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Alvin P. Adams, an aviation executive who came of age in the Roaring '20s and never outgrew the roar, died Oct. 2 in Lenox Hill Hospital. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan.
In a career in which he was The Wall Street Journal's first aviation specialist at 21, a vice president of a leading aviation investment company at 24, the president of an airline at 29, a major industry consultant at 34, a Pan Am executive at 45, and the point man in the U.S. invasion of the European Airbus until he was 72, it would be tempting to conclude that Mr. Adams was simply an aviation man.
That would be a mistake. As his own unpublished memoirs make clear, for all the time he put in as an aviation executive, Mr.
Adams was first and foremost a man of his times. And those times were the 1920s.
From the moment he and his Yale classmates began haunting the "21" Club and other New York speak-easies, jazz clubs and strip joints and entertaining European royalty and international high rollers during summertime tours with the Yale-Princeton jazz band, Mr. Adams, a banjo-playing amateur boxing champion, was the very embodiment of the flapper era: a man so devoted to...