At the opening of the trial Judge Thayer was within two weeks of being sixty-three, although the leathery texture of his face made him seem a decade older. He was about five feet two inches tall, with the edgy vanity of many short men, and a voice that easily turned petulant. On the bench he looked the part of a judge. He had a high forehead, a sudden little hawk nose bridged by pince-nez, thin gray hair and mustache, dark-circled eyes, and a narrow Yankee line of mouth. Governor Samuel McCall, a fellow graduate of Dartmouth, had appointed him to the bench in 1917. Thayer was born in Blackstone, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles south of Worcester, the son of the local slaughterer and provisions dealer. After going through the local public schools and Worcester Academy, he entered Dartmouth with the class of 1880. Known there as Bobby, he was more noted as an athlete than a scholar. While a sophomore he organized the first college baseball nine and was its captain for three years. Once he was suspended for a half-year as the result of a rowdy prank, but he returned to graduate with his class. His undergraduate pictures show a fair-haired young man with a sprouting mustache, a quizzical expression, and eyes so deep-set that they seem almost hooded. On graduation he briefly considered going in for big-league baseball, but instead returned to Worcester, where for two years he read law on his own. He was admitted to the bar in 1882. For the next thirty-five years he remained in that small city, rising higher in its restricted social world than might have been expected of a butcher’s son. He married early and well. He became an Odd Fellow, chairman of the Worcester Athletic Association, and a member of the Dartmouth Alumni Council. Indicative of his popularity, he was elected a Democratic alderman in Republican Worcester, the youngest alderman the city ever had. Later he conformed more strictly to his social group and became a Republican. His greatest regret, for which his appointment as Superior Court Justice was only partial solace, was that he had not been young enough to join the Army in 1917. Webster Thayer—the Anglo-Saxon coupling had a bell-like resonance in which were blended the Mayflower tradition and that of the young federal republic. Yet there was a hollowness to the ring, as the butcher’s son well knew. Thayer, even as a justice of the Superior Court, was haunted by an inner sense of doubt that made him seek the approbation of other men, constantly, uncritically. In his three years on the bench he appeared a run-of-the-mill justice, causing no particular attention adversely or otherwise. The court attendants noted his irascibility, and his vanity came out in a fondness for buttonholing lawyers in the corridor to tell them about the charge he had just written. As an old-line Yankee, he had no great sympathy with foreigners, but no one had ever questioned his fairness.