A memorial donated by William “Little Willie” Adams and his wife Victorine stands in the old Memorial Stadium’s deep center field. It’s a fieldstone hospice, endowed through their generosity to assist patients nearing the ends of their lives.
Adams, who died in 2011, is the stuff of urban legend. He was the city’s top Black businessman, venture capitalist and orchestrator of the pre-legal lottery. He made millions on the pennies, nickels and dimes of small time wagerers. He kept his mouth shut, shunned publicity and was personally frugal.
The odds for him making it were far from promising. He was the son of a white businessman and his African-American maid. His mother wanted little to do with him.
“Not until adulthood did he learn the surprising truth about both parents, a truth he shared with few others,” writes author Mark R. Cheshire in his 2021 book, “They Call Me Little Willie.”
Adams was raised by his grandparents on their tenant North Carolina tobacco and cotton farm. A savvy grandmother advised Willie to learn arithmetic so their landlords could not bamboozle him out of a share of the farm profits.
Willie embraced school and the blackboard. He was something of a math wiz and could tabulate figures with ease.
Biographer Cheshire describes Adams as having a “monomaniacal focus” and developing “a very favorable taste for the buying power of money” and a “precocious ability to identify money-making opportunities.”
Adams relocated to Baltimore in 1929 to escape the perilous agrarian conditions in North Carolina. He lodged with an uncle in the 1800 block of East Eager Street north of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
He repaired and rebuilt bicycles for the Polish and Czech immigrants living nearby. He also witnessed how Baltimore residents wagered a penny a day, maybe a nickel or dime, on the numbers game, where neighborhood bookies operated a lottery without the legal blessing of the State of Maryland.
His family’s landlady had him read the daily newspaper to her and find a number buried in the tiny type (a stock market close or total among wagers at a race track) of a newspaper, Cheshire writes.
Soon Adams stopped fixing old bikes and sought out his own customers who wanted played their favorite numbers.
It is hard to imagine today how pervasive the numbers game was in Baltimore. By 1951, when Adams was called before a U.S. House Committee, he said that $1,000 a day was normal. (Adams would have plenty of legal scrapes, but amazingly beat them, often by hiring well connected lawyers with substantial legal and political pedigrees.)
By 1931 he picked up the nickname, “Little Willie,” after a night at a movie theater with friends. The film was “Little Caesar” and its star was Edward G. Robinson.
In time East Baltimore could not hold Little Willie and he jumped to the larger and wealthier West Side. He opened and built his own night club and bought rental properties.
When cash ran short, Adams made friends in the Jewish business community — Irvin Kovens and Maurice L. Lipman. Adams never revealed which of these men was his main go-to guy.
He was also fast on his feet. “Back then, whites almost never came into the Black community. So the police didn’t know where to look for me,” Adams said decades after the 1930s.
Cheshire notes that Adams only wanted to be a business operator and make money. He abhorred violence.
He took his profits from one investment and put them into another — from the bar, to the purchase of a Black Chesapeake Bay resort, Carr’s Beach.
Over the years he had a number of business partners, among them sausage maker and City Councilman Henry G. Parks and developer Theo Rogers. He also assisted other Black business owners financially.
In 2021 the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Gilchrist Center opened near the 36th Street boundary of the old Memorial Stadium property. The hospice, designed for those without caregivers, was financially assisted by the Adams Foundation and Theo Rogers, his partner.
