My father was a U.S. soil conservationist and my mother a school teacher. My father thought very little of lawyers. However, defense lawyer Clarence Darrow and his performance in the Scopes trial have substantially influenced my life since 1956 – and most probably led to me becoming a lawyer. In the summer of 1956, I had a new girlfriend at Ohio State, Sue. (She was the first of any length; I married her in 1958.) She had left the campus to spend the summer with her family in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I had a summer job doing highway construction in Ohio. One weekend, my job was rained out on a Friday, and I hitchhiked to Connecticut to see Sue. That weekend, we somehow ended up with tickets to see, “Inherit the Wind,” on Broadway starring Paul Muni. (He received a Tony for the role.) The play was about a teacher, Scopes, who was on trial for teaching evolution. He was defended in part by America’s most famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow. I became a lifetime admirer.
After Sue and I graduated and were married, I accepted a management trainee job with Republic Steel in Canton, Ohio. I had worked there on the hot rolling mill during college. (I had hitchhiked to Canton to get the job.) Sue and I knew no one in Canton so we joined a book club at the public library. One month, the book club’s discussion was of “Clarence Darrow for the Defense,” by Irving Stone, which I read for the occasion. I told the lawyer who led the discussion that, “I sometimes thought about going to law school,” and he said, “Why don’t you?” At that moment, I decided to go. Shortly after, Sue and I left Canton with our infant first born, David, to return to Columbus. I took courses at Ohio State to get my grade point average above the one that had been just high enough for me to graduate. I was then accepted to law school, where I became a law review editor.
Years later in New York when I headed a Federal Bar Council Committee which issued a report advocating, “Cameras in the Courtroom,” I learned that the Scopes trial had been broadcast live on the radio. The transcript of it has been available since it ended. A recent selection of my book club has been a new book: “Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation,” by Brenda Wineapple, about the Scopes trial and Clarence Darrow.