Break-Ins History

   #1---When we kids were little, the family was asleep upstairs one winter night when we were startled awake by violent banging on our heavy front door, the door with the key attached to a green  ribbon, and secured by a chain.  Yelling and pounding persisted, with my mother and father trying to decide what to do. From my bedroom, shivering and shaking, I heard my father say:   They're yelling "Fire!!' He went downstairs to check it out.  We heard voices and finally my father came back upstairs and told my mother that two men were downstairs saying their car broke down and they were afraid they'd freeze to death in the cold.  They'd asked him to let them stay inside until morning.  He told them they could sleep  on the couch or in the chair, though my  father had not liked that they'd yelled Fire. I heard my mother say what if they come up and kill us in our beds. I remember wishing we had a lock on the bedroom doors.
      But morning came and we were still alive and the men were still in our house.  My father had left for work.My mother made  them some breakfast and they left, probably to find some place that was open where there was a phone so they could get their car running. We went out to go sledding on the hill behind our house, where as usual several other kids had already gathered. It might have been a snow day, or more probably Christmas vacation. The subject of the conversation  was-- Burglars!  Different kids reported attempted break-ins of several houses the night before.  Someone had called the police.  That was unheard of at the time.  But the robbers got away, the story went.  I remember putting two and two together, and not wanting to admit that the would-be perps had spent the night at our house. I felt kind of embarrassed and not wanting to ruin a good story for them.
   #2 ---We were in high school when much the same happened again, minus the cry of Fire.  Two men with a broken-down car in the middle of a cold night pounding on our door  and asking for shelter from the cold.  My father let them in. In the morning, I recall one of them looking at our pictures on the mantle and asking if we knew the Tracy girls.  We did, but they were older than us, and not our friends. Again my father was at work before  the men left and one of them  scared the dickens out of my mother when he extended his hand toward her when she was sitting at the kitchen table, but all he did was give her  a handful of change as gratitude for their night's lodging and breakfast, all the money he had, he told her.
 #3 ---The most frightening of all.  My father was gone by this time and only my mother and I were party to the attempted break-in.  Helen and the young Bartholomew girls were tucked away in the other part of the house and blissfully unaware.  It was late at night, my mother and I asleep in our separate bedrooms.  We were jolted awake by a pounding on the door and voices yelling at the top of their lungs---"LET US IN!!" My mother yelled down the stairs for them to go away but they just hammered and kicked at that heavy old front door and screamed, "We're going to get in! One way or another!"  We had a telephone by then: it was downstairs in the living room past the two almost floor-length front windows. I was young enough then to try to reach the phone, in the dark, and by crawling across the floor from the bottom of the stairs to the phone.  I heard them run across the porch and around the back of the house.  There were several dogs in various dog coops in the back yard and they went wild at the  activity in the middle of the night.  I did reach the State Police, no 9-1-1 back then, and told them someone was trying to break in my house.  As I recall, they called back in the morning to check the status. They never came out.  The next morning,the back door of the old store was hanging off.  The intruders must have found that unacceptable and not worth entering. As far as I know.  The story the next day was that there'd been a big fight at the then notorious Valley Inn, and two men were running away to avoid a disastrous outcome, such as being beaten to a pulp.  #4 and #5 were burglaries at my present house, spaced exactly 10 years apart and both when we were not home, so not as frightening, except for the first time when I was not sure where two of my young teenaged children were.  I've written about that before, and may again some day.
     At present, I'm trying to put out of my mind a certain story  read years ago in the Atlantic, a story so gruesome that I don't even want to go near where the magazine is stored away.  The horror which befell Mrs. Puttermeister is forever etched in my mind.