Note: This is the story of what happened to me over thirty five years ago. Since the school is still in business I have changed its name and done my best to disguise its location. I doubt that this sort of thing still occurs there, but I have no way of knowing for sure. I have also changed the names of the participants, because it's unlikely any of these women would want their children, or grandchildren in some cases, to know everything they did as teenagers. After all, I still get Christmas cards from some of them.
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I went to an expensive university on a partial scholarship that didn't pay all the bills, so I had to work to make up the difference. I worked dawn-to-dusk on a construction project during the summer between high school and college and earned a big chunk of what I needed. I had to find a part-time job during the school year to earn the rest, but the university's placement office didn't have any jobs above minimum wage. My experience on the construction job, plus the years that I worked after school at a hardware store, helped me land a job as a handy-man. I would have preferred something closer to the university campus but there was regular bus service to get across town, so I was able to save some money by not needing a car.
My employer was the Southside Academy, a small private college for girls. It was a boarding school that offered freshman and sophomore level classes in an environment that was more personal than at the huge university I attended. I was one of only eight men on the staff. There were two male professors on the faculty, plus a night watchman, a gardener and his assistant, and two maintenance men who worked on weekdays. I lived in a small room in the basement of the administration building and took my meals in a dining room for non-faculty staff members.
My job didn't have any set responsibilities. I just had to be there in case something broke down and had to be repaired on short notice. The evenings were usually fairly quiet, giving me plenty of time to study. The weekends weren't quite as slow, since it seemed like everything that broke did so on a Saturday or a Sunday.
When I wasn't fixing something or studying, I was watching the girls. Being a leg-man, I had plenty to watch, too. About 150 girls were enrolled at Southside, all from well-to-do families. And there wasn't a black, an Asian or a Hispanic among them (after all, it was still the early seventies). There weren't many fat girls, either. Athletics and physical fitness were stressed at the school, and just about every student was a member of one or more sports teams. The tennis team, the gymnastics team, the swimming team and the diving team were competitive on the junior college level, but the girls also played interscholastic volleyball and softball. The result was a campus full of fit, attractive female bodies.
Normal attire for the students was a uniform of sorts consisting of a white blouse and a skirt, which could be any solid, dark color. A school sweater or blazer was added on cooler days, and the girls were allowed to express their individuality with a scarf or shoes of their choice. The Academy dress code did not permit pants or slacks, and even the women on the faculty were required to wear skirts or dresses. Short skirts were fashionable, so the hemlines were several inches above the knee. I liked it best when the women and girls wore knee high boots with their short skirts, which they often did. (Gas was cheap, too, so life was good.)
I had just turned eighteen when I started working at Southside and, although I wasn't a virgin, I was eager to expand my sexual horizons. Socializing with the students was discouraged, of course, but all of them were of legal age, so I considered them to be fair game. I set about getting to know them, beginning with their names. Privacy laws were not as important in those days, so getting my hands on a roster was easy; there were copies of the student directory in most of the offices, including mine. Then I got a yearbook from the previous semester and started to put names to faces, concentrating my efforts on the best looking of them. The Academy's athletic events were an especially good place to watch the girls, because the coaches frequently asked me to be there to fix broken equipment on short notice. I especially liked the gymnastics and swim meets, for obvious reasons. I love a form-fitting leotard or Speedo, but the tight micro-shorts the volleyball players wore were also quite revealing.
A few of the two dozen women on the faculty were nice-looking, too, including the President. Everyone called her "Dr. B" since she her multi-syllabic last name was hard to pronounce. Too bad all forty-year-old women didn't look that good. She was a well-endowed brunette and I always watched her when she was around since she usually wore high heels that showed off her superb legs. In fact, on my second evening on the job, I looked out the window from the basement workshop and saw up her dress as she spoke to one of the professors. Under her skirt she wore stockings and garters, and I watched her from then on, hoping to get another glimpse like that first one.
