Franklin Pierce Adams

Franklin Pierce Adams (Chicago, November 15, 1881-New York, March 23, 1960) was an American journalist and writer, known as Franklin P. Adams, and for his newspaper columns Always in Good Humour and The Conning Tower were the titles of his daily columns in the New York press, signed FPA.

As a panelist on radio's Information Please (1938–48), Franklin P. Adams was the designated expert on poetry, old barroom 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.

A translator of Horace and other classical authors, F.P.A. also collaborated with O. Henry on Lo, a musical comedy.

He began working at the Chicago Journal in 1903, but in 1904 he moved to the New York Evening Mail, where he worked until 1913, when he moved to the New York Tribune.

During his time at 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, “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” In 1911, he added a second column, a parody of Samuel Pepys' Diary, with notes drawn from F.P.A.'s personal experiences. In 1914, he transferred his column to the New-York Tribune, where it was famously retitled “The Conning Tower” and was considered “the pinnacle of verbal wit.”

During World War I he worked on the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes in Washington D. C. and in France as a captain in the intelligence service, after the war he returned to New York. While serving in the army, he became a captain. After the war, the so-called “comma-hunter of Park Row”. In 1921 he worked for the New York World, in 1931 for the New York Herald Tribune, and in 1937 for the New York Post until 1941. In 1938 he appeared on the radio program Information, Please.

Much later, the writer E. B. White freely admitted his sense of wonder: “I used to walk quickly past the house on West 13th Street, between Sixth and Seventh, where F.P.A. lived, and the block seemed to shiver".