Perhaps when you're 8-years old you don't fully grasp the historical significance of an event, despite the fact that you're right smack in the middle of it. Oh, you get that it's an important event because how else could you explain the thousands of people who have converged on your small, Tennessee town to hear two famous Americans verbally spar over the question of Biblical inerrancy and evolution?

This past week marked the 83rd anniversary of what has been known through the decades as the Scopes Monkey Trial. In short, a general science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., was put on trial for teaching evolution despite a Tennessee law that forbade it.

Justin Falls/Daily Advance (ENLARGE)

Duane McSmith holds a watch fob bearing a picture of a monkey wearing a straw hat as he talks about the Scopes trial in Tennessee and his involvement in it as he sits in his home in Elizabeth City Monday, July 14. McSmith and a friend created the fobs and sold them for $1.50 a piece during the trial.

Justin Falls/Daily Advance (ENLARGE)

Duane McSmith talks about the Scopes trial in Tennessee and his experience with it as a child in Dayton, Tenn., 1925.

Ninety-one-year-old Elizabeth City resident Duane McSmith was there when it all happened. And he wasn't just a passive observer; rather he managed to make his mark on history.

"I remember several things very vividly," says McSmith, who is best known locally for his work as a master gardener and his Hide-N-Wood Gardens. "The town was overrun with everybody."

Indeed, Dayton, Tenn., was overrun with people. According to some accounts, there may well have been 20,000 people in the town of 3,000.

According to an account compiled by University of Missouri law professor, Douglas Linder, the Scopes Trial was essentially a set-up to test the teaching of evolution in the face of a Tennessee law that forbade it.

"The Scopes Trial had its origins in a conspiracy at Fred Robinson's drugstore in Dayton," Linder writes. "George Rappalyea, a 31-year-old transplanted New Yorker and local coal company manager arrived at the drugstore with a copy of a paper containing an American Civil Liberties Union announcement that it was willing to offer its services to anyone challenging the new Tennessee anti-evolution statute."

Linder goes on to write that Rappalyea, "a modernist Methodist with contempt for the new law," said that a trial challenging it would be a way to bring attention to Dayton, a town that was in need of revenue.

"Listening to Rappalyea, the others — including School Superintendent Walter White — became convinced that publicity generated by a controversial trial might help their town," Linder went on to write.

Science teacher John Scopes was recruited to act as the teacher who would be on trial. The ACLU brought in famous litigator and professed agnostic Clarence Darrow to head the defense team — a team that consisted of many famous attorneys of the day — while populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan — his nickname was the Great Commoner — was brought in for the prosecution.

From there, a media circus was born.

For families like Duane McSmith's, the person that was Bryan was a hero who stood for every man. A staunch Presbyterian, Bryan, who had been Secretary of State and a three-time presidential candidate, wasn't afraid of sharing his belief in the Bible with supporters.

McSmith, whose parents were Southern Baptist and public school teachers, recalls that his mother supported the ban on teaching evolution.

In fact, she even hosted Bryan in their home on more than one occasion.

"Mother was a very active Bible teacher and her and William Jennings Bryan got along and they had long discussions of what the Bible was all about," recalls McSmith.

But it was McSmith's personal contribution to the history of this famous spectacle that he cherishes most when recalling that week in 1925.

"The thing that I remember most was that the local blacksmith's son — I can't recall his name — was just a little older than I. His father and a local artist in town were making these molds for watch fobs with a monkey in a straw hat on it," recalls McSmith.

One of the molds made by the blacksmith was rejected, so he gave it to the two boys. The boys, McSmith recalls, would go and collect discarded lead scrap from the railcar hotboxes, take that back to the blacksmith shop where they would melt it down in a crucible and cast their own watch fobs.

The mold had been rejected because the letters spelling out Dayton 1925 were missing so the boys would simply stamp that on the lead watch fobs they were creating.

And those fobs, 10 to 20 of them, were sold by the boys on the streets of Dayton for $1.50 a piece.

"We both made enough money to each buy a new bicycle," recalls McSmith.

McSmith also has one of those fobs in his possession today. This particular fob was likely a reject, he says, because some "junk" had fallen off, leaving a corner missing from the lead artifact.

Memories of watch fobs are not the only thing McSmith took away from that week.

Because newspapers did not have the ability to send photographs over the wire in those days, they employed former World War I pilots, McSmith says, to fly photographers back to the cities with photos.

McSmith says his uncle was a World War I pilot and when he had visited him prior to the Scopes Trial, he had become fascinated with airplanes. The planes in Jim Abel's field provided McSmith with many opportunities to speak with pilots and learn something about flying.

"They (the pilots) would buy automobile gas for their planes and they would strain it through their felt hats then shake the hats dry and put them back on their heads," recalls McSmtih, the sparkle of a youthful memory in his eye.

Those days spent with pilots sparked a desire in McSmith to be a pilot. During the early days of World War II, he was a mercenary fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force, until the U.S. enter the fray and he became an American pilot.

That experience would eventually lead him to working as a test pilot and engineer for NASA.

Although McSmith would become a NASA engineer, steeped in the scientific world, he says he never lost his faith in the idea of creationism, and has never believed in evolution.

Like his parents and most of the people of Dayton, Tenn., during 1925, McSmith chooses to believe that humans did not evolve from apes; rather a supreme being created them.

"Me and the Lord, we get along quite well," he says of his decision to stick with creationism, rather than evolution.