Bob Sanders: ‘Inherit the Wind’ worth watching

Fred (no, not him, the other Fred) and I were talking about movies that should be required watching, Pictures like “Grapes of Wrath,” “12 Angry Men,” “The Oxbow Incident,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and one that was on TV recently, “Inherit the Wind.”
For the one person who has never seen it, it is the (slightly) fictionalized version of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s about a young teacher who gets arrested for teaching science. It became a sensation when William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate, and noted lawyer Clarence Darrow locked horns, Bryan for the prosecution, Darrow for the teacher.

And that brings to mind a tragedy that hits close to home, one I learned about only recently. Pardon the personal stuff, but it is pertinent, I think, to our discussion.

I knew Daddy had dropped out of school after the eighth grade, and that his mother kind of home-schooled him after that in the very basic three Rs. He’d always say that he dropped out to help Grandpa on the farm, which he did.

But not long before he died, he had a long talk with my oldest cousin. As she later told us, he told her of the main reason he left school was because Grandpa pulled him out when they started teaching “science” at the school. Hmmm.

By looking back and doing a little figuring, we decided that the furor about Darwin’s theory would have been raging along about then, and maybe some of it even trickled down to our town. Man coming from monkeys? Grandpa certainly didn’t want his youngest son exposed to anything like that.

You need to know that Grandpa and Grandma were super-religious.

Theirs was a religion in which nearly everything was sinful, and if you didn’t do enough of those things, you’d probably make it to heaven. Things like fishing on Sunday, or smoking or drinking, or going to the picture show (especially on Sunday), or dancing, or doing most any kind of work on Sunday except the feeding and milking, etc. Reading was pretty much limited to the Bible and the newspaper. (Thank God, Mother liked to read “them old books.”)

The regular Baptists and Methodists were not religious enough for Grandpa, so he built his own non-denominational tabernacle. Services were held there every other Sunday night, different preacher each time, usually of the Pentecostal type.

Anyway, that’s the kind of baggage Daddy was saddled with, and he bought into a lot of it, although he was fairly lenient about letting me go to my love of loves, the picture show.
I wish he could have seen “Inherit the Wind,” but he probably wouldn’t have watched it. He couldn’t be quite comfortable, watching one of those sinful things. His parents had marked him too well.

So sad.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.