Forever Tied to Austin and Each Other

Almost forty-two years ago a man killed his wife and mother and made his way to the top of the UT Tower, killing people on the way, and took up a siege of an area for blocks around. FFP stepped out of a drug store on the Drag (as Guadalupe is called by UT area denizens) to see what the commotion was and heard a shot whiz past his ear. He thinks that it was the bullet that killed someone to his right. He thinks he was partly shielded from the sniper's view. He rushed back inside the refuge of the store. At that point, the woman in the center of this picture, Claire, was already lying on the South Mall. Next to her was her boyfriend, dead. She was struck in the abdomen and her unborn baby died. She is more than likely the first person shot that day. (She is a wonderful and humble woman who seems to demure that awful distinction with a "maybe I just wanted to have been the first.") On the left in this picture is Toby Hamilton. He wasn't on campus that day. He was in West Austin, a twelve-year-old kid doing what kids do and he heard about the shootings on the radio and saw puffs of smoke on the Tower deck. What he didn't know at that moment was that it was his scoutmaster shooting at people. And that the two young college students who had stayed with him and looked after him while his parents made a trip a few weeks before were lying on the mall, one dead and one severely wounded.

In 1966, armies of counselors didn't show up in Austin to get the victims, near victims, law enforcement officers and victims' family and friends through this cataclysmic event in their lives. Toby attended the funeral of the man (a boy himself really) he had looked up to that summer. He was so upset that his parents didn't let him visit Claire whose life was saved but who spent months in the hospital. She tried to pay off the bill but isn't sure she ever did. School was suspended for one day. Flags flew at half mast for a week. In 1999, a turtle pond was built in a tucked away spot north of the Tower to honor the victims. Some time later a small plaque was added, identifying the purpose but without naming the victims.

Informally, people affected have been coming together to heal. When I took this picture, Claire and Toby had seen each other for the first time in forty-two years a few hours before. FFP and Toby have been meeting and talking with the officers and citizens who worked to stop the shooter. FFP has worked tirelessly to honor those folks with a plaque on a county building that will be named the "Tower Heroes" building.

A while after this picture was taken, we took Claire to the pond, which she'd never seen. It was full of cute turtles. Claire said she finally felt her baby was at rest.

UT Tower

This is a view of the UT tower from an odd place: the terrace of the President's office. We got a Heritage Society Tour in 2006 and I shot this picture.

I'm racking my brain for tomorrow's theme day: "What do people think of when they think of your city." It's TOO many things, really. And, I'm sort of afraid most people don't think of what I'd like them to think! But mostly it's just that there are too many things: the University, the Capitol, music, the hills and lakes. Ah, well, tomorrow I will pick something that screams Austin to me. Or FFP will. And that will be that. Maybe the UT Tower is what people think of. Some may think of Whitman up there over forty years ago taking potshots at citizens and students like FFP. But I don't think I'll show the tower tomorrow.

One Fateful Day

This is a photo I took last night at the Austin City Council meeting in City Hall.

Here you see Austin Mayor Will Wynn presenting a thanks proclamation to Houston McCoy, the man who actually fired the shotgun blasts that killed the UT Tower Sniper Charles Whitman on August 1, 1966. It's a long, strange story how Houston and some of his colleagues on that fateful day (who were also there last night), have been denied coverage in the news media since that date.

But that's way beyond the scope of this forum. Forrest has his version of the day on his web journal, here.

All McCoy's living colleagues save one and relatives of the rest were there--including the UT employees who participated in helping the officers gain access to the Tower through the tunnel system and then operated the elevators to get them up there. Also, there was a representative from the UT Co-op accepting the award for Alan Crum, the Co-op Security Manager who went on top of the Tower with the officers.

The lady in the background looking up at Houston is the widow of George Shepard, one of the officers who was in the waiting area of the observation deck and was preparing to go out to help his colleagues while the confrontation took place.

Houston's daughter Monika was the driving force in making this ceremony happen.

