SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Before he became the center of one of Springfield’s stranger religious fights, Fritz Darrow was a Harvard man who married his wife beneath an apple tree.
By the time Darrow arrived at Drury College in Springfield in 1907, he had already lived a life that would have stood out almost anywhere in the Ozarks.
He had graduated from Harvard, studied Greek in Athens and belonged to the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society — an esoteric religious movement built around reincarnation, philosophy and the belief that deeper spiritual truths could be found beneath conventional religion…