The following year he moved to the New York Evening Mail, where he worked from 1904 to 1913 and began his column, then called "Always in Good Humor," which used reader contributions.

During his time on 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 of "Tinker to Evers to Chance".

In 1914, he moved his column to the New-York Tribune, where it was famously retitled "The Conning Tower" and was considered to be "the pinnacle of verbal wit".

[3] During World War I, Adams was in the U.S. Army, serving in military intelligence and also writing a column, "The Listening Post," for Stars and Stripes editor Harold Ross.

White freely admitted his sense of awe: "I used to walk quickly past the house in West 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh where F.P.A.

"[5] Adams is credited with coining the term "aptronym" for last names that fit a person's career or job title, although it was later refined to "aptonym" by Frank Nuessel in 1992.

(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?"