New Philadelphia man honors father with historical book
As his caregiver, Tom Adamich helps daily with his 87-year-old father’s needs.
At the age of 8, Tom Adamich worked with his father Thomas, learning how to answer business calls and observing the process of running a highly successful company. Today, Tom Adamich lives with him in the house Thomas designed and built on a steep hill in New Philadelphia.
As his caregiver, Tom Adamich helps daily with his 87-year-old father’s gradual slide into dementia, his photographic memory and gift for conversation diminished and his ability to build and maintain relationships with others gone.
A librarian and historian, Tom Adamich has written a book, “Design and Determination: The Electrical Associates,” which honors his father’s work in the field of industrial motors.
The son of immigrant parents, Thomas Adamich showed such early talent in art that he began work as a draftsman for the city of Barberton as a teenager. His father Anthony had become a successful rubber mold designer with patents with Goodyear Aerospace and Fawick Flex-Grip, the rubber grip designs popular with professional golfers. Inheriting his father’s mechanical aptitude, Thomas Adamich received a civil engineering degree from Ohio University and worked for Imperial and Joy Manufacturing until he founded TEA.
His experience with those companies included being a key contributor to the fan product used on the Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco, running chaff systems for military missile launch mechanisms and motors in all aircraft galleys.
“He knew how important manufacturing was in figuring out the future,” Tom Adamich said, “and that as these companies began to fall back, how it changed the lifestyles of the middle class. Dad was adamant about keeping doors open in order to find new ways to build on the future. We seem to have lost that. It makes you wonder how we can look ahead.”
Thomas Adamich’s business flourished until an unfortunate accident when he was 80. A lawn mower rollover left him with such a badly burned leg that he had to have an extensive skin graft. Not too long after that, he suffered a major stroke and has been declining ever since.
Despite his experience with his father’s companies, Tom Adamich chose to follow a different but related path working as a traveling librarian. His work, though sometimes strictly as an in-house librarian, requires research and cataloging. He has written six books of historical background for companies including The Greening Nursery Company, Monroe County Community College and the New Philadelphia Elks. History is a major part of his interest in antique cars. He serves as vehicle archivist for the Wills Sainte Claire Museum in Marysville, Michigan.
Like his father, Tom Adamich has had to work under difficult circumstances. While caring for his mother, who had Parkinson’s disease, he developed a sinus infection and then Guillian-Barre` syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which a person’s immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system.
“One morning when I was running, I felt a little off,” said Tom Adamich, an avid runner since competing at New Philadelphia High School. “Through the day my arms and legs became weaker until I couldn’t use them. When I finally went to the emergency room, it was the last time I walked for nine months. I was in ICU for six days and then rehab for 45 days. It has taken three to four years for me to feel like myself again.”
He is back to running 2-3 miles a day and writes full-time from home.
In the house Thomas Adamich built, the walls are full of his paintings. He is comfortable sitting at the breakfast table looking at the daily paper or some of Tom’s books. Tom Adamich sits at the custom-painted grand piano to play a little jazz.
“Life is good right now,” Tom Adamich said, “but it is certainly scary to look at what has happened to American industry and try to imagine the impact on the lives of people in the future. I want the world to remember people like my father, who worked so hard to make life good for us and who had a work ethic that is not so often seen today. I hope we can still learn from his example.”