I did with the boys,” said Adams. He gets a gleam in his eye when his daughters remind him that the apple never falls far from the tree.

“What was that you did when you were in school, Dad?”

Adams flashed a wide grin and shook his head. “Smoke bomb in the school’s ventilator system; my past is not too good!” His prankster boys were chips off the old block. Kenneth spray painted a school bus up one side and down the other and “flashed a moon” out a bus window. Donnie set off firecrackers in the school library.

Good, old-fashioned fun was the name of the game on the Adams’ farm in Livermore Falls. Adams’s love of tinkering and his experience rebuilding automatic transmissions at Bailey Brothers before dedicating approximately 30 years to what was then Boise Cascade in Rumford, made him a master of creation at home.

A machinist and welder 1st class, he built tractors and skidders and even rigged up an old golf cart for his grandchildren to boonie-cruise through the fields in back of the farm. He fashioned a plow for the driveway from a 1952 hemi-head Desoto engine; Doucette remembered sitting on his lap and plowing the snow.

“Donnie and I kicked butt every year in the skidder competitions at the fair with the skidders dad built,” said Doucette. Adams’s nephew, Orville Polland, to whom Adams was like a dad, said Doucette and Donnie won so many competitions against name-brand models, home-made skidders were banned and then given their own separate contest.

Adams also built a snowmobile following a plan from Popular Mechanics using an 8hp Briggs and Stratton engine. Doucette remembered hitching a rope to the back and pulling her brother Donnie all around the lake on skis.

“That skidoo could outrun the neighbor’s manufactured machine. The only problem was when the plywood got wet, it didn’t run,” said Adams.

Theirs was a country life long before “organic” was cool, raising beef cattle and planting gardens, and baking pies that Adams loved. If his daughters’ math is correct, he ate five to six thousand pies in his lifetime.

“I ate a lot of apple pie,” said Adams, who admittedly marveled at his wife’s ability to spin and crimp a pie so perfectly you couldn’t tell where she began and ended.

As with all farms, there were chores, including caring for horses. Adams  rescued their first horse from abusive conditions , bringing her home for his girls. “Milady and I grew up together,” said Doucette, who recalled many a morning, including Christmas, in the barn spreading hay and cradling calves while dad did most of the work.

Life became fuller as grandchildren arrived. On one occasion, Adams went fishing with a grandson only to get lost on the way out of the woods. Adams chuckled, “My grandson said, ‘Grandpa, you can go where you want, but I’m going where I can hear the cars going by!’”

A father’s reminiscing is warm, his memory long. “There’s so much we missed,” Adams said of regaling his fatherly tales.

When asked what advice he would give to young men preparing to raise a family, he crooned a song by William Mayhew: “Be sure that it’s true when you say, ‘I love you.’ It’s a sin to tell a lie. Millions of hearts have been broken just because these words were spoken. Be sure that it’s true when you say ‘I love you.’ It’s a sin to tell a lie.”

At 86, J. Wesley Adams remembers commitment and dedication to family . He’s the picture of what fatherhood looks like when done right.