Joe Adair

Joe H. Adair

BRJoe Adair, of Hagerman, New Mexico, passed away early Tuesday morning, December 11, 2007. He was 90 years old and had been ill for all of 2007. BRBRBorn May 11, 1917, in his familys home on Hunter Prairie near Boswell, Oklahoma, Joe Hugh Adair was the seventh of nine children of Henry Rollen Adair b. 1881 and Wauxie Edna Wilson Adair b. 1886. His parents had been married in Indian Territory in 1902, more than five years before Oklahoma statehood. Joe had three brothers and five sisters, all of whom preceded him in death. He had a close-knit family which included his grandfather, Robert W. Adair, a Civil War veteran born in 1833, who lived in the household until his death when Joe was almost ten years-old.

Mr. Adair attended his first school in 1923 at a one-room schoolhouse in Mayhew, Oklahoma, later attending the Boswell schools, graduating as salutatorian of the Boswell High School Class of 1935. He then attended Southeastern State College now Southeastern Oklahoma University in Durant, OK, earning a Bachelors Degree in Education. In 1939 he married his high school sweetheart, Ruth Nell Neill, who survives him.

During and after his college years, Joe taught school in a number of one-room school houses in southeastern Oklahoma. He also surveyed land, worked for the Watkins Company, and raised cattle and horses on the small ranch he and Ruth Nell had purchased in 1946. In the 1950s he also worked for the Boswell State Bank. In 1959 at the urging of his lifelong friend, Bayless Irby of Artesia, NM, Mr. Adair moved his family to Hagerman, New Mexico to begin teaching school again. He taught in the Hagerman schools until his retirement in 1979, teaching over seven hundred 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders through those years and hundreds more as he continued as a frequent substitute until the early 1990s.
PHe made a public profession of faith in Jesus Christ in the early 1940s and from then on was an active member in Southern Baptist congregations in Boswell,

Visitation

Ballard Funeral Home
205 E. Iverness Rd.
Hagerman, NM  88232
Thursday, December 13, 2007
2:00 p.m. 7:00 p.m.

Service

Funeral

First Baptist Church
211 N. Cambridge
Hagerman, NM  88232
Saturday, December 15, 2007
11:00 a.m