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The casual mention of “the house where the lady with the TV show lived” led to a search to find out more about Marcia Adams, a colorful and accomplished former resident of Winona Lake.
She and her husband, who was an executive with Lake City Bank, lived on Park Avenue at the south end, near the entrance to Stone Camp. Born in April 1938, in Columbia City, she attended Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She eventually established a reputation for her recipes and cooking — originally of Amish food — as she began publishing a series of cookbooks. Her book “Cooking from Quilt Country” contained 200 recipes of Amish dishes. She published four more volumes, with titles including “Marcia Adams’ Heirloom Recipes,” “Christmas in the Heartland” and “New Recipes from Quilt Country: More Food & Folkways from the Amish & Mennonites.” All her books are available on Amazon.com.
Each book was developed into a syndicated television show titled “Marcia Adams’ Kitchen” which she hosted weekly on PBS, and was also aired on the Armed Forces Network. She regularly traveled from Winona to Bowling Green to record the television series in the PBS studios there.
In 1982 she won a national cooking contest with a prize of $10,000, and she also became a regular food columnist for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. A member of the Indiana Arts Commission, she was awarded the Sagamore of the Wabash. As a patron of the arts, she helped raise funds for the Arts United Center and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.
Plagued for years by a condition that severely restricted her heart’s pumping efficiency, she went on the heart transplant list in February 2000. Her opportunity came with a heart transplant operation in April 2001 at age 65.
In typical fashion, entrepreneurial Marcia turned that experience into more books — her sixth and seventh. The first was “Marcia Adams: Heart to Heart” in which she detailed her struggles with heart disease.
The second, which appeared post-transplant, was “Marcia Adams: Change of Heart.” It chronicled her traumatic experience with heart disease and captured the dramatic scenes of the life-saving surgery as it followed Adams along her road to recovery. She also produced two television documentaries on her experience, with titles of “Heart to Heart” and “Change of Heart.”
Marcia Adams succumbed to a fatal heart attack on Feb. 5, 2011, at age 75.
