All the Way with F.P.A.

November 15 was the birthday of humorist, columnist, radio personality and Algonquin wit Franklin P. Adams (Franklin Pierce Adams, 1881-1960). In his day, Adams was best known as a regular on the radio quiz show Information Please (1938-48); for his newspaper column “The Conning Tower”, which ran from 1914 until 1941; and for his many books.

I thought I might be related to Adams as I am the Presidents by that name, and you must admit he has a pretty WASPy sounding moniker, but F.P.A. was a very different sort of Adams. The surname is native not only to the Angloverse, but also to the Netherlands and the Northwestern region of Germany. And just like the Marx Brothers, his Adamses were German Jews from that area. The tell was in Adams’ original middle name, Leopold, which he changed (ironically) at the time of his bar mitzvah. The affectation of tweaking his name to that of another U.S. President is just the kind of thing a thirteen year old would do!

A Chicago native, Adams began his long newspaper career at the Chicago Daily Journal in 1903. Like Ring Lardner, he was originally a sports writer as much as a humorist. In 1904, he moved to the New York Evening Mail. Over the years, he also wrote for the New York World, The New York Telegram, The New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Post. He was also a columnist at Stars and Stripes during World War One, where his editor was Harold Ross, who later founded The New Yorker. His “Conning Tower” column often featured contributions from fellow Algonquin Roundtable members Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley (the one Algonquinian I actually am related to), along with later writers like James Thurber and E.B. White.

My “go to” guy on all things FPA is friend Kevin Fitzpatrick, reigning Shepherd at the Lambs Club, and founder of The Dorothy Parker Society. He included F.P.A. material in his books The Lost Algonquin Round Table: Humor, Fiction, Journalism, Criticism and Poetry From America’s Most Famous Literary Circle (2009, with Nat Benchley) and The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (2014) as well as an upcoming one in 2024. He has interviewed F.P.A.’s son Anthony Adams at length and is in possession of this archive of FPA’s letters, stories, documents, and photos (the pix in this post come from him).

Oh, and why’s it called “The Conning Tower”? The phrase is a nautical term. It’s that part that sticks out on the top of a submarine, for the purposes of observation and steering the vessel. That’s what conning is. If you’re not a sailor yourself, you may have heard the phrase “you have the conn” in movies about the navy or on Star Trek. I can only imagine that Adams had a pun in mind related to pulling the reader’s leg when he made this name of his column.