quality:corruption, linguistic:voice_change
Early education

Adams's father had a three-inch telescope, and they enthusiastically shared the hobby of astronomy, visiting the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton together. His father later served as the paid secretary-treasurer of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, from 1925 to 1950.

Charles Adams's business suffered large financial losses after the death of his father in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907. Some of the loss was due to his uncle Ansel Easton and Cedric Wright 's father George secretly having sold their shares of the company, "knowingly providing the controlling interest" to the Hawaiian Sugar Trust for a large amount of money. By 1912, the family's standard of living had dropped sharply.

Adams was dismissed from several private schools for being restless and inattentive, so when he was 12, his father decided to remove him from school. For the next two years he was educated by private tutors, his aunt Mary, and his father. Mary was a devotee of Robert G. Ingersoll, a 19th-century agnostic and women's suffrage advocate, so Ingersoll's teachings were important to his upbringing. During the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in 1915, his father insisted that he spend part of each day studying the exhibits as part of his education. He eventually resumed, and completed, his formal education by attending the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School, graduating from the eighth grade on June 8, 1917. During his later years, he displayed his diploma in the guest bathroom of his home.

His father raised him to follow the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson: to live a modest, moral life guided by a social responsibility to man and nature. Adams had a loving relationship with his father, but he had a distant relationship with his mother, who did not approve of his interest in photography. The day after her death in 1950, Ansel had a dispute with the undertaker when choosing the casket in which to bury her. He chose the cheapest in the room, a $260 coffin that seemed the least he could purchase without doing the job himself. The undertaker remarked, "Have you no respect for the dead?" Adams replied, "One more crack like that and I will take Mama elsewhere."