The Scopes trial was planned in 
Robinsons' Drug Store, which moved 
to its present location in 1928. 
where he found Dayton’s leading citi- 
zens crowded around a table, sipping 
Coke and arguing about the Butler Act. 
Within a few minutes, Scopes had of- 
fered himself as the sacrificial lamb. 
From that point, events accelerated and 
began to run along a predictable track. 
William Jennings Bryan, who had 
stirred millions with his “Cross of Gold” 
speech and almost become president as 
a result, was passing his declining years 
as a fundamentalist stumper — “a tinpot 
pope in the Coca-Cola belt,” as H.L. 
Mencken remarked. He volunteered his 
services for the prosecution, and Cla- 
rence Darrow responded in kind for the 
defense. The rest, as they say, is history. 
Of late, ,it has, alas, become current 
events as well. 
Robinsons’ Drug Store is still the so- 
cial center of Dayton, although it moved 
in 1928 to its present location in the 
shadow of the Rhea County courthouse, 
where Scopes faced the wrath of Bry- 
an’s God. “Sonny” Robinson, Doc’s boy, 
has run the store for decades, dispensing 
pills to the local citizenry and thoughts 
about Dayton’s moment of fame to the 
pilgrims and gawkers who stop by to see 
where it all started. The little round 
table, with its wire-backed chairs, occu- 
pies a central place, as it did when 
Scopes, Doc Robinson, and George 
Rappelyea (who made the formal “ar- 
rest”) laid their plans in May 1925. The 
walls are covered with pictures and 
other memorabilia, including Sonny 
Robinson’s only personal memory of the 
trial: a photograph of a five-year old 
boy, sitting in a carriage and pouting 
because a chimpanzee had received the 
Coke he had expected. (The chimp was 
a prominent member in the motley en- 
tourage of camp followers, many of 
comparable intelligence, that descended 
upon Dayton during the trial, in search 
of ready cash rather than eternal en- 
lightenment.) 
I was visiting Robinsons’ Drug Store 
in June, when a San Francisco paper 
called with a request for photos of 
present-day Dayton. Sonny Robinson, 
who claims to be a shy man, began a 
flurry of calls to exploit the moment. Up 
north in the big town, you wouldn’t keep 
a man waiting, at least not without a 
request or an explanation: “Excuse me, 
I know you must be in a hurry, but 
would you mind, it won’t be more than a 
few minutes. . . But it was 97° outside 
and cool in Sonny Robinson’s store. And 
where would a man be going anyway? 
Half an hour later, his personages as- 
sembled, Sonny Robinson pulled out the 
famous table and brought three Cokes 
in some old-fashioned 50 glasses. I sat in 
the middle (“the biology professor from 
Harvard who just happened to walk in,” 
as Robinson had told his callers). On one 
side sat Ted Mercer, president of Bryan 
College, the fundamentalist school be- 
gun as a legacy to the “Great Common- 
er’s” last battle. On the other side sat 
Mr. Robinson, son of the man who had 
started it all around the same table fifty- 
six years before. The fundamentalist 
editor of the Dayton Herald snapped 
our pictures and we sipped our Cokes. 
Dayton has remained a small and 
inconspicuous town. If you’re coming 
from Knoxville via Decatur, you still 
have to cross the Tennessee River on a 
six-car ferry. The older houses are well 
kept, with four white pillars in front, the 
vernacular imitation of plantation style. 
(As a regional marker of the South, 
these pillars are architecture’s equiva- 
lent of the dependable gastronomical 
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