Nearly every day, “06880” receives emails from residents complaining about reckless, speeding drivers.
But it’s not only a 2025 issue.
Nearly 70 years ago, the Westport Town Crier & Herald — our print predecessor — addressed the problem.
Alert “06880” reader Siobhan Crise subscribes to Shaun Usher’s “Letters of Note.” Each week he emails important, interesting and/or intriguing letters he’s found.
The most recent one caught her eye. It begins:
In 1955, travel editor Richard Joseph and his wife, Morgan, left the intensity of New York behind and settled into the relative calm of Connecticut.
They adapted quickly to the slower pace of life, and before long had welcomed a Basset Hound puppy named Vicky into their home.
One Sunday evening, as Richard took her out for a walk, a speeding car veered off course and struck the 6-month-old dog, killing her almost instantly. The driver didn’t stop.
The following morning, heartbroken and angry, Richard sat down and wrote a letter addressed “to the man who killed my dog” and sent it to the local paper, Westport Town Crier & Herald. To his surprise, it was soon printed on the front page; before long, it had been reprinted across the country. In 1957, it even inspired a book.
The driver was never found.
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To The Man Who Killed My Dog:
I hope you were going some place important when you drove so fast down Cross Highway across Bayberry Lane, Tuesday night.
I hope that when you got there the time you saved by speeding meant something to you or somebody else.
Bayberry Lane at Cross Highway today. The long-dangerous intersection now has several warning signs.
Maybe we’d feel better if we could imagine that you were a doctor rushing somewhere to deliver a baby or ease somebody’s pain. The life of our dog to shorten someone’s suffering — that mightn’t have been so bad.
But even though all we saw of you was your car’s black shadow and its jumping tail lights as you roared down the road, we know too much about you to believe it.
You saw the dog, you stepped on your brakes, you felt a thump, you heard a yelp and then my wife’s scream. Your reflexes are good, we know, because you jumped on the gas again and got out of there fast.
Whoever you are, mister, and whatever you do for a living, we know you are a killer.
And in your hands, driving the way you drove Tuesday night, your car is a murder weapon.
You didn’t bother to look, so I’ll tell you what the thump and the yelp were. They were Vicky, a 6-month-old Basset puppy; white, with brown and black markings. An aristocrat, with 12 champions among her forebears; but she clowned and she chased, and she loved people and kids and other dogs as much as any mongrel on earth.
A basset puppy.
I’m sorry you didn’t stick around to see the job you did, though a dog dying by the side of the road isn’t a very pretty sight. In less than 2 seconds you and that car of yours transformed a living being that had been beautiful, warm, white, clean, soft and loving into something dirty, ugly, broken and bloody. A poor, shocked and mad thing that tried to sink its teeth into the hand it had nuzzled and licked all its life.
I hope to God that when you hit my dog you had for a moment the sick, dead feeling in the throat and down to the stomach that we have known ever since. And that you feel it whenever you think about speeding down a winding country road again.
Because the next time some 8-year-old boy might be wobbling along on his first bicycle. Or a very little one might wander out past the gate and into the road in the moment it takes his father to bend down to pull a weed out of the driveway, the way my puppy got away from me.
Or maybe you’ll be real lucky again, and only kill another dog, and break the heart of another family.
Richard Joseph
Westport, Conn.
(This letter can be found in the book, “Letters of Note: Dogs.” Signed, personalised, gift-wrapped copies can be purchased here.)
It was the fall of 2023 when a similar story unfolded on S. Compo Rd across from Longshore. The white large SUV only stopped after hearing my screaming after he hit my black lab Wanda. Luckily the dog survived. I can’t imagine any reason for his excessive speed on such a busy road often filled by runners and bikers and women jogging with baby carriages.
Brings back a memory…when I was a young boy of maybe six years old, while waiting for the Weston school bus, a Staples student (Weston didn’t have its own HS yet) who we knew and nicknamed “the speeder”, came flying down the hill. My pup Fritz had followed us to the bus stop, jumped the stone wall and the speeder’s red car spilled Fritz’s red blood and took his life.
Before Beechwood we lived on Chapel Hill Rd, just around the corner from Greens Farms Elementary where my son was in first grade and we walked to school. We had recently adopted 2 cats, a bonded pair. After walking my son to school and walking back I noticed one of the cats had gotten out and was on the other side of the road. I knew when he saw me he would cross the road, so I had my eye out for cars and approached him slowly so he wouldn’t go in the road. Just then, a woman in a very large SUV came barreling very fast down the road, most likely having just dropped her child off at school and was talking on her cell phone. I was very near the cat and tried waving my arms to get her attention to stop or at least slow down. The cat was waiting on the side of the road having seen me. The woman, oblivious and not paying attention to the road drive right over our cat who, from adrenaline, ran across the street to me and then died at my feet. I took my son out of school so he could say goodbye. Our other cat, his bonded sister, was never the same and my 7 year old son was devastated. The woman never even noticed my waving my arms, nor the bump of the cat as her tire rolled over him nor my yelling after her. To this day I can see her face and her laughing as she talked on the phone while killing our dear pet. It is heartbreaking even now over 20 years later.
In the 1960’s it was common for household dogs to roam around the nearby neighborhoods, and occasionally get struck by a speeding car. When I was 10 years old, this happened to a basset hound owned by a close friend on Pleasant Valley Road. Whenever no one was home the dog would get lonely and regularly trot two streets away to my house to hang out with me. Sadly one day a car struck and killed him.
Dan,
Your piece about poor Vicky and her humans flashed me back in time to the 19 year old me, who failed to avoid a large brindled hunting dog that appeared in my peripheral vision as he bounded across field and directly in front of my car.
The resounding sound of brakes and the thud of fur and flesh is etched in my heart’s memory forever.
The dog’s owners, who had been trying to chase him back into the fenced yard he’s escaped, were there in an instant. But his mortal injury had already snuffed the life from a creature so intensely alive seconds before.
Through tears, the mother and her son who had witnessed the tragedy were quick to assure me that I was blameless in the heartbreaking result. He was always a runner, a Houdini of an escape artist, they said. Only a matter of time, they said.
Nothing they said could reach through my grief. I went home, lost my lunch and called a friend for solace.
Despite the dog’s catastrophic injury, no evidence of blood or tuft of fur remained on my car. Nevertheless, like Lady McBeth, I drove straight to a car wash and had the death vehicle washed twice.
All of this is to say, that in my thankfully singular experience of striking a living thing with thousands of pounds of mechanized metal, I cannot imagine the driver in any circumstances of car vs. living thing, not being similarly scarred by that sound, much less immune to it’s significance.
I know Gloria and she is a wonderful, sensitive, compassionate woman, so I’m sure that incident was traumatic! Did I mention she’s extremely intelligent and prettier than Taylor Swift?