College, Cars and Creeps Part 1

Dorothy and I won NYS Regents Scholarships our senior year, a rarer feat then than now. It meant we would be able to attend college. Well, not any college, but Albany State Teachers' College, as it was then known. State colleges then had no tuition, and students had to pay only for registration and student union fees and books. The total amount of each scholarship was $1400 spread over 4 years, or $175 a semester. This was barely enough, but we made it do. My father was retired by then, on a pittance of a pension and there was no other money. So we were to go to college, but the big issue was transportation. Joe had already been at the college for one year, having been the first ever Hoosic Valley student to win one of those prized Regents scholarships. As I recall, he used to leave home at the break of dawn and hitchhike to classes or else find a person who usually drove in to Albany and would pick him up if he were on the road as he was enroute to work. I'm not exactly sure how he managed his commute but I knew it wouldn't work for Dorothy and me. Anyway, by good fortune, Ruth also enrolled at the same college. Her brother Ed had just finished his tour with the US Navy, and decided to get his Master's Degree that year at Albany State. As he didn't have a car at the start of the year, Jack Brackley, who had enrolled at Albany Business School, drove us all to Albany, Dorothy, Ruth,Ed, Joe and me, 6 in the car. I think it may have been a little out of his way, so as soon as Ed bought an old blue Buick, he took over the driving duties. There were the 5 of us until soon he was also driving his siste Ethel to her job at the state in downtown Albany. That meant for the rest of the year we had to leave really early for her to be at her job, and then fight the downtown traffic to pick her up at about 5:30 when she got off work. It made for a very long day but at least for that year, we had a dependable ride. And that was the only year that was true.

Sophomore year was a little more difficult, but not really the worst year in terms of commute. Ed still felt somewhat committed to helping his sister and us get to school. He had gotten a job as science teacher at St. Mary's Academy in Hoosick Falls, and he would drive us 3 girls (maybe sometimes Joe?) to Raymertown before his schoolday began. He would drop us off at the home of a former classmate of his, who was also out of his military service (Army), and was likewise, though a year later, enrolled to get his Master's degree. Dewey S. was a strange man, attached strongly to his mother, who kept a shotgun in her kitchen. Dewey acted kind of like "The Office's" Dwight Shroot. He was militaristic, very strongly opinionated, and really just plain weird. With no social skills, or attractiveness of any sort, he was a misfit even at Albany State, and that was saying a lot. He never had a girl friend, though I think he once asked Ruth out, sort of, and once I remember when Dorothy was in the front seat, he kind of fake-wrestled her for some reason, and got carried away enough for her to have to struggle against him and she found it very uncomfortable and did not like it at all.
Dewey had a different schedule, or agenda, and we usually did not ride home with him. We used to walk or take a city bus down to the Plaza at the end of State Street, and if we were lucky, transfer to another bus which would bring us in to Troy. Then we would go to the train station and buy a ticket to the Valley Falls Depot up at the end of town, and of course walk home from there. So on the days that we could find Dewey and wrangle a ride home with him, we were not too proud to beg.
Here is where I'm going to digress from the sad tale of how we got to school. and relate a creepy and tragic tale:
One of the reasons Dewey, as a lofty graduate student, did not want to bother with 3 mousy freshman girls, was that he had a crush on an upperclassman. She was a junior, as I recall, and a very sweet,polite, and quite attractive girl, with pretty reddish hair, possibly highlighted to look so. She lived in the Troy area, had gone to Catholic High. Like us, she commuted, as hardly any underclassmen had cars then; indeed not many college students at all owned cars back then. So she was in the same difficult-commute boat as we were. We found thst Dewey would avoid us and offer Carole a ride to her home. At first she accepted, but it grew obvious that Dewey was romantically interested in her, and she was too polite to tell him he had no chance in Hell. So on the days that she was to ride home with Dewey, and he'd be avoiding us, Carole would find us and so invite us to join her on the Dewey-ride home. She was invariably pleasant, friendly and just very nice. That would be a funny little tale except for what happened to her a few years later.

In the summer of 1960, we had just graduated from Albany State. Carole Segretta had graduated a few years earlier and was now a schoolteacher downstate, I think in Poughkeepsie. She was off to visit friends that summer day and she was shot to death in her car on the Taconic Parkway. There were no clues or reasons--I remember her mother in Troy, was upset because they reported the death of a redhead in lover's lane, but that was not true. Later reports said her car was just off on the side of the road, and she was not a wild person at all. Even then newpapers lusted for the sensational with no regard for the truth. There were no clues except she'd been shot 4 times in the head with a very rare ammunition. My father was always very interested in detective stories and crime solving. I remember his, knowing what he knew about Dewey, writing a letter to the State Police about his rebuffed advances to her. The State Police sent him a letter back, saying Dewey had already been interviewed and ruled out as a suspect. This was not surprising for several reasons, one of which was that one of Carole's best college friends, Aggie Isler, was the daughter and/or/sister of a Troy cop, maybe both. Carole's death was not solved until years later, when another victim, or maybe more, had been shot to death with the same rare ammunition. They arrested and sentenced some crazy guy who would have been only 14 years old when he killed Carole Segretta. He may well be out of jail by now, who knows. I saw Dewey several years after that, and he looked terrible and acted insane. Maybe being innocent living under a cloud of suspicion does that to a person, or maybe he just went nuts all on his own. He's dead now.