Memories of the Whitman shooting
I was there watching it from the NE corner of 21st & Whitis (the Dobie Mall building and the Ransom Center hadn't been built yet), which was a small parking lot at the time. The roomie & I walked out there after eating lunch in the Holiday House which fronted on the Drag. While eating, we had seen the ambulances howling up the street & wondered what was going on.
We heard a few "booms", then somebody yelled at us to get down...that "they" were shooting people from the Tower. Crouching behind a car, we could clearly see Whitman leaning over the parapet taking aim & firing downwards. Most of the time it was a loud "boom", but once in a while we heard a rapid "pop pop pop" - when he used his smaller M1 carbine. We could see the ricochets knocking sprays of stone off the parapet wall.
After a short while we could hear lots of return gunfire coming from nearby buildings & apartments. Hundreds of rounds were going off, so it sounded like a big firefight - similar to the 'Nam newsclips on tv. That's when he ducked down behind the wall and started shooting through the drain spouts. A small Cessna plane made a pass around the Tower, but veered off sharply - that's when Whitman fired at it (supposedly hitting it once).
This went on for a while longer, while some of us speculated that the shooter (s) would jump off the Tower to end it. Then all of a sudden we saw a white flag being waved above the wall. Like a bunch of idiots, hundreds of people, including us, rushed up to the Mall. By the time we got there, the dead & wounded had been removed by brave individuals under fire. There were numerous pools of blood all over the area, and the crowd meticulously avoided stepping in them. Next to the ground floor exit in the west side of the Tower the crowd was pretty thick. Some random sights there: A Daily Texan reporter with his notepad, press card...wearing a steel army helmet...a Texas Ranger holding upright a Thompson submachine gun...a student sitting up on the wall who shouted "Let's hang him when they bring him out" (didn't know he was dead at the time). Unknown to us, the bodies from the Tower were removed from the east entrance,
After an hour or so, there wasn't much to gawk at, and the stunned crowd thinned out, so we went back to our apartment and turned on our tv to watch the news reports. That's when we heard the well-known local news anchor, Paul Bolton, choke up when his grandson's name was read from the list of the dead. Remembering that personal tragedy still brings tears to my eyes. That evening we went down to a packed Scholz's and got drunk.
Afterwards there were no public memorial services, nobody rushed in counselors, no calls for gun bans....no nuthin'.
I was there watching it from the NE corner of 21st & Whitis (the Dobie Mall building and the Ransom Center hadn't been built yet), which was a small parking lot at the time. The roomie & I walked out there after eating lunch in the Holiday House which fronted on the Drag. While eating, we had seen the ambulances howling up the street & wondered what was going on.
We heard a few "booms", then somebody yelled at us to get down...that "they" were shooting people from the Tower. Crouching behind a car, we could clearly see Whitman leaning over the parapet taking aim & firing downwards. Most of the time it was a loud "boom", but once in a while we heard a rapid "pop pop pop" - when he used his smaller M1 carbine. We could see the ricochets knocking sprays of stone off the parapet wall.
After a short while we could hear lots of return gunfire coming from nearby buildings & apartments. Hundreds of rounds were going off, so it sounded like a big firefight - similar to the 'Nam newsclips on tv. That's when he ducked down behind the wall and started shooting through the drain spouts. A small Cessna plane made a pass around the Tower, but veered off sharply - that's when Whitman fired at it (supposedly hitting it once).
This went on for a while longer, while some of us speculated that the shooter (s) would jump off the Tower to end it. Then all of a sudden we saw a white flag being waved above the wall. Like a bunch of idiots, hundreds of people, including us, rushed up to the Mall. By the time we got there, the dead & wounded had been removed by brave individuals under fire. There were numerous pools of blood all over the area, and the crowd meticulously avoided stepping in them. Next to the ground floor exit in the west side of the Tower the crowd was pretty thick. Some random sights there: A Daily Texan reporter with his notepad, press card...wearing a steel army helmet...a Texas Ranger holding upright a Thompson submachine gun...a student sitting up on the wall who shouted "Let's hang him when they bring him out" (didn't know he was dead at the time). Unknown to us, the bodies from the Tower were removed from the east entrance,
After an hour or so, there wasn't much to gawk at, and the stunned crowd thinned out, so we went back to our apartment and turned on our tv to watch the news reports. That's when we heard the well-known local news anchor, Paul Bolton, choke up when his grandson's name was read from the list of the dead. Remembering that personal tragedy still brings tears to my eyes. That evening we went down to a packed Scholz's and got drunk.
Afterwards there were no public memorial services, nobody rushed in counselors, no calls for gun bans....no nuthin'.
