90-Year-Old Driver Still Missing : Disappearance: After a daylong search, friends and authorities turn up nothing. However, authorities do not suspect foul play.

Alice Adams spent a fitful night praying for the phone to ring and straining to hear the familiar rumble of her husband’s Cadillac coming home.

It had been 16 hours since she had seen her 90-year-old husband, Ted Adams, who dropped from sight Tuesday afternoon, and Alice Adams tried not to think the worst.

“I heard the clock strike every hour,” the 87-year-old Leisure World resident said Wednesday. “I didn’t take off my clothes, I didn’t take my shoes off. It was so quiet and dark.”

Ted Adams disappeared about 3:45 p.m. Tuesday as he was driving home to the couple’s Avenida Majorca home, Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson said. After a daylong search, both law enforcement authorities and friends and relatives remained baffled and frustrated over his unusual disappearance.

Olson said investigators have combed much of South County with patrol cars and a helicopter in search of the distinctive red-and-white 1978 Cadillac El Dorado, bearing the license tag TED A OK, in which he was last seen. A missing-persons bulletin was sent to all law enforcement agencies in Southern California, and all hospitals in the county have been checked.

But as yet, Olson said, authorities have not been able to come up with a single clue in the retired union representative’s disappearance, although they do not suspect foul play.

“We’ve had things like this before,” Olson said, “and they do show up in some strange places. He could have gone far and wide.”

Alice Adams, who married Ted 14 years ago, said he had no interests outside the Leisure World retirement community or any family members to visit in the immediate area.

“I just don’t understand it,” Alice Adams said, adding that her husband was in good health but suffered occasional lapses of memory. “He doesn’t like to go anyplace these days. He’s never done anything like this before.”

The last person to see Ted Adams was next-door neighbor Ralph Mitchell, who spent the day fielding telephone calls from worried friends who read about Ted Adams’ disappearance in the newspaper.

At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Mitchell said, he followed Adams to a Mission Viejo auto repair shop to drop off the Cadillac. The two returned to Leisure World, spending the early afternoon lounging in the shady porch connecting their apartments.

“We talked politics. You know, Iraq and all that type of thing. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary,” Mitchell said.

At 3:30 p.m., the pair got into Mitchell’s car and returned to pick up the Cadillac. On the way back to Leisure World, Ted Adams followed Mitchell.

When the two came to the intersection of Alicia Parkway and Paseo de Valencia, Mitchell decided to turn left into a shopping center parking lot, while Adams turned right toward the retirement community.

“I looked in my mirror and said to myself, ‘O.K., he’s turning right. He’s all right. He’s home free.’ ” That was the last time Mitchell saw his neighbor.

Alice Adams and Mitchell are concerned because Ted Adams has become more confused in recent months. Once he enjoyed going out and traveling with his wife; now he prefers the comfort of the small home they have shared for the last 14 years, she said.

“Almost every evening we would walk through the park,” Alice Adams said. “But other than that I haven’t been able to get him to go anywhere. He’s so forgetful and absent-minded. He just got confused. I always have to tell him which way to turn.”

While police continued their search late Wednesday afternoon, Alice Adams sat near the phone, waiting for her husband to call her and tell her he’s OK.

Meanwhile, Mitchell and other friends conducted their own searches of the streets around Leisure World and the nearby Laguna Hills Mall.

Alice Adams said she met her husband while they were working in Los Angeles at the Teamsters Union headquarters. She was a secretary and he was a business agent.