There’s nothing like a good story

In the early 1920s, my grandfather bought his young sons, my father and uncle, the World Book Encyclopedia, which they left in pristine condition, judging from how I found the many volumes in his bookcase in the early 1940s.Pop, as he was known to his children and grandchildren, was so pleased when he saw a child related to him actually looking at the books, he told me I could take them home. So, from about the age of 11 or so, I became a devoted reader of the World Books. I saw them as an endless supply of good stories and it was up to me alone to find the interesting ones and skip what didn’t look promising. I don’t remember how many volumes there were but for some reason, I do remember the final one started with Troy and ended with Zwingli. I knew more about that Swiss theologian than most kids.Pop had also added annual volumes that contained the events of each year until he determined the books were never going to be devoured by his sons. But as a result, I also became something of a youthful specialist on the events of 1924 to 1928.I was especially taken with a 1925 trial and a 1927 obituary that I read over and over. The obituary recounted the long, sad life of the “mad empress,” Carlota of Mexico. She was the widow of the Emperor Maximilian, who had been placed on a shaky Mexican throne by Napoleon III of France while the country’s neighbor to the north was distracted by its Civil War. Once the war ended, the United States reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine and the emperor was dethroned by an American supported revolution in 1867.While Maximilian was losing his throne and his life, the 26-year-old empress, a cousin of Queen Victoria, had returned to Europe in a vain attempt to get help from her royal relatives. While going from capital to capital, she suffered a mental breakdown and never knew Maximilian had been captured and executed by a firing squad. She would live for 60 more years, most of them in mental hospitals, and die in her native Belgium in 1927.Carlota is forgotten but the 1925 trial of high school teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law turned out to be an early skirmish in a controversy that still scares Republican presidential candidates. The headline in the encyclopedia was “Evolution vs. Fundamentalism.” The trial was dominated by the three-time presidential candidate and old time religion champion William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and the great defense attorney Clarence Darrow championing evolution and Scopes, who was largely ignored. The battle was won by Darrow but lost by his client who was found guilty by the Dayton, Tenn., jury and fined $100, which The Baltimore Sun paid.The trial was made into a play and movie, “Inherit the Wind,” which brilliantly cast Fredric March as a fictional Bryan and Spencer Tracy as Darrow and brilliantly miscast the dancer Gene Kelly as the iconoclastic journalist Henry L. Mencken. (Mencken wasn’t mentioned in the encyclopedia but I discovered him in college and have spent a lifetime reading him. His reporting from Dayton is still considered magnificent, especially his essay on the death of Bryan, who died in his sleep, “while the cock crowed on the dung hill,” the day after the trial.)Even as a kid, I thought the best part of the trial was Darrow’s examination of Bryan, whom he had called as a Biblical authority. Darrow mockingly challenged Bryan to explain how Cain found a wife and Bryan replied he’d leave it to the agnostics to track her down. You didn’t find exchanges like that on the radio, even between Jack Benny and Fred Allen.Back then, I assumed the Scopes spectacle had settled the matter and science had won, but what do kids know? Just recently, one of the leading lights of the Republican Party, Sen. Marco Rubio, told GQ Magazine evolution and creationism were two conflicting theories as if one wasn’t science and the other, myth.But back then, I also assumed kids would always look for good stories in actual books.Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.