preparatory course at Allegheny College. He did not last long. The “Panic of 1873” plunged the nation into depression, and ended Darrow’s college days. Like Everett and Mary and Amirus before him, Clarence took a job as a schoolteacher, in his case at the District No. 3 school, a few miles away in the town of Vernon. He received $100 for the three-month autumn term. He was a colorful sight in those days of the “Long Depression,” wearing a bowler and driving through town in a shabby contraption: an old sleigh that his father had converted into a buggy. He was a lax instructor who refused to employ corporal discipline and let the boys stretch their hour of recess. The choicest part of the job, he’d say, was the good meals and pie he got when invited to supper by the families of his students.
Oratory was part of the curriculum, and as a student Clarence had excelled at memorizing his “pieces” and presenting them with dramatic flourish. His own classmates would long remember his recitation of “Darius Green and His Flying Machine” (“Darius was clearly of the opinion / That the air is also man’s dominion / And that, with paddle or fin or pinion / We soon or late / Shall navigate”). The Darrows had a custom of reading aloud for one another at the dining room table or while gathered in the sitting room on winter nights. He attended, and soon was entering, the speaking contests held at town picnics and the evening declamation series in the local schoolhouse. He liked to sit in, as well, on the arguments held before “Justice” Fitch. “Every time there was a lawsuit I used to go to the tinsmith’s law shop and listen to those country pettifoggers abuse each other,” he recalled. “They talked so much and abused each other and the witnesses so violently that I thought I would rather be a lawyer than anything else in the world.” The blacksmith, Lorenzo Roberts, let Darrow read his law books.
He taught for three years, but the legal profession seemed a better way to make money, and he nurtured a conceit that “I was made for better things.” His father had studied law and so, Darrow decided, should he.18
THE DARROWS PLACED great faith in education. As each child graduated from college, he or she devoted a share of their earnings to help the next pay tuition. As times got better, it was Clarence’s turn for higher learning. Amirus, Mary, and Everett contributed, and he set off for the University of Michigan school of law in the fall of 1877, at the age of twenty. He made no significant impression in his year in Ann Arbor, did not graduate, and never acquired a law degree. His only notoriety was not the best kind. He got in a spat with his landlady. Darrow “could not or would not pay for his rooms, and accordingly left them one day last week, telling Mrs. Foley that he had left his trunk and its contents and those he said would pay his indebtedness to her. She was, of course, glad to get even this from him. But on opening the trunk it was found to be filled with “wood, burnt boots and other things of equal value,” the local paper reported. “This should warn all others from trusting him.”
Darrow replied with a letter to the editor, calling Mrs. Foley’s account “nearly all an entire fabrication.” He had paid his rent, and was moving out, when they bickered over alleged damage to his room. She had seized his trunk, said Darrow, and half of the wood heating fuel he left behind. “Although poor, I value my reputation too highly to dispose of it for the small sum in controversy,” Darrow said. “I will prove by witnesses the above facts, as stated by me, to be true, to any one who will call at my present boarding place.”19
The costs of law school were not terribly high—$50 covered tuition and fees—but still an obstacle for Darrow. And for American lawyers in that era, a law degree was an exception. Most took jobs as clerks in a local attorney’s office and “read law” to prepare for the bar exam. So Darrow found work in a Youngstown, Ohio, firm and studied there. He remembered sitting through one libel case with his mentor, and being puzzled when that learned man pronounced the newspaper’s action as “libeelious.”
“Libelous, correctly pronounced, has a dry technical, colorless