If the shooting had taken place this summer, the media would have been exploring it from every angle, getting to the bottom of every person's story or, at least, repeating the same sound bites from some for weeks. Not so in 1966 although a Life Magazine did show the tower through the bullet hole in a window on the cover and it was the lead story on the national newscasts that night. But people went back to their lives and studies and jobs. There was no memorial to the victims until 1996 (a small pond north of the tower was created) and then it had no plaque until more recently. Little money was collected to help the victims and I don't think anyone was sued.

Remembering a Horrible Day

August 1, 1966 was one of the those Austin days when there isn't a cloud in the sky and the heat seizes your skin and blasts through to your bones. I was a 20-year-old junior at The University of Texas, taking two courses in summer school. At 11:55 a.m. I had just gotten through having lunch with two of my Longhorn Band pals at Renfro's Drug Store across from campus and we were paying for our burgers. The cashier warned us that "a guy is out there shooting a gun." We blew her off and went outside anyway.

We stood there for a minute or so, trying to figure out what was happening and then I decided to go on to class. As I turned to my right, it was like a giant invisible hand pushed me back and I stood rooted to the sidewalk, feeling strangely queasy for some reason. About ten seconds later, a rifle shot whizzed past my right ear and hit a man -- a 38-year-old with six kids to support -- standing four feet from me. He died two hours later at a local hospital.

That of course, was the opening phase of the Charles Whitman siege. (If you want to read more, go here.)

Forty-one years later, about forty people, myself included, gathered at the small memorial The University of Texas finally erected in 1999, just north of the Tower, to remember the 16 dead and 31 wounded from that day. (The lack of memorial recognition about the incident by UT until 33 years later is another story.)

This was the first time ALL the brave officers who participated in subduing Whitman that day have been recognized and several of them, including one widow, were there to talk, remember, befriend each other, and try to heal. (There are a lot of side stories here that go way beyond what I should put on this forum.)

This photo I happened to take is especially meaningful. The two pretty ladies in the foreground are the daughter and granddaughter of Austin Police Officer Billy Speed, the only law enforcement officer killed during the rampage. Becky, the daughter, was all of 18 months old that fateful day. She never got to know her dad. Billy had been talking that morning about wanting to get out of police work and how he'd like to start his own photography business.

The children swinging in the tree are grandkids of Houston McCoy, the man who actually shot and killed Whitman, but has never been given proper credit for it in the news media. (A very long story, not appropriate for this forum.)

Somehow, this photo said a lot to me-- about the living and the dead.

Whitman's View--The Day I Almost Died

I shot this photograph on April 1st, 2007 from the west side of The University of Texas Tower's observation deck. This was the first time I had visited the deck since prior to August 1st, 1966, the day sniper Charles Whitman rained down a withering fire of bullets from this vantage point. Thanks to some connections I have made, I was allowed to go up to the deck on April 1st this year along with some former Austin police officers who were on the tower in 1966. They all participated in the elimination of Whitman.

What you see here is the middle of the 2300 block of Guadalupe Street which is known as "The Drag" to Austinites. It is the main retail/restaurant district for The University of Texas at Austin, defining the western border of the campus.

The white air conditioning unit on the roof in the middle of this photograph probably saved my life on August 1st, 1966. At around 11:55 a.m., along with two of my Longhorn Band friends, I was standing on the sidewalk just under the now-existing black sign with white letters that reads "Wish." I have drawn a crude oval showing our approximate 1966 location. As a note of historical accuracy, in 1966, the entire ground level area under the signs Wish, Austin's Pizza and Sprint was one large store/soda fountain-cafe called Renfro's Rexall Drug Store. That is where I met my pals every school day that semester for lunch at 11:25. The cashier had told us "somebody's shooting a gun out there," but we couldn't comprehend what she meant and we toddled right on out to the sidewalk in front of the store. (This was 1966, after all.)

Whitman may have considered us for targets, since he could have probably seen our heads over the ac unit. But he probably could not have seen our bodies and at that point in the rampage, he was aiming for midsections. Instead, he chose to shoot a 38 year-old military veteran named Harry Walchuk, who was standing in the door of a narrow newsstand that was located just to the south of us. (In this photograph, it is where you see a yellowish building's north edge and a black and white striped awning above it.) The newsstand closed many years ago and the building was expanded to the north to encompass its real estate.

I have revisited this sequence of events in my mind just about every day since then.