The Uffda Trial

Things were always peaceful in the small western Minnesota town of Vingelen. The Jazz Age, with its flappers and speakeasies, had largely passed them by. For the most part, they only worried about price of wheat, barley, oats, eggs, and cream. The population of Vingelen was seventy percent Norwegian, twenty-nine percent Swedish, and there was one family of Germans.
In the summer of 1926, however, a man came to town advertizing movies to be shown at the new theater, and promised that as a door prize for those who came to his movie show, he would give away live baby. After three nights of just awful entertainment, the slick entrepreneur declared that attendance had not met his expectations and that the door prize would not be given away. Outraged, the local boys terrorized him with rotten eggs. Everyone had a grand time, but it turned out that the man had no sense of humor or proportion. He demanded that the county sheriff arrest the fun-loving boys. The resultant trial was a delightful farce.
The fictional town is based on a real place, and the author has made a careful study of the the ethnic dynamics of first and second generation Scandinavian immigrants. The story is based on a true event, and one of the defendants in the trial was the author's father.