It’s a bit of a stretch for me to connect this to Purse Stories, but in a crazy way it IS about purses!

Circa 1957: For about a year in the mid-fifties, our part of town had some very peculiar excitement. Reports of a naked burglar sneaking into homes and stealing purses were rumored. People thought he was in his 30’s or 40’s and said he was a fast runner (remember: this was before the running craze took hold). As far as I know, however, nobody ever saw his face - just his back side as he ran away buck naked.

One evening after dark, my little brother and his friend Claude came barging through the door, laughing hysterically, and giggling the way twelve year old boys do .... finally, they collected themselves enough to tell about seeing a guy carrying a bundle and running up 3rd Street only wearing sneakers - naked! - and that they’d tried to chase him but were laughing too hard! Another time we heard about his burgling a house during a Christmas party. He was spotted taking purses that guests had laid alongside their coats in the bedroom. Again in the buff! Despite the dragnet, with police swarming the neighborhood and several parks nearby, the guy slipped past and was not caught. Occasionally we’d hear more about him, and speculation abounded: who could this guy be? Everyone had a theory, but no official announcement was ever made. Eventually these nighttime occurrences ceased.

Circa 1985: It was many years later, say in the mid-80’s, when I visited an old family friend. As we stood in the driveway admiring her daylilies, she told me the story of an event that had occurred only a year before (1984). She’d been on her hands and knees dividing daylilies when her eye was caught by something just beyond the edge of the house. (As explanation, I should tell you that the house stood several feet off the ground, on piers, allowing for crawl space. Although it was skirted all around, there was a gap in the skirting near the driveway, most likely left open for access by repairmen.) Finally she was able to see into the dim interior and realized that a bunch of stuff lay on the ground, just out of reach. When she raked-out the first pieces, she called the police.

There were dozens of purses!

Among them were those reported stolen from the Christmas party thirty years before. Police theorized that the burglar had lived somewhere nearby, and with no fences around, this driveway made for a straight shot from one street to the next. The gap in the foundation proved a simple depository, where the cache was completely hidden when one stood or walked nearby.

For a while, in an otherwise innocent time, the Naked Burglar was fodder for gossip and lots of speculation, but we never discovered who it was that stole all those purses.