Monkey Town

My friend Craig Gabbert had always told me that his family was involved in the Scopes Trial, but I never had thought much about it. Then, one summer, Craig invited several friends, including my wife Yvonne and me, to go with him and his family to the annual Scopes Trial reenactment in Dayton, Tennessee. 

It was hot that summer, as it had been in 1925, and when Craig introduced us to his mother, Frances Robinson Gabbert, she offered us a pitcher of iced tea. We sat sipping tea on the front porch of her house, gazing across the street at the Rhea County Courthouse and listening to her stories of seventy years before, when as a little girl she had witnessed one of the most remarkable events in American history. Her father, it turned out, had been F. E. Robinson, the “hustling druggist” of Dayton, at whose store the trial had been planned. The round oak table where we ate lunch that day was the same one where Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan had been invited for supper during the Scopes Trial.        

The reenactment was fascinating, but the best part of that weekend was listening to Frances tell her stories. They seized my imagination, though for a while I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I thought of approaching Frances about writing a memoir but never got around to it. Then, two years later, she died and the opportunity seemed lost.   

But the stories wouldn’t let go. I continued to roll them around in my mind, and more and more they began to sound like a novel. I could use Frances’s stories, follow the outline of historical facts, and yet have the freedom to imagine scenes where there were gaps and to write dialog bringing the stories to life.   

And that’s what I did. The book was published as Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial. This week, to celebrate one hundred years since the trial, I think you might enjoy reading it.