Bowen says anthologies of Mencken's writings were around in the 1950s and "lots of us had them at Notre Dame, so it wouldn't be unusual that John would think of him or know how to imitate him, though not many could do it as well. Some of Mencken's most famous writing was inspired by the Scopes trial in Tennesse, which as a journalist he had covered. Mencken had little use for Catholicism and less for Evangelical fundamentalism. John's "I can hear him now, the grand high mucky-muck" passage is a pretty good representation of his style." (also see Maritain, Jacques).

Myers doesn't think Bellairs read him much, but Myers himself was a fan while an undergraduate at Notre Dame. "He had something of the aura of forbidden fruit, and I used to love the slashing sarcasm directed against abolitionists, fundamentalists and the 'booboise' (his word) in general. Naturally, I would share the good parts with John. In the late 1950s, Inherit the Wind, a play about the Scopes Monkey Trial, was a big hit, and a thinly-disguised Mencken was one of the principal characters. It was made into a movie in 1960 with Gene Kelly in the Mencken part (not the greatest casting). More to the point, I saw the road production of the play in Chicago in the late '50s and Bellairs could well have been with me. A few years ago I read Mencken's autobiographic trilogy, Happy Days, Heathen Days, and Newspaper Days, and my enthusiasm for him has declined tremendously. He now seems like a self-important bloviator. One particularly offensive recurring theme in these three books is that, due to some glitch in Maryland law at the time, medical students would have to raid Negro cemeteries at night to obtain cadavers for vivisection. Mencken found it hilarious that Negro families objected to this practice. The hell with him."