President of Rotary International · author of the 1926 convention address “Rotary’s Ideal of Service”
Donald A. Adams was president of Rotary International when he delivered the convention address published as “Rotary’s Ideal of Service” in the August 1926 issue of The Rotarian, the organisation’s official magazine. The passage about sincerity and integrity sits inside a plain-spoken argument that service means more than shipping honest goods on time. He was credited by name in print for close to seventy years — in a 1932 newspaper column, in B. C. Forbes’s Thoughts on the Business of Life in 1937, and in quotation collections as late as 1995 — before the line quietly changed hands.