"You do not know what you can miss before you try." -- Franklin Pierce Adams
Franklin Pierce Adams (November 15, 1881, Chicago, Illinois — March 23, 1960, New York City, New York) was an American columnist (under the pen name F.P.A.) and wit, best known for his newspaper column, "The Conning Tower", and his appearances as a regular panelist on radio's Information Please. He was a prolific writer of light verse, and a member of the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s and 1930s.
"Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net."
Adams was born Franklin Leopold Adams to Moses and Clara Schlossberg Adams in Chicago on November 15, 1881. He changed his middle name to "Pierce" when he was confirmed at age 13. Adams graduated from the Armour Scientific Academy in 1899 and attended the University of Michigan for one year.
He first worked for the Chicago Journal in 1903. The following year he moved to the New York Evening Mail, where he worked from 1904 to 1913 and began his column, then called "Always in Good Humor." In 1913, he moved his column to the New York Tribune, where it was famously retitled "The Conning Tower."
During his time on the Evening Mail, Adams wrote what remains his best known work, the poem Baseball's Sad Lexicon, a tribute to the Chicago Cubs double play combination of "Tinker to Evers to Chance".
During World War I, Adams was in the U.S. Army, assigned to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he worked with Harold Ross, Alexander Woollcott and other literary lights of the 1920s. After the war, the so-called "comma-hunter of Park Row" (for his knowledge of the language) returned to New York and the Tribune. He moved to the New York World in 1922, and his column appeared there until the paper merged with the inferior New York Telegram in 1931. He returned to his old paper, by then called the New York Herald Tribune, until 1937, and finally moved to the New York Post, where he ended his column in September 1941.
During its long run, "The Conning Tower" publicized the work of such writers as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Edna Ferber and Deems Taylor. Having one's work published in "The Conning Tower" was enough to launch a career, as in the case of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. Parker quipped, "He raised me from a couplet." Much later, the writer E.B. White freely admitted his sense of awe: "I used to walk quickly past the house in West 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh where F.P.A. lived, and the block seemed to tremble under my feet...the way Park Avenue trembles when a train leaves Grand Central."
FPA often included parodies in his column. His satire of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" was later collected in his book Something Else Again (1910):
Soul Bride Oddly Dead in Queer Death Pact
High-Born Kinsman Abducts Girl from Poet-Lover...Flu Said to Be Cause of Death...Grand Jury to Probe
Annabel L. Poe of 1834½ 3rd Ave., the beautiful young fiancee of Edmund Allyn Poe, a magazine writer from the South, was found dead early this morning on the beach off E. 8th Street. Poe seemed prostrated and, questioned by the police, said that one of her aristocratic relatives had taken her to the "seashore," but that the cold winds had given her "flu," from which she never "rallied." Detectives at work on the case believe, they say, that there was a suicide compact between the Poes and that Poe also intended to do away with himself. He refused to leave the spot where the woman's body had been found.
As a panelist on the radio's Information Please (1938-48), he was the designated expert on poetry, old bar-room songs and Gilbert and Sullivan, which he always referred to as Sullivan and Gilbert. A running joke on the show was that his stock answer for quotes that he didn't know was that Shakespeare was the author. (Perhaps that was a running gag: Information Please's creator/producer Dan Golenpaul auditioned Adams for the job with a series of sample questions, starting with: "Who was the Merchant of Venice?" Adams: "Antonio." Golenpaul: "Most people would say 'Shylock.'" Adams: "Not in my circle.") John Kieran was the real Shakespearean expert and could quote from his works at length.
His books include Tobogganning on Parnassus (1911) and Answer This One (a 1927 trivia book with Harry Hansen). His final volume, The Melancholy Lute (1936), featured Adams' selections from three decades of his work. He also was a translator of Horace and other classical authors, and he collaborated with O. Henry on Lo, a musical comedy.
Dorothy Parker dedicated her 1936 publication of collected poems, Not So Deep as a Well, to FPA. Many of the poems in that collection were originally published in "The Conning Tower".
