For the first time in nearly 75 years, the Saturday Night Club will return to the home of H.L. Mencken, Baltimore’s controversial and curmudgeonly literary legend.
On Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025, the Society to Preserve H.L. Mencken’s Legacy, Inc. will host the return of the Saturday Night Club at Mencken’s historic home directly across from Union Square Park. The event is a fundraiser in keeping with the Saturday Night Club tradition, with music and heavy hors d’oeuvres and drinks catered by Kerellas Café of Greektown. Proceeds will help restore the Mencken family piano that remains in the home.
Carter McMullen, pianist and artistic director and founder of the Salon Concerts of Baltimore, will perform on Mencken’s piano, which was the center of Mencken’s weekly gatherings. McMullen and his trio will perform chamber works by Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms and Mozart.
Mencken was an American journalist who wrote for the The Baltimore Herald and The Baltimore Sun among other publications through the early- to mid-20th century. He began hosting his Saturday Night Club gatherings in the early 1900s when prohibition was in effect, and while the sale of alcohol was prohibited by law, the actual drinking of it was not, if one could manage to be in possession of it. Jim Kennedy, volunteer at the H.L. Mencken House, explained that Mencken had some recipes for alcoholic beverages, and he would invite his friends over to “eat, drink, and be merry.”…