Thursday, August 08, 2002

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Charlie Stitzer has a penchant for peeling off his clothes and, on warm summer nights, lolling sans garment in his State College-area back yard.

But he's quick to strap on the cloak of indignation when his right to bare everything comes under fire.

The retiree has rained down letters on prosecutors, court officials and even the neighbor lady who got him in the legal soup two summers ago by calling police, saying she was incensed at spotting the spindly 64-year-old bachelor in a state of undress three back yards away.

A Centre County judge gave him probation for indecent exposure; then the state Superior Court overturned that ruling, reasoning that as long as he wasn't all that visible, Stitzer's backyard nudity was his own affair.

The county court also found Stitzer guilty of harassment. It was ready to give him a monthlong respite in jail for mailing off letters to the offended neighbor, but on Monday, another three-judge Superior Court panel tossed out that conviction, too.

In this week's 2-1 decision, the judges said Stitzer "was trying to establish a dialogue with his longtime neighbor in an attempt to mediate their ongoing conflict. ... He used these letters as a forum to make peace."

Not that history will confuse Stitzer with St. Francis of Assisi, who probably never wore a thong to mow the grass and then doffed it when he sat in relative seclusion by his garage or worked in his garden.

In one letter, Stitzer followed his olive branch to Pamela Watkins, his neighbor in the village of Pleasant Gap, with the oblique warning, "what goes 'round comes 'round."

But the Superior Court judges agreed with State College defense lawyer Andrew Shubin, the sixth attorney the cantankerous Stitzer has hired, that the three letters Stitzer posted to Watkins were at most annoying, not harassing or threatening.

Still, Stitzer was wounded by his own pen.

In the wake of his conviction for indecent exposure, he mailed a letter to another neighbor, suggesting that tires stored on Watkins' property were breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

That was deemed a violation of a probation provision barring Stitzer from even indirect contact with Watkins, and in September, he was ordered off to jail for 160 days.

Now, all's back to normal in Stitzer's neighborhood. He's still mowing the lawn dressed like an extra for "Caligula," and he plans on slipping into the back yard and out of his togs when it suits him.

"Damn right," he said yesterday. "I can go out in the damn yard whenever I please."

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