Thoughts in a Haystack

"Dayton is having a case of the morning after today," Jack Lair of William Randolph Hearst's International News Service (INS) reported on Saturday. "In numbers, [the opening day] was a fiasco; the procedure lacked drama; and then came the forty-eight-hour adjournment to let what warmth that had radiated cool off." Dayton quieted down for the weekend. Trial spectators from the surrounding countryside returned to their homes. Most visitors from outside Tennessee headed to Chattanooga for a hot time or the Great Smoky Mountains for a cool breeze. Reporters and defense lawyers enjoyed a riverboat excursion on the Tennessee River, compliments of the Chattanooga News. Prosecutors drove into the mountains for the day. About the only excitement occurred when a self-proclaimed Independent Free Thinker and Lecturer began loudly assailing Christianity on a downtown street corner. He was arrested for disturbing the peace and released on condition that he stop speaking in public.

- Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods