In Baltimore

Festive banquet foodstuffs and funeral meats were served in Baltimore in the same week for newspapermen. Van Lear Black, chairman of the board. of the Baltimore Sun, returned from a long trip abroad studying aviation and was feted; John Haslup Adams, for many years editor of the same journal, died and was buried.

A banquet hall in the Alcazar Hotel was transformed into a temporary airplane hangar. Five hundred guests sat down to dinner; among them Herbert C. Hoover, Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, Anthony H. G. Fokker, Owen D. Young, Franklin D. Roosevelt. All talked aviation, particularly commercial aviation; all honored Van Lear Black, potent banker as well as newspaper solon, for his ten-month survey of commercial flying abroad.

John Haslup Adams was 28 before he decided what to do. Forced out of school early because of family finances, he got a job as office boy with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Strange office boy, he wanted to investigate art and for this purpose pinched his living; learned shorthand; did odd jobs; and finally went to Paris on his savings. Back from Paris with a thorough artistic background, he started writing; won a contest on the old Baltimore News at an age when most bright young men are beginning to succeed, took the resulting job offered him and in five years was managing editor, at an age when many young men are beginning to admit failure. His later years were devoted to the Baltimore Evening Sun and Baltimore Sun.

Said the New York World: "The country loses one of its ablest newspapermen . . . one of the few men of the city [Baltimore] who never fell under the spell of the methods for which H. L. Mencken stands. . . While the Evening Sun [Mr. Mencken's]was saying in effect that it is a pretty sordid world and all jobholders ought to be hung,* Mr. Adams clung to his old sentimental love of the human race.'' Said H. L. Mencken in the Evening Sun: "Of all the journalists I have known in this life, the late Jonh Haslup Adams was the only one who never made a visitor compromise with hie convictions."

*Awkward usage for the editorial page of the World. "With reference to the death penalty hanged in preferred."