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Samuel T. Shaw, deaf, white-haired, was once an art student but he went into the hotel business to make more money. With Simeon Ford, chief rival of Chauncey Depew as an after dinner speaker in the terrapin stew era, he owned the lamented Grand Union Hotel on 42nd Street. The Grand Union vied with Delmonico's and the Café Lafayette for the best food in the city. Its Hasenpfeffer and roast oysters were famed. It boasted a vast T-shaped bar at which beer was dispensed from the transepts, mixed drinks along the nave. Like every other hotelman, Sam Shaw was bothered by the problem of washroom literature. He solved the problem by putting up in the men's lavatory an enormous blackboard, bisected by a white line. One side was headed POETRY the other PROSE. There was plenty of chalk for the suddenly inspired, an eraser for the censorious. In 1914 the city bought the Grand Union and tore it down in the course of subway construction. Since then Sam Shaw has lived in moderately comfortable retirement with his pleasant French wife (see cut).
Sam Shaw owns a fine collection of the earlier Fakes, which he invited the new Fakirs to study. Last week he gave his prize (a check instead of pennies) to Beata Beach, daughter of Sculptor Chester Beach, for a parody of De Witt M. Lockman's Academy portrait, His Ancestor's Uniform. The original showed a baldish gentleman in pince nez, leaning against a colonial mantelpiece in a Revolutionary uniform. Fakir Beach showed the same man, completely nude, against the same mantel, under a portrait of an ape.