F.P.A.

"Nothing makes me so angry as to hear somebody say, 'That is too good for a newspaper; it is good enough for a magazine.' I have never seen anything too good to appear in a newspaper."

Two years ago Franklin Pierce Adams, who practiced the art of column writing for nearly 40 years, broke the silence of retirement to comment on a later generation of columnists. "I worked all day and half the night writing and rewriting, polishing and refining each column," he said. "Today's columnists won't work. It's no use to advise them. They won't work."

Adams could remember a happier and a more literary time, when a handful of dedicated writers and editors, among them Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, and Harold Ross of The New Yorker practiced their art with a lapidary's care. Clinging together for mutual support, they met weekdays as the Vicious Circle, a social group that lunched at the Algonquin Hotel and traded mots and puns, Saturday nights over the poker table of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. Of them all, none set journalism's banner higher than the cigar-smoking, pool-playing little gargoyle with the long neck and the big nose and the bushy mustache: F.P.A.

Appearing daily above these initials,

Adams' column, "The Conning Tower," provided a varied diet of puns, epigrams, wry humor, and observations on man's minor imperfections and the minutiae of life. His sharp eye surveyed the theater: Helen Hayes, he observed, after seeing her coy performance in Caesar and Cleopatra, suffered from "fallen archness." He rewrote razor-blade ads ("Ask the man who hones one"), and punctured politicians ("When candidates appeal to 'Every-intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them"). He drafted fond couplets to his young sons:

Gentlemen, I love and like you, Caring little for your IQ,

Adams crusaded against illegible house numbers, hatcheck girls, paper towels, his wife's salad dressing, and dry-sweeping with a broom (he felt that the dust raised was dangerously germy). "Whom are you?" demanded "The Conning Tower" testily of any author caught misusing the pronoun.

But Adams' true love was light verse, and he courted it constantly. On Valentine's Day he wrote:

The ink is red, The rent is due, My hope is dead, And how are you?

He adapted the forms of classic poets to his own use, as in this quatrain after Omar Khayyam:

A pair of legs beneath the Breakfast

Table;

A pot of coffee, strong and colored sable Beside me singing in the Percolator--Greater than Grable Thou, and I than

Gable!

Adams' pen pals--among them Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, Sinclair Lewis,

Edna St. Vincent Millay--vied eagerly for the honor of contributing to his column. These guest appearances, combined with his own fey wit, earned him a tidy salary--at one time $25,000 a year--and a wide following. The Adams circle grew by millions after he joined radio's renowned Information Please quiz program in 1938, along with Clifton Fadiman, John Kieran and Oscar Levant.

But vogues pass. Information Please, so successful on radio, died painfully in the new medium of TV. In a less leisurely age, "The Conning Tower," which had come to rest on the New York Post after tenures on the old New York World and the Herald Tribune, spoke to indifferent ears; in 1941 it ended for good.

In 1955, his health declining, Adams put aside the fife, the piccolo, the mouth organ and the penny whistle he invariably brought with him to social occasions, and entered the Lynwood Nursing Home in uptown Manhattan. There he died last week at 78, of arteriosclerosis. Some years earlier he had parodied Henley's Invictus:

It matters not how dull the earth, How gray the sky that clouds above it; The world is full of life and mirth, And even if it ain't, what of it?

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