Darien's Dolce Vita

"One of the most forthright witnesses have ever encountered," is the way Circuit Judge Rodney S. Eielson described William G. Alpert, 20, of Darien, Conn., at last month's trial and conviction of 19-year-old Michael Smith for negligent homicide in the car-crash death of Nancy Hitchings. Alpert, Smith's chum at Norwalk Community College, a night school, had volunteered vivid descriptions of staggering drunkenness at the debutante party that preceded the fatal accident. He himself did not drink, said Alpert, airily explaining: "I have no need to dull my senses."

Not with alcohol. Last week Alpert was arrested for the possession of narcotics. When Norwalk police stopped his blue 1958 Volkswagen, they found 1 1/2 oz. of marijuana hidden where the batteries should be in a 3-in. flashlight in the glove compartment. And in his pocket was a tin tobacco box containing several marijuana cigarettes.

Dark Doubts. Alpert, according to the police, admitted that he had been using marijuana for about a year, and that he also kept his senses spinning by sniffing model-airplane glue and eating "goofballs" (barbiturates) and hallucinogenic peyote. Arrested in the car with him, after admitting he knew about the presence of the drugs, was another pal of Michael Smith's--18-year-old Martin Greig, who is currently estranged from his family and living with Michael. In two earlier arrests, six other Fairfield County youths had been picked up on narcotics charges--two of them sons of former mayors of Norwalk and Stamford.

Nobody was happy about the new element that had been added to the situation: the commuter community of Darien seemed to the outside world like more of a Peyton Place than ever (Darien real-estate men report indications that sales of houses are down), and dark doubts are shadowing the residents themselves. "Parents are more suspicious of their kids," said one Darien minister last week.

Part of New York. Darien's head shakers shook their heads still harder, murmuring among themselves about all the new people crowding in--supervisors from nearby factories, onthemove executives transferred to New York from all over the country--and about the dangers of letting one's children go to public school and take up with youngsters whose parents one does not know and is not likely to.

Darien's high school is a good one, and the mingling there of children from varied social stratifications is generally thought to be working out well for all concerned. The trouble is that in a school of 1,018 pupils so near New York there is bound to be a fast set of hard-shell hippies like Alpert who seem utterly glamorous to more sheltered types. As one Darien mother sighed last week: "It's hopeless. We're just nothing but a part of New York--that's all it is."

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