Mrs. Cheryl Tharpe Adams, 77, died Friday, December 24, 2021, at the Harborview Nursing Home in Dyersburg, Tennessee, from complications related to dementia, a disease she had struggled with for more than three years.

Cheryl is survived by her devoted husband, Barry Adams (Dyersburg, Tennessee); daughter Tifany Glomb and husband Timothy (Longwood, Florida); Hayley Downs and husband Marlan Barry (Kingston, New York); stepson Brian Adams (Cleveland, Tennessee); and grandchildren Jackson, Whitney, LilyAnn, Sarah Grace, and Luke. She is preceded in death by her first husband, Albert Downs; mother Margie Tharpe; and grandmother Birdie Lee Posey Hook.

She was born in Columbus, Georgia, on December 15, 1944, and raised in nearby Phenix City, Alabama, a town notorious at the time in the national media as "Sin City" for its association with homegrown organized crime and that became the inspiration for the 1954 film noir The Phenix City Story . Although she was an only child, Cheryl grew up surrounded by a large brood of aunts, uncles, and cousins who congregated around the family homestead where she lived with her mother and grandmother.

When it came time for bright young Cheryl to attend high school, the family tightened their belts to afford the tuition of Highland Academy, a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school in Portland, Tennessee, where she became a popular and ambitious student, playing the piano and saxophone and serving in leadership roles on the student council, the Adventist Theological Society, and Sabbath School. Classmates remember that the scent of White Shoulders perfume followed her everywhere. And although she didn't know it at the time, Cheryl had a secret admirer who was to become her husband more than 40 years later.

But first, after marrying at 22 years old and settling in DeLand, Florida, to raise her two daughters, she worked part-time jobs and attended college classes at Stetson University, eventually earning her Bachelor of Arts in English. She especially loved Shakespeare. In fact, she could still recite a soliloquy from Macbeth — "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage" —long after her illness had robbed her of much of her ability to communicate.

In the late 1970s she was hired as a cub reporter at the DeLand Sun News , the local newspaper, where she was eventually promoted to managing editor. Her youngest, Hayley,  recalls spending nights playing among the archives and typewriters in the newsroom as her mother raced to make deadlines.

Later in her career she served as chief information officer for the Volusia County Sheriff, a job she detested for many reasons, among them the requirement that she attend grisly crime scenes in the middle of the night. After leaving the Sheriff's Office, she settled into a longtime position as director of media and public communications at Stetson University, her beloved alma mater, where she worked until her retirement at 65.

Eight years after she was widowed in 2000, Cheryl was contacted by Barry Adams, the aforementioned "secret admirer," and a long-distance email correspondence quickly bloomed into romance. In 2009, the two married, and she relocated to Dyersburg, Tennessee, where she became a member of the Dyersburg Adventist Church and served as editor of the Squash Blossom , the Church's newsletter to promote healthy living. It was a volunteer job she approached with the same rigor she had applied to all of her professional work.

Cheryl is remembered by friends and family for her generosity, mellifluous Alabama accent, and her excellent Southern home cooking. Although she retained some old-fashioned sensibilities around feminine modesty, she possessed a dark wit that she deployed with verbal zings when you least expected it. She was beautiful, enigmatic, complex, and troubled like the many romantic figures in literature she admired.

She was loved, and she will be missed.

A memorial service will be held on Saturday, February 19, 2022 from 2:00-3:00 p.m. at the Dyersburg Seventh Day Adventist Church with burial to follow at Fairview Cemetery in Dyersburg, TN. Visitation will be held on Friday, February 18, 2022, from 5:00 until 8:00 p.m. at Dyersburg Funeral Home.

The family of Mrs. Cheryl Adams ask that memorial donations be made to the American Alzheimers Foundation https://alzfdn.org/support-us/donate/