Leland P. Lovette (1897-1967) was a Vice Admiral in the United States Navy. He served as director of public relations from December 1937 until May 1940, when he assumed command of the USS Selfridge (DD 357) in the Pacific and participated in military actions in Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal. Lovette returned to the Navy Department as director of Public Relations from 1942 until 1944, when he took command of the Alaska class cruiser USS Guam (CB-2). Originally from Greene, Tennessee, Lovette spent most of his adult life in Annapolis, Maryland and Washington, D.C. In addition to his career as a Naval Officer, Lovette was also an author, writing on the topic of Naval strategy in Naval Customs - Traditions and Usage and also reviewing works for Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880–January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, and satirist. Mencken became a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899 and then moved to The Baltimore Sun, where he wrote from 1906 until the end of his career in 1948. Mencken was well known for his commentary during the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1929. As a free-lance columnist, his columns addressed many of the social issues of the day, ranging from civil rights and social Darwinism to prohibition and the Great Depression. In addition to his reporting and editing career in periodical publications, Mencken also published over thirty books during his lifetime, his best known being The American Language and Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.

Although openly opposing marriage, Mencken wed Sara Haardt in 1930 after a seven-year courtship. She died five years later, leaving Mencken grief-stricken. On November 23, 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke that left him aware and fully conscious but nearly unable to read or write and to speak only with some difficulty. After some time, he was able to recover some of his ability to speak, talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense as if he were already dead. Mencken spent much of his time preoccupied with his legacy, and he organized his papers, amounting to hundreds of thousands of letters, newspaper clippings, and columns, to be made available to scholars after his death. Mencken died in his sleep in 1956 and was laid to rest in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.