Pirate victim attended Arlington High, then saw the world

Fifty years before Scott Underwood Adam decided to sail around the world, he was a serious and quiet high school student in Arlington Heights who was involved in everything from the wrestling team to the philosophy club.

And when he left his hometown of Prospect Heights for college, he never returned, according to his classmates.

Adam, 70, and his wife Jean, 66, were two of the four Americans slain by Somali pirates Tuesday, the first Americans killed since a wave of pirate attacks began six years ago.

A 1958 Arlington High School graduate, Adam was a California filmmaker for 30 years before boarding a yacht with his wife to sail around the world and hand out Bibles.

Those who knew Adam in high school said he kept to himself but was very articulate. He was a manager of the wrestling team and member of the philosophy team, chemistry team, Future Teachers Club, choir, Drama Club, National Thespians Club and school newspaper, according to the 1958 Arlington High School yearbook.

Phil Lambdin graduated with Adam. The two were in Thespian Club and several school plays together.

“He was always very serious,” said Lambdin, who lives in Northern Virginia. “I do remember he loved the Thespian Club, and if I remember correctly, he wanted to be a journalist.”

Lambdin said he doesn’t remember Adam being noticeably religious in high school, nor did he recall if he had any family still in the Chicago area. While Lambdin attended many Arlington High School reunions in the past, he doesn’t remember seeing Adam there.

“I can’t imagine this happening to someone I knew,” said Lambdin. “I knew Scott Adam in high school, but I just can’t picture him sailing around the world. He was so serious. I guess people change.”

Another 1958 Arlington graduate, Kathy Miller Lisec, organized the class’s 50th high school reunion in 2008. She recalled Adam was hard to reach.

“We did get a note that said he was living on a boat, which he must have sent,” Lisec said.

Another classmate, Ed Schumacher, says Adam did come to a reunion, although it was at least 20 years ago.

“In high school we hung in different crowds,” said Schumacher, a Palatine resident. “I was into athletics and he was into drama.

“But I do remember seeing him at a reunion; it was either the 30th or 40th. He wore a sleek suit and I remember thinking he looked pretty West Coast.”

After high school, Adam went to Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., where he graduated in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in theater-drama, university officials said.

He went to Hollywood almost immediately and embarked on a 30-year career in TV and films. According to Variety, Adam was an assistant director, unit production manager and producer in the 1970s and ’80s. He worked on a number of episodes of “McCloud,” “The Love Boat” and “The Dukes of Hazzard,” Variety said.

Adam was a production manager in 1985 on the movie “The Goonies,” associate producer on a 1991 TV remake of Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” and associate producer on Arthur Penn’s 1993 telepic “The Portrait,” starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall.

But by 1996 Adam’s attention was increasingly drawn to Christianity. According to The Christian Post, Adam finished his master of divinity degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2000 and got his master’s of theology in 2010.

The Post talked to Richard Peace, Adam’s friend and teacher at Fuller, who said Adam abandoned his doctoral studies, sold his home and devoted all his time to sailing the world and delivering Bibles.

According to their website, svquest.com, Scott and Jean Adam started their missionary sailing trips in 2002 after they became “unhappy being dirt dwellers.”

Since then they visited Polynesia, New Zealand, Mexico, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Australia, China, Malaysia and Singapore.

“Getting the Bibles into schools and colleges was a thrill for us (and we hope for them also),” Jean wrote on her blog.

By December 2004 they were making their home aboard their 58-foot yacht, Quest, passing out Bibles to schools. To prevent teachers from selling them, Jean stamped, “A gift from your friends in the United States Quest Bible Ministry. Not for sale,” inside each cover.

According to Jean’s blog, she thought they would be in Suez, El Gouna, Egypt by April 1, and in London by fall.

Scott and Jean had recently been joined on the Quest by Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle of Seattle.

The four were sailing in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Somalia when they were boarded Friday by pirates.

A U.S. Navy destroyer shadowed the hijacked yacht for days, in radio contact with their captors in waters off East Africa. Two pirates even boarded the warship to negotiate.

Then without warning Tuesday, the situation turned deadly. From the yacht came a rocket-propelled grenade, followed by the staccato sound of gunfire. U.S. special forces scrambled onto the occupied vessel to find the Americans fatally wounded.

Their deaths appear to underscore an increasingly brutal shift by pirates in their treatment of hostages.

Killing hostages “has now become part of our rules,” said a pirate who identified himself as Muse Abdi. He referred as a turning point to last week’s sentencing of a pirate to 33 years in prison for the 2009 attack on the U.S. cargo vessel the Maersk Alabama — just two days before the hijacking.

“From now on, anyone who tries to rescue the hostages in our hands will only collect dead bodies,” Abdi said. “It will never, ever happen that hostages are rescued and we are hauled to prison.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton strongly condemned the killing of the Americans as “deplorable,” saying in a statement the slayings underscored the need for international cooperation in fighting the scourge of piracy in waters off the Horn of Africa.

Ÿ Daily Herald wire services, and staff writers Lee Filas and Bob Frisk contributed to this report.