Occupation: Office Manager, Pocahontas County Convention and Visitors Bureau
Education: Accounting degree from Bluefield State College
Hometown: I was born in Arkansas and we moved here from Idaho.
Hobbies: Quilting and more quilting
Favorite Book: I don’t really have a favorite book, but I love to read. I have favorite authors – John Grisham and James Patterson
Favorite Movie: “Officer and a Gentleman” and “Always”
Philosophy of Life: Take one day at a time.
Sometimes a summer job can turn into a career if your lucky.
Linda Adams, of Marlinton, just so happens to be one of the lucky ones. Her part-time stint at the Pocahontas County Convention and Visitors Bureau turned into a full-time job.
“I was going to school at Bluefield State College and I needed a part-time job,” Adams said. “The weekend position came available so I thought, ‘I can work there weekends when I’m in school and then when I graduate I can find something else.’ When I graduated, they asked me if I wanted to come on full-time, and I became the office manager.”
Adams recently celebrated her 17th anniversary with the CVB and said the years passed quickly due to the unpredictable job.
“It’s so different,” she said. “You don’t have the same thing day after day, after day. You meet so many different people coming and going. It’s just really interesting, the different people you meet. People always say to me, ‘what do you do? Don’t you get bored?’ We’re busy all the time. We really don’t have a slow period.”
Adams enjoys living in Pocahontas County and doesn’t plan to leave anytime soon. After moving here her junior year in high school, the county became home and soon, she will see her son, Devin, graduate from Pocahontas County High School – just as she did.
“He’s a sophomore in high school,” she said. “He’s getting his learner’s permit. It’s all he can think about.”
If Adams is first known to visitors as an employee of the CVB, she is first known to friends and neighbors as a quilter. It is a hobby that she proudly displays in the office.
“We have visitors in and they admire the quilts on the wall,” she said. “Most of them, I did. One of them I did for my mom but she brought it here to hang for everyone to enjoy.”
Thanks to a friend who convinced her to take a class, Adams has become a quilting queen.
“I took a class and I was hooked,” she said. “Now I take every quilting class I can and I’m working on one project or another all the time. My nieces and nephews always love getting something from me because they know it’s going to be something I make.”
Now a “master” quilter, Adams joins fellow quilter Sherry Hudson in teaching classes through Pocahontas County Parks and Recreation.
“We’ll teach one in the spring and one in the fall,” she said. “We’ll teach appliqué. I really like the appliqué and hand-quilting.”
Adams prefers hand quilting, an art form lost to the quicker and easier form of machine quilting, but she also understands the allure of the latter.
“I have actually broken down and sent some of my quilts away to have them machine quilted,” she said. “Not that I’m happy about that, but that’s the only way they’re going to get quilted.”
A special project that she plans to hand-quilt – no matter how long it takes – includes quilt tops and squares that her grandmother began and was unable to finish.
“When Grandma pass-ed away we found a lot of her quilts that were not finished or were just tops,” she said. “A cousin of mine from Texas just sent me a big box of Grandma’s pieces that she didn’t put together. There are about three quilts in there so I’m pretty anxious to get those together. That way, there will be some old and some new in them.”
Adams links the past and the present through her two passions – her job and quilting.
Visit Adams at the CVB office – open seven days a week – in downtown Marlinton