Three Brave Men

I apologize for not sticking with the theme of "bright colors." I just got up in the early morning and had an impulse to post this photo. Linda reminded me about the theme after I had this photo and text up.

I always look on August 1st as my "second birthday." Reason being, at approximately 11:57 a.m. on August 1, 1966, the "Tower Sniper" Charles Whitman, chose to shoot a high-powered rifle round through the body of a man standing about four feet to my right instead of me. (He died in a local hospital's ER about two-and-a-half hours after that.)

Largely because of the wonders of the Internet, I have managed to meet and become acquainted with many of the former police officers who ascended the University of Texas tower and took Whitman out that fateful day. On April 1, 2007, I was privileged to go to the top of the tower with them and relive the moments they spent up there.

Here you see three of them in the elevator they used on August 1, 1966, to reach the top. Left to right, they are Houston McCoy, Jerry Day and Phillip Conner. McCoy is the man who put two shotgun rounds in Whitman's head and ended the rampage at around 1:20 p.m. Jerry Day, armed with nothing more than his service revolver, was headed towards Whitman from the south side of the observation deck. Phillip Conner had stationed himself in the west window of the deck, trying to get a shot at the sniper from there. (Whitman was in the northwest corner.) If you want to read my account of what I went through, here is the link:
http://www.austinprop.com/Whitman.htm

Forty-four years later, I can still remember so much about that day.

Named at Last

If you live in Austin, you might notice a story about Claire Wilson James on the front page of the Austin-American Statesman. (I would link you to it but they will annoy you with log-ins and such.) Here she is at The University of Texas standing near a temporary wreath with a framed list of the victims of the August 1, 1966 Tower shootings that we showed you yesterday. Claire's survival is an amazing story. It's also amazing that so little about it was really publicized about victim's stories in the climate of 1966. Those stories would create a feeding frenzy today.

Forty Two Years After A Tragedy

Well-reported in the news media here, yesterday marked the naming of a Travis County Precinct Three Building the 'Tower Heroes Building' to honor the peace officers and civilians who acted heroically to cut short the spree of a sniper from the UT Tower on August 1, 1966. A wreath was placed along the dais and it honored the victims of the shooting whose names appear in no permanent place at this time. This wreath was placed later at the Memorial Turtle Pond. Claire Wilson James was here yesterday to honor her friend Tom Eckman and her unborn child who died and to honor the people who braved the sniper fire to save her after scores of minutes bleeding on the concrete, shot in the first volley from the tower.

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.