Obituaries - May 10, 1999

Stanley Adams; Korean War Medal of Honor Winner

Lt. Col. Stanley Adams, 76, who won the Medal of Honor in the Korean War for leading a counterattack against numerically superior forces. In February 1951, Adams was an Army sergeant leading a patrol south of Seoul when more than 100 enemy soldiers attacked with machine gun and mortar fire. Adams ordered his men to fix bayonets, and he and 13 members of his unit charged. Though wounded in the leg by machine gun fire and knocked down several times by grenade blasts, Adams continued to provide leadership while fighting hand to hand. Adams and his men killed about 50 of the enemy and pushed back the attack. He retired in 1971 at the rank of lieutenant colonel after a 28-year career. His brother, Malcolm Adams of Wichita, Kan., once told the Kansas City Star that Adams was modest about his Medal of Honor. “He would never talk about winning it. . . . He would just say it was part of his job.” On April 19 in Bend, Ore., of Alzheimer’s disease.

Phra Charun Bhaanchan; Temple Treated Drug Addicts

Phra Charun Bhaanchan, 73, a Buddhist monk who founded a temple in Thailand that helped drug addicts and then became a sanctuary for thousands of ethnic Hmong from neighboring Laos. A former Special Branch police officer, Phra Charun founded his 100-acre temple complex, Wat Tham Krabok, in 1957. His program using bad-tasting herbal remedies to treat drug addicts was unique at the time and one of the few ways people in Thailand addicted to drugs could receive treatment without criminal stigma. He once estimated that his remedy had saved more than 100,000 people. The three-week treatment program was not without critics, however. Some viewed it as too harsh and said some addicts died during the process. The temple has been the focus of diplomatic controversy as well by becoming home to as many as 20,000 ethnic Hmong people, many believed to be illegal immigrants from Laos. Phra Charun was the recipient of a Magsaysay award in 1975 for his work with addicts. The award is given annually in Asia in several categories and is named after Ramon Magsaysay, the Philippine president killed in a 1957 air crash. On Tuesday of kidney failure.

Irving Stevens; Honored as King of the Hobos

Irving “Fishbone” Stevens, 79, named King of the Hobos in 1988 at the annual National Hobos Convention in Britt, Iowa. Stevens, who began hopping trains in the 1930s, described his life on the road in a book titled “Fishbone: Hoboing in the 1930s.” He once told a reporter for a newspaper in Portland, Maine, that he would often go door to door offering to fix machines for food or a pair of shoes after the cardboard in his shoes wore out. Stevens recalled being “a dreaming, lonely boy of 9” when he saw a freight train roll through town with one car painted with the slogan “See America First.” Later, Stevens married, raised a family and worked in the woods. He became something of an entrepreneur, making a concoction called “Irving’s Fly Dope,” a foul-smelling potion to keep flies off fishermen in New England’s summers. That business led to other ventures. He was reportedly trying to manufacture and sell aluminum cribbage boards and was marketing a “chain sawhorse” for carpenters to hold irregular pieces of wood for cutting. Stevens wrote a second book, “Mandy’s Washtub and Other Stories,” a collection of folk tales about Maine. On Tuesday in Corinna, Maine, of complications after aneurysm surgery.