The Press: Baltimore Beauties

Alfred Jenkins Shriver was a precise Baltimore bachelor, an alumnus of Johns Hopkins. He stuttered terribly but never let that bother him. As a Maryland gourmet, he was famed for his perfect dinner parties. As a Maryland lawyer, he specialized in wills. Last September Alfred Shriver died, aged 72, leaving a will that was something to see.

To Johns Hopkins Alfred Shriver bequeathed $650,000 for a lecture hall. Its equipment is to be “the best obtainable in the world,” its walls covered with murals painted by “the best available artists.” What caused the greatest tongue-wagging in Baltimore since Wallis Warfield bagged a King-Emperor was the stipulation that one mural shall show the famous beauties of Baltimore in the 1890’s.

As subjects for this mural precise Alfred Shriver knew exactly whom he wanted: ten ladies whom he had known and admired from his youth up. Some of them: Mrs. Bruce Gotten, called by the Baltimore Sun “one of the most beautiful women that ever grew up in this city”; Mrs. J. Lee Tailor, who in middle age still had “the most exquisite coloring, with perfect Titian hair and eyes the color of violets”; Mrs. James Brown Potter, who did not marry until she was 38, when the Sun enthused: “The most beautiful violet grown in Richmond was named for her. . Possibly no other woman in America has had more offers of marriage.”

Last week the trustees of hard-up Hopkins voted to accept the Shriver bequest, kept a discreet silence as to when, how and by whom the Baltimore Beauties would be immuralized.