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 in his parlor. Photo via H.L. Mencken House.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.”“He had a piano, or the family had a piano that’s still over there in the parlor, in the front room, and they would play tunes on the piano,” Kennedy told Baltimore Fishbowl. “They’d [Mencken’s guests would] bring their own instruments.”Kennedy relayed that Mencken was a solid musician himself, a decent pianist with perfect pitch who was close with people affiliated with the young Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and many of them were part of the Saturday Night Club. “A lot of the people who were part of it were musicians of the highest order, people associated with fledgling Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, or even before the Baltimore Symphony was incorporated,” Kennedy said. “The music director at the Naval Academy was a regular.”Shield of the Saturday Night Club. Photo via H.L. Mencken House.Guests were a rotating cast of characters, including Louis Cheslock, a violinist, composer, and professor at Peabody Institute for six decades, and a physician from Johns Hopkins who did some of the early research on X-rays, losing his arms by testing X-ray equipment on them. All the people who came were either friends of Mencken’s or people his friends had invited. The Saturday Night Club continued for around 30 years until he had a stroke in 1950.The story of the Mencken piano has lore all its own. H.L. Mencken’s father, August, a successful tobacco merchant, wanted a piano for the family home as the children were interested in music. August, in shopping for pianos, told the salesperson he wanted a Steinway, but the salesperson convinced him to purchase a Tonk piano instead, insisting the quality was just as good as a Steinway but at one-third the price. Tonk pianos were made by Tonk Manufacturing Company, one of several Tonk family businesses which began with furniture manufacturing. In addition to pianos, the company made horns and a variety of musical accessories, most notably the swiveling three-legged piano stool they patented.Kennedy described the Mencken piano as “a very sturdy piano that the kids can crawl around and play on without destroying it,” but it has weathered being stored away and needs work to be restored to its former glory as the centerpiece of the Saturday Night Clubs.“We want to get the piano brought up to a higher standard than it is now,” Kennedy said, noting some work has been done on it in the past. “There’s a picture where [a piano repairperson] pulls the action out. Someone has written in red crayon on the side of ‘HLM TONK.’ So, it was in a shop somewhere where someone pulled the action out and did some work on it, and the work was done on the cheap, so the counterweights to the hammers are less than desirable.”Writing on inside of Mencken’s Tonk piano. Photo via H.L. Mencken House.Ownership of the Mencken House has changed hands several times. In 1997 it was shuttered for what would be 22 years. Thanks to a generous bequest by Navy Commander Max Edwin Hency, a former Mencken Society member, the home was then renovated and restored using most of the antique furnishings and artifacts rescued from two decades in storage. It reopened to the public as a museum in the fall of 2019. The Society to Preserve H.L. Mencken’s Legacy, Inc. hopes to host three to four Saturday Night Club events per year.The Saturday Night Club will take place at 7 p.m. on Jan. 18. Tickets are $100, and attendance is limited to 30 people. The H.L. Mencken House is located at 1524 Hollins Street, Baltimore, MD.To purchase tickets, click this link.