Taking up an education to become a dentist is a commitment: a devotion to diligent study, hard work, and a years-long training arc that tests one’s discipline.

For Cullman dentist Clyne Adams and his wife, Martha, it’s more than a little remarkable that each of their three children elected to follow the very same career path Clyne himself chose more than 40 years ago.

“I was shocked, really,” said Adams, who shares his west Cullman office building with his two sons, Rex and Joel — both of whom are also dentists. “Not in a negative way — we’ve always supported whatever our children chose to do — but the shock was just a surprise that they chose, at all, to do it.”

“Clyne insists that I was that mother who’d look the child in the eye and say, “‘What do you mean that you cannot do that?’” added Martha.

With an extended family that’s grown to include six grandchildren — Walter, Lillian Claire, Ruth, Jane Kimbell, Lydia, and Silas Joel — Clyne, Martha and the rest of their family make it a priority to find time to be together at Thanksgiving, and whenever else they can, throughout the holidays.

That can be a scramble — something that was true even before the grandchildren came along — but it’s important.

“Early in our married life, we celebrated Thanksgiving in either Cullman or Choctaw counties with our families,” explained Martha. “After having Rex, Victoria and Joel, we varied how and where we celebrated Thanksgiving. But we’ve always tried to include as many family members as possible.”

Sharing a common career may help with all the scheduling. Each of the Adams’ three adult children — Rex (the oldest), Victoria and Joel (the youngest) — came to a career in dentistry in his and her own way. But, said Joel, growing up around a dad who always seemed to enjoy his work, as well as a mother who taught him to rise to any challenge, made an early and lasting impression.

“I always enjoyed coming down to the office on the weekends, when dad would have an emergency patient,” Joel explains. “That’s kind of how I really learned about it. And I never heard anything like ‘I had such a bad day’ when dad came home from work.

“Then I got in college, and thought, ‘Man, this sounds like it would be a pretty good profession.’ So I decided while I was in school that this was what I was going to do.”

Like her younger brother, Victoria decided to go into dentistry while she was still an undergraduate.

“She had planned to go to medical school to be a pediatrician,” said her dad. “But she did a month-long interim learning course in pediatrics while she was still at Birmingham-Southern, and it sort of changed her outlook.

“She called us and talked to her mom and me about it. She thought I’d be upset, but I said, ‘No [dentistry] may just be the best game in town.”

Even though he’s the oldest, Rex was the last Adams sibling to settle on dentistry for a career. He’d already earned a degree in veterinary medicine from Auburn University, and had practiced for five years under local veterinarians Dr. Bruce Lee and Dr. Tommy Little, when he decided to make the change.

What moved him to switch gears and take up yet another rigorous training program?

“I just like school,” he half-jokes.

“I had started doing quite a bit of dentistry on horses, and had developed an interest in that. I just thought I’d pursue that interest, but in this way.”

Unlike his dad and brother, Rex is left-handed — a practical distinction when it comes to using specialized dental equipment. While the right-handed Clyne and Joel Adams work in partnership in the downstairs portion of their two-story office building, Rex maintains his own dental practice, with his own equipment, on the building’s top floor.

“It’s separate, but of course we’re all here in the same building, and we all support each other,” Clyne explained.

Clyne and his family are blessed with the gift of understatement. Prodded to shed a little modesty; to talk about the interesting things in their lives outside the office, Joel eventually volunteers this tidbit:

“Rex is a pilot. He actually holds a commercial pilot’s license.”

“I fly some,” Rex admits with conspicuous understatement.

Each member of the Adams family is grateful for the life he or she has chosen, and for being part of a family anchored by love, mutual support and a peaceable instinct for sticking together and for getting along.

“I did not anticipate, nor predict, the life courses of our children, and I realize that it is a bit unusual that all three are dentists,” added Martha, who’s been married to Clyne for 48 years.

“We are thankful for, and proud of, what we have tried to accomplish, and take great pride in what our children have done, thus far. We hope and expect that our grandchildren will follow suit.”