FOR THE 69TH STRAIGHT YEAR, THE LATE CLARENCE DARROW FAILS TO REAPPEAR

They gather yearly--no matter the weather, the creaks in their bones or the increasing fog of some of their memories--at 10 a.m. on March 13 at a bridge in Jackson Park to honor Clarence Darrow, the most famous lawyer of the century just passed.

A marvelously diverse group of students, lawyers, politicians, curiosity seekers, civil libertarians and history buffs (four of them are shown in Osgood's photo), they do this at the Clarence Darrow Bridge, just to the south of the Museum of Science and Industry.

The date marks the anniversary of Darrow's death in 1938 (he was born on April 18, 1857, 150 years ago last Wednesday). The bridge, which was visible from Darrow's home, where he died at age 80, was a place the attorney frequently went alone to think, to contemplate the mysteries of life and the complexities of his cases, such as the still-famous Chicago murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks, and his defense of John T. Scopes' right to teach the theory of evolution in a Tennessee public school.

Following services at Bond Chapel on the University of Chicago campus, Darrow's ashes were scattered over the lagoon from the bridge, but it was not until 1957, when the city's relatively new mayor, Richard J. Daley, dedicated the bridge in Darrow's name, that people started the March 13 gatherings.

There are some who believe that the spirit of Darrow prowls this area. Richard Crowe tells of Halloween night in 1994 when he was leading one of his popular ghost tours: "We were standing by the bridge [when] this old man dressed in lawyerly fashion like Darrow suddenly walked out from the museum. We're screaming and yelling and this guy doesn't move."

Darrow, famously agnostic, had said before his death that, if in fact there was an afterlife, he would return to the bridge on the date of his death. He did this, in part, to help debunk the mediums, popular at the time, who made money pretending to summon the dead.

Darrow made clear his feelings on an afterlife: "Every man knows when his life began . . . . If I did not exist in the past, why should I, or could I, exist in the future?"

This year, as in years past, a wreath was tossed upon the waters of the lagoon and, after a few words, the crowd went into the museum for a formal discussion of Darrow's legacy.

This is one of the city's quiet events, rarely covered anymore by the news media. But it was enough to compel at least one person to seek out and read (it's easy to find on the Internet) Darrow's brilliant, 20,000-word closing argument in the Leopold and Loeb case, the most eloquent attack against the death penalty ever launched.

Who needs ghosts when you've got genius?

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