A bittersweet reminder that the last time the Cubs won the World Series was the era when people used words like "gonfalon".

1908-2008. A century. That's one hundred years. Sigh...

That's funny, because I was reading E.B. White's "Here is New York" (1948) yesterday, and he lists Franklin P. Adams--along with much better-remembered names as Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley, Robert Benchly, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker--as one of his literary heroes when he came to New York. He was amazed every day, he said, that they were living here in the same city as him. He wrote, "I used to walk quickly past the house in West Thirteenth 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."

I had somehow completely missed that Adams was a member of the Algonquin Group (an Algonquinian?), though I did know he wrote a column called "The Conning Tower" for several New York newspapers. But now I feel bad for really only having known him as the author of "Baseball's Sad Lexicon"!