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.