Then, late in my first month on the job, I learned something that made my life very interesting: Southside Academy used corporal punishment to discipline their students. I learned of this one weekend when I saw three members of the staff leading a girl to Room Six. Room Six was at the opposite end of the hall in the basement of the admin building where my workshop and sleeping area was. Curious, I went down the hall and listened at the locked door. The shrieks and cries I heard told me a very serious spanking was in progress. The sound of leather on bare flesh was unmistakable.
Not wanting to be discovered, I left before it was over. I went to check out Room Six after they were gone but I discovered that I didn't have a key for that lock. In fact, not counting the girls' dorm rooms, Room Six was the only door on campus that I couldn't open with my master key. After listening to two similar spankings, I was determined to learn more.
By listening discreetly and asking just a few questions I learned that, sometime during their first month as a student, every freshman was taken to Room Six to witness the punishment of an older girl. It was supposed to impress upon their young minds the consequences of breaking the rules. Among the students, Room Six was the most dreaded place on campus. Some of them called it the Dungeon, the Torture Chamber, the Punishment Room or the Whipping Post, but most everyone usually just referred to it by its room number.
Punishments usually took place in the evening on weekdays, and in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. That way the student had at least one night to recover before classes began the next day. The offender had to strip totally naked before she was shackled in position. A professor or other staff member would administer the punishment with some kind of a leather whip, and the school nurse was always there to keep an eye on things. The punishment strokes were not counted. The event was timed, usually by Dr. B, but sometimes by one of the school secretaries or by Dean Adams (Dr. B's assistant). Punishments lasted from as few as one minute to as many as five minutes and usually, but not always, resulted in uncontrollable crying by the miscreant.
Having learned all I could and seeing the regularity with which Room Six was put to use, I set about finding a way to observe the proceedings. Planting a camera was out for a variety of reasons: I didn't have that kind of money, I couldn't get into the room, and the TV cameras of the day were way too big to be easily concealed. Room Five, next door, was full of air conditioning and heating equipment but drilling or cutting a peephole in the concrete wall was impracticable, as well as far too obvious.
The ventilation system was my answer, but it was going to take some work to modify one of the ducts as a peephole. I needed an excuse to work in there, so early on a Saturday morning I put some road kill in one of the ventilation ducts. The call for maintenance boomed over the PA system after lunch. With Evelyn, Dr. B's secretary, following me around the building, I traced the odor to Room 5 and then told her that I could see a dead animal in the duct work. I told her I would have to dismantle a few things to remove the corpse and clean up the blood and guts, and that was all she wanted to know. She went off to report to Dr. B, leaving me alone to put my plan into effect.
Altering the metal duct work so I could see the interior of Room Six took less time than I thought. I cut a hole through the bottom of one of the air registers and fabricated a hinged panel to cover the hole. The register was fourteen inches wide and the grill that covered it would prevent anyone in Room Six from seeing my face on the other side. The grill was about eight feet above the floor so I had to come up with something to stand on. Anything permanent was out of the question since I didn't want to leave any evidence of my voyeurism. I solved the problem by building a small platform that I could hook onto one of the sturdy electrical conduits that were attached to the wall. The platform was large enough for me to stand on but small enough to hide under an air handler when I wasn't using it.
When I finished my spy hole I rearranged the boxes and furniture stored in Room 4. I wanted to be able to pass unobserved from my workshop in Room 3 to my spy-hole in Room 5, and I wanted my perch to be concealed from the door to the hallway. That door was kept locked, but I knew I had to be careful.
The next morning, a Sunday, my preparations paid off in a big way. I had finished breakfast and was on my way to the workshop when I saw some women go into Room Six and close the door behind them. Quickly but quietly, I made my way to Room 5 and climbed onto my platform. I got my head into the air duct in time to watch Rebecca, a pretty brunette, removing her bra. Evidently she had been on a date the night before and she had stayed out past curfew.
