Conkling

Roscoe Platt Conkling--for three weeks every scandal-nosing news cub has leered as he mouthed that name. Mr. Conkling is a roving gas engineer who plays the violin. Mrs. Sidney Erskine Brewster, petite and 26, did not guard the letters he wrote her with discretion. Mr. Brewster, 29, was an aviator, Manhattan scion, grew not to perceive the jest, killed his wife as she was dressing for dinner clad only in her chemise, killed himself. What editor or printer's devil in the U. S. does not know that? But what editor asked: "Who is Roscoe Platt Conkling? A descendant of 19th Century Manhattan Republican Boss Roscoe Conkling? A namesake of Roscoe's voter-bludgeoning henchman, Thomas C. Platt?" In a jazzed age no news hound delved through the reference "morgue" of his paper to turn up the great story of Conkling, Platt, Garfield and James G. Blaine. But for the tangled interplay of their rapier politics Garfield would never have been President, nor would the name of Blaine awaken potent memories. Yet, instead of recalling to their readers the late and great, many an editor slapped down amid his scareheads a (faked) picture of Mrs. Brewster in her chemise. The facts are that old Roscoe Conkling had no issue. Gas Engineer-Violinist Conkling is the son of B. F. ("Dry Feet") Conkling, the engineer who abandoned the sinking General Slocum "without getting his feet wet," when she sank with 1000 casualties in the East River, Manhattan (1904). He is likewise onetime husband of Grace Hazard Conkling, poetess-in-waiting to the Manhattan column of Franklin P. Adams (famed as "F. P. A."); father to adolescent Poetess Hilda Conkling.