It was a cold winter night after I returned from a wrestling match. Like all wrestling coaches, after a match, I was wound up like an 8 day clock. I walked through the door and my wife exclaimed.” We had a peeping Tom and I called the police!”
Welcome home I thought! She explained how this guy was standing on the roof next door sipping a beer while staring through our daughter’s window. The police showed up with two tracking dogs but the guy jumped down and made his escape with the the dogs right behind.
They failed to catch the guy.
Now, My wrestling macho kicked in. and I said, “ If I had been here I would have done this and I would have done that! The bravado was amazing. Then in mid-speech, there was a scraping sound on the side of the house. “What’s that noise?” I asked.
She replied,”It sounds like the ladder you left leaning against the house last summer.’” Just like a women, she had to get that fact in! You guessed it, the peeping Tom returned and was moving the ladder to a window for more viewing. With all that pent up wrestling energy bursting to the top, I grabbed my First Alert flashlight and rushed out the front door in the freezing cold only wearing a tee shirt and khaki pants. I rounded the coroner of my house and there he was, the peeping Tom positioning the ladder under a window.
He saw me running at him like a man possessed. He dropped the 24 foot ladder with a loud crash. My past Army training kicked in as I screamed, “Halt!” He never halted and was running down my icy covered driveway. His feet went out from under him as I leaped though the air on him crashing my trusty First Alert flashlight on his head a few times.
He started to get up calling a variety of nasty names. I’ll kill you mother… (and I was not his mother!) The threat to kill me gave me a fearful adrenaline rush. I put a wrestling move on him called a cross face. He bit my arm! I repositioned the crossface so it was covering his mouth and nose. I let up long enough so he could get a little air and he threatened to kill me again. He struggled to get up and I put another wrestling move on him called a grapevine around his leg. He was going nowhere!
The inch or two of snow was inside my shirt but I didn’t dare let the guy up. He gasped, “Let me up and I’ll boogie out of here!” “You ain’t boogieing anywhere.” I responded.
My wife again called the police. I was writhing on the frozen ground with what seemed longer than three or four wrestling matches. With the siren whaling , the police car came flying down my driveway and stopped. I relaxed my hold on the peeping tom.
“Hello, Bill,” said the cop to the peeping Tom on the ground. And the guy on the ground said. “Hello Officer Stone.” You see, they knew each other! It so happened the peeping Tom was due to show up at jail the next day for some other crime.
That meant there was no paper work done on the peeping Tom crime, no story in the local papers, and I remained an anonymous hero. Later the town cop told me the peeping Tom couldn’t understand why he had lumps on his head. The cop told him that’s because the ladder landed on his head! By the way, I broke the flashlight. In fact, I told the story to the manufacturer and they sent me a new flashlight!
