Mysterious Missives and Watty

This could be filed under Desperate for A Ride
When Dorothy was still in high school, she received in the mail a series of anonymous letters, maybe 3 or 4 or so. I think they may have been signed secret admirer. She kept them for a while, but now they're gone, so I don't know all the details any more. The letters were typed and quite lengthy. I remember one of the letters told her that hair such as hers "should never be cut but be allowed to sweep the streets." We all got quite a laugh out of that. After the first letter or so, my father became intigued. Putting his amateur detective skills to work, he determined that they were written by an adult, and an educated one at that. The letters were not obscene in any way, but contained lengthy and flowery descriptions of her and her beautiful hair. The last letter she got asked her to meet the writer at the Valley Inn at a certain time. I'm pretty sure it was after dark. I know she and Sandy went to the designated meeting spot, and nothing came of it. We never found out who the sender was, BUT

A few years later, we were college students, and of course were still living at home, commuting all the way. We discovered we had a "Peeper." That was a rather innocuous name then for what today would be taken much more seriously. A man was seen to park his car in the parking lot of the old cinder block company next door, get out, and peer into the "middle room" window through where the lilac bushes were and still are. Then the window gave a clear view into the room where the TV was, and where Dorothy ,as well as others, would sit on the couch in the glow of the TY screen, and watch TV, She would probably have been combing her hair as she watched, as she had a habit of doing. I think Joe was in the army then, because I remember watching for the Peeper from his bedroom window. I think his routine was to come on Friday nights after Sara closed the store, which was 10:00 p.m. He would get out of the car and walk over to the driveway outside our house and peek through the bushes. He always seemed to be wearing a white shirt. My father used to say he was going to throw hot water on him from the window above, but he never followed through. Again, in those days, crime was not thought of, and so, I suppose, a lot of bizarre behavior went unreported if not unnoticed. But one Friday evening Ed O. and I decided to play detective ourselves.
We sat in his old blue Buick on the other side of the river across the bridge, and waited at the usual Friday night time. Of course we had the headlights turned off. We were not to be disappointed. Sara closed her store at 10, all was dark, and we saw a car pull into the lot, a distance away from the house, as usual. We held our breaths as a man got out, and walked over to the lilac bushes, and stood looking into the window. We waited a little while until we saw him start to leave and then Ed started his car and drove slowly across the bridge, watching the peeper's car just leaving the lot and start to drive upstreet. We followed, our headlights still off as our suspect turned left at the Methodist Church and then right into the alley, where the driver got out to open his garage door, which fronted on the alley, and put his car away. The car was a maroon sedan and the driver was Watty!

Watty
John and Helen w. lived in the big old house across from the Catholic Church, which later burned, and was replaced by the modular house there today. They probably moved here when we were in 7th grade or so. We didn't pay much attention to those things then. John was a professor at RPI, Helen was stay-at-home mother to 5 children, 4 boys and a girl. The youngest may even have been born while they lived in Valley Falls. The parents were active members of the Catholic Church; the children were all really polite and well-behaved. I taught several of them years later, all nice kids, the only daughter a special joy to have in class. At one time when we were in 8th grade or so, Helen started a Girl Scout group, which I remember going to several times with Snookie, Dorothy, Lucille, and a few others, but nothing much happened so we just stopped going. So this was the background of Watty, who we later learned was "The Peeper."
We all knew by then that Watty was The Peeper. But we couldn't have been very afraid of him. When we would be waiting at Mancinelli's for a bus or the hope of a heavensent car ride, Watty would frequently drive down the hill from RPI and offer us a ride home. We 3 girls would all pile in,grateful as could be. He was a mild, friendly, soft-spoken man, as at ease and normal a person as you could find. One day, after he'd picked us up, he said he'd forgotten something in his office, and asked if we would mind if he went back to retrieve it. Of course we didn't. He left us in the car on the campus, and was gone for a very long time, maybe 45 minutes or so. It was long enough for us to talk about him, and mock him, etc., and I remember speculating if he'd hidden one of those new-age tape-recorders in his car so he could hear what we'd say about him. I think we might have addressed a few choice comments to him. We kind of recalled then that his specialty at RPI was electronics. I can't remember if that was the last ride he ever offered us, but it may have been.