Pat. Pend.: Banana Split-Eating Shave
ca. 1990s
[text on drawing reads:]
It's also a game. With a winning guess,
the set-up shaves out a banana split.
It can fit into a vehicle's dashboard.

Pat. Pend.:Your Plums-Fall-Hoe-Down
ca. 1990s
[text on drawing reads:]
Your plums fall down under a
plum tree and into a fruit box.
They are guided by special tapes
that know the destination of the plums.

BIOGRAPHY

William Adkins was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1932. He dropped out of high school about 1947 and went to California, where he supported himself with a series of odd jobs. Several years later he moved back to Kansas City, got married, then served briefly in the army. After his discharge he worked in construction. Adkins divorced in 1965 and moved in with his elderly father, whom he took care of until he died in 1971. His father was an eccentric inventor; he spent his last years attempting to perfect a perpetual-motion machine. Apparently his father passed along something of his unusual inventive knack to his son, for after his death William Adkins began spending his own spare time drawing detailed designs or building "working" models of such whimsically unusual devices as "a fishing pole that can also be used to handicap gambling, and a popcorn kernel toss game which is also a valentine."* About 1971 Adkins moved to Kansas City's Westport community living first in the back yard of some elderly junk collectors and then on the unheated back porch of a retired schoolteacher. After she died (in 1985) her house was torn down, but for the next ten years Adkins continued to live in a lean-to shack on her former lot. He now lives elsewhere in the city in low-income housing provided by the social services department. [*"William Adkins and the Art of Patent Drawing" by Eugene W. Metcalf, in the Winter 96-97 issue of Raw Vision magazine.]

BOOKS

The End is Near! Roger Manley. Illustrated. Bio.