Charles A. Boston

One of the familiar figures around the Century’s lunch-table was Charles Anderson Boston, whose dry humor and pungent comment gave to the conversation a flavor of their own. Boston was a lawyer long well-known in this city’s practice; he had personally handled many important and complicated cases. At the Bar Association (where the north side of Desk 12 was always regarded as his up-town headquarters) he was as constant a visitor as at the Century; in fact, he was in many respects our foremost authority on legal ethics. Boston had strong opinions on many subjects and in his quiet way, when the talk turned in those directions, expressed his mind with characteristic plainness. Some of his formal judgments occasionally startled his hearers—as when he proposed, for speeding-up of justice, the establishment in criminal cases of procedure which, like the drumhead court-martial, should try the accused party not only near the scene of crime, but very soon after its commission; or when, as president of the American Bar Association, he linked the Eighteenth Amendment with the government’s old attitude on slavery, as a blot on the Federal constitution. He had his own point of view for everything. When criticized for marking his household car with his wife’s initials, not his own, he used to answer that Charles A. Boston’s initials on a private car would provoke misunderstanding.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1936 Century Association Yearbook