My father was a lawyer and a Republican. He believed the two men guilty not from any particular study of the trial itself but because of his acquaintance with Captain Van Amburgh, a ballistics expert who testified at the trial. Van Amburgh, through laboratory examinations, was certain that one of the recovered murder bullets had been fired from Sacco’s gun. This convinced my father, although—as it came out later—it never convinced Captain Proctor of the State Police. My Aunt Amy, who was a social worker and lived in the Elizabeth Peabody House, was equally convinced of the two men’s innocence. This again was not from studying the evidence—it was simply the way one had to feel if one was a social worker. Nobody could have continued to stay at the Elizabeth Peabody House who felt otherwise—not that such a person would ever have been there in the first place. One of the proud moments of Aunt Amy’s life was when she was arrested for picketing the State House and taken away in a patrol wagon. I think she was almost disappointed that the policeman who arrested her was so courteous about it. I do not know when my views about Sacco and Vanzetti changed. It must have been sometime in the thirties, when I happened to read a book of their letters. Those letters were just not congruous with the sordid and mercenary Braintree murders. As to the question, Who were the murderers if Sacco and Vanzetti were not? I thought I found that answered later by one of their counsel, Herbert Ehrmann, whose book _The Untried Case_ seemed to prove that the men who did the killing were from the Morelli Gang of Providence. If one accepted that explanation, reinforced by other evidence as time went on, everything apparently fitted together. One of the Morellis looked enough like Sacco to have been his brother. Dedham, where the trial took place, is a colonial backwater. For the most part it is a mill town stretched along the loops of the Charles River, but the older section near the High—not Main—Street is a well-preserved relic, with spacious frame houses of the mid-eighteenth century and later and more grandiloquent mansions of the century’s end. The courthouse, built in 1827, is a stone building with massive Greek-revival columns. Its Roman dome, soberly proportioned to the columns, is the most conspicuous object in Dedham. From the flat country beyond the river it looms above the elms, flanked by white meeting-house spires, a symbol of authority. Almost always when I see the great dome so secure above the peaceful community I find myself thinking back to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Whatever one’s feelings about the trial, its presence still seems tangible in the courthouse and the High Street.