The Night of the Teen-Ager

It was a nice-looking group. The men wore quiet ties and dark, well-fitting suits; the women, mostly hatless and coifed for the occasion, were in simple knits or tweeds, just the thing for the suburbs--even an appearance in court. These were the parents whose arrest for violation of a Connecticut statute against serving liquor to minors has sent a shock wave of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I across the country (TIME, Oct. 2).

The evening of last June 22 in Darien, Conn., had seemed like many another summer night. A vice president of the Johns-Manville Corp., Francis E. Dutcher, and his wife gave a dinner party for their debutante daughter Nancy. Then there was a dance for about 250 youngsters under a tent on the spacious grounds of Psychiatrist George S. Hughes and his wife, who were giving it with their friends, the William F. Otterstroms (he is general auditor of the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp.) and the Dudley Felts (he is a consulting engineer), in honor of the families' three debutante daughters. The trouble was that after the parties, 17-year-old Nancy Hitchings was killed in an automobile accident, and an indignant Circuit Court judge, Rodney S. Eielson, haled the parents into court.

The parents did not look as if they thought they were going to jail. They chatted quietly among themselves in the front of the courtroom, a comely group that under other circumstances might have been waiting for an admissions-committee meeting at the country club to get under way.

Behind them sat the other defendants: Science Teacher Carlton Josselyn, who had been earning extra money as a bartender, two part-time waiters, and the caterers, Mrs. Helen Bussey, 56, and Mrs. Emily Agnes Peterson, 51. For these two ladies there was a shocking surprise: the prosecuting attorney charged them with an additional count of conspiracy on the ground that they had provided the bartenders. The case against the parents and caterers was postponed for a week.

Unrecognized. But the next day, Judge Eielson resumed the trial of Michael Valentine Smith, just turned 19, charged with reckless driving and negligent homicide.

Michael's defense, conducted by natty Lawyer Arthur ("Dart") O'Keefe Jr., who drives a Rolls-Royce and affects bowler hats and pin-stripe suits, is that he was just too drunk to have been driving Mrs. Hitchings' 1964 Ford station wagon at the time of the accident, and that Nancy herself must have been in the driver's seat. He claims to remember nothing of what happened that night.

"Michael was so drunk he didn't recognize me when I talked to him," testified William Alpert, 20, Michael's friend and fellow student at a three-year-old local junior college called Norwalk Community College. Alpert also testified that Nancy Hitchings, too, was "intoxicated to the degree that she kept asking me to dance. She would not have done that normally because she was a lady and would not have been so aggressive."

A witness testified that Michael had not been driving when they left the Hughes party at 2:30 a.m.; Nancy's date, Jim Olsen, had been at the wheel, but they had dropped Olsen off at his house and then gone on--where, Michael does not remember. An hour later, and about 20 minutes before the accident, a police officer and a teen-ager both testified, they saw Michael driving the Hitchings car in the center of town.

Blood & Holes. Most of Michael's trial turned out to be a battle of accident experts. Nancy's father, George Hitchings, paid $300 a day for the testimony of Alfred Moseley, a nationally recognized authority, who claims to have investigated more than 15,000 automobile accidents. Moseley contended that Michael must have been driving because 1) Nancy's blood was found on the right side of the car roof; 2) there was a hole in the rubber floor mat on the passenger's side, which he claimed was made by one of her high heels on impact. The car, he said, had skidded, gone through 72 feet of hedge, hit a tree and turned over once, catapulting Michael across the front seat and through the open right door. Defense Lawyer O'Keefe, on the other hand, called an accident expert of his own to testify that the car had not turned over at all, and that Michael must have been on the passenger's side to have gone out the right door. The court went outside to study the crushed and battered car, in which Nancy's body had been found.

George Hitchings, who is a vice president of American Airlines, took the stand to admit that his daughter Nancy had recently complained of a couple of blackouts lasting a minute or more, but that after visiting two doctors, including Psychiatrist Hughes, nothing had been found to be wrong. Michael, slender and sullenly handsome, puffed a cigarillo during a recess and expressed the hope to reporters that "now at least parents will realize they have to do something about this problem of teen-age drinking." His widowed mother, a secretary for CBS in Stamford, sat behind him through out the trial, neat and archetypically suburban in a grey wool suit.

Vodka on the School Bus. On the stand, Michael testified that he remembered arriving at the Dutchers' for dinner (where he was Nancy Dutcher's date "and acted as co-host"), drinking and chatting for about 45 minutes before dinner, arriving at the Hughes's coming-out party about 9:45 p.m., going through the receiving line, and heading for the tent, where there was dancing and two bars--one for hard liquor and one for soft drinks. About the only thing Michael remembered of the party was kissing a girl named Cindy Whelan on the dance floor and getting pushed around for it by her date. He did not recall being with Nancy Hitchings at any time that night, attributing his loss of memory chiefly to the concussion he had suffered in the accident which left him unconscious for two and a half days.

All through the trial, over a hundred dinner tables, Darien parents kept protesting that Darien was no different from any other high-tax suburb on the flanks of a hundred other U.S. cities. But even to some of the inhabitants, Darien seemed wilder than most. In the weekly Darien Review, Episcopal Rector William C. Bartlett described the town as a place "where ninth-graders drink vodka on the school bus." Early this year an entrepreneur opened a teen-age nightclub that had dancing but only soft drinks. It failed. "The kids around here just won't go to a place where they can't drink," complained the owner. Where do they go? Either to private parties or across the line to New York, where the drinking age is only 18.

At week's end, the verdict on the trial was still not in; nor was the verdict on Darien. But Judge Eielson had his own views: "I don't think things are the way they should be in a community," he said, "where the majority of 250 youngsters are drunk by the end of the evening--think what a percentage of the families in Darien that figure represents--where teen-agers can force parents to reopen the bar at 12:30 in the morning, and where it seems that almost all of those kids left the party with a different date than they started with."

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