F.P.A. Surfaces Again

The tabloid New York Post, whose sawed-off columns are already top-heavy with columnists (the Post prints 35), last week found room for one more. The new column, "This Little World," came from an old hand. Moustached, spaniel-eyed Franklin Pierce Adams, 64, got his start in 1903, grinding out columns for $25 a week on the old Chicago Journal. When he manned the "Conning Tower" in the old New York World, such wits and literary wights as Dorothy Parker and John O'Hara were among his unpaid contributors.

By -937, F.P.A. had hiked his pay to $21,852 a year, for a syndicated column in the New York Herald Tribune. When he tried to boost it higher and was offered a pay cut instead, F.P.A. submerged, surfaced his "Conning Tower" again on the New York Post. The Post fired him in 1941 because the Adams style of poetry a la Horace and Herrick was too fancy for the subway trade.

Putting out the welcome-home sign fortnight ago, the Post ran an interview in which F.P.A. glumly observed that "the only people who like to write [are] the people who write terribly." Scanning his first week's effort, some readers wondered if he was beginning to like his work. F.P.A. is unworried: if the three-month syndicate trial doesn't pan out, he still makes pool-table pin money on radio's Information Please (around $500 a week).

For want of a future, the tabloid Paris Post, four-page little sister of the New York Post, quietly folded last week after 177 issues. Reason: its G.I. readers were going home too fast; the U.S. tourists it had counted on had not yet arrived.

The field was left to the famed Paris Herald Tribune, European sister of the New York Herald Tribune, since World War I the favorite reading of Americans in Paris.

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