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50 Years After Scopes Memoir Published, Collaborator Reflects on Scopes and Trial

On this date in 1925, the famous "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, came to an end with a guilty verdict for the defendant, a young western Kentucky teacher named John Scopes.  

In the years following, a lot of ink was spilled analyzing the trial, the legendary lawyers William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, and certainly the issue of teaching human evolution.  Scopes himself got comparatively very little attention. 

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the memoir that changed all that, Center of the Storm

Producer of the WKMS documentary I Am John Scopes Todd Hatton talks about the book, and Scopes himself, with the Texarkana, Texas journalist and author who collaborated on the work, Dr. James Presley.

Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.