"The Reckoning" Texas Monthly - Survivor of the Shooting 8/1/1966

[BevoJoe]

http://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/the-reckoning/ MARCH/2016 An Article by Pamela Colloff

This is a good piece about a young 18 year old Coed who found her way into Charles Whitman's sights on the UT campus nearly 50 years ago, and how her life was changed forever....good read.

Some of you guys may have been on campus that day, some of us came years later. Local channels in Dallas broke programming and cut to the scene in Austin. A buddy of mine and me, watched the whole thing on TV that day. Even though I arrived at UT in the early-mid 70s, every time I walked across campus, I always looked up at the tower and had a strange feeling remembering the event.

In the fall of 1974, I came out of class, heard the Tower chime, looked up just as the last person to jump off the deck stepped off the edge.

 

[WorsterMan]

Very interesting article and good read for sure. A horrible day in UT history. Joe I cannot imagine you seeing someone jump off that deck - what an awful memory.

My recollections of that day are pretty limited. On Aug. 1st 1966 I was 12 years old and off at boys camp outside Florissant, Colorado. The camp was owned and run by native Texans and most of the campers were from Texas, so word of the shooting made it's way around camp pretty fast. I didn't see the TV coverage, hear radio news, nor see the newspapers and I was not in Texas to hear the personal conversations at the time. At camp we were all very shocked of course but pretty isolated from the event.

For years and years I always thought of that terrible day whenever I was on campus and in view of the tower.

 

[BevoJoe]

I was 12 (by 1 week) when the shooting happened. A friend of mine and I had just come in my house from playing "burnout" in the back yard and the news crew interrupted mid day programming to carry it live.

As far as the memory of the guy jumping off the tower, by the time I saw that I had seen much worse in my life. I had forgotten about the suicide jumper until I read the article.

 

[uisge beatha]

Tough but interesting read. Thanks for the link.

 

[Phil Elliott]

I just finished this. I can agree that it's sad what happened to this poor woman, and especially what happened to her unborn baby, but most of how her life has turned out is not due to Whitman's bullet, IMO. It's because she has chosen to live outside the "norm" of society. There is nothing wrong with that at all, it is her choice, of course. The story is written as if we should feel sorry for her that her life has turned out this way, but who is to say that living in a house trailer in Texarkana is somehow beneath us?

Because she was shot on campus, she now has some special insight into how we should not allow "campus carry"? She says that a campus is a "sacred place that must be protected." People like her who continue to believe that stopping lawful CCL holders from carrying their weapons on campus is going to somehow magically prevent the next tower shooting are out to lunch as I see it. In the intervening 50 years since Whitman's rampage, we have piled more and more restrictive gun laws on law-abiding citizens, and such mass-shootings have increased dramatically, and usually in so-called "gun free" zones. To think that preventing lawful carry of a concealed handgun on campus is going to make you safer is ignoring reality so you can feel good about yourself.

 

[BevoJoe]

Phil: I liked the bit about the guys that ran to their dorm rooms or vehicles and grabbed their deer rifles to return fire.

The rest of her life turned out exactly as she lived it. PTSD wasn't that well known back then, but she probably had a bad case of it that went untreated.

 

[Phil Elliott]

Phil: I liked the bit about the guys that ran to their dorm rooms or vehicles and grabbed their deer rifles to return fire.

This is a long forgotten or never-known fact that I always point out to folks to want a gun-free campus. When the police showed up in 8/1/66, they brought pistols and shotguns, which were totally ineffective. It was students who used the deer rifles they had in their dorms that held Whitman at bay and made him shoot only thru the downspouts, which drastically reduced his available targets. The students in many cases turned the rifles over to policemen so they could continue the defense against Whitman.

 

[Crockett]

P

Because she was shot on campus, she now has some special insight into how we should not allow "campus carry"? She says that a campus is a "sacred place that must be protected." People like her who continue to believe that stopping lawful CCL holders from carrying their weapons on campus is going to somehow magically prevent the next tower shooting are out to lunch as I see it. In the intervening 50 years since Whitman's rampage, we have piled more and more restrictive gun laws on law-abiding citizens, and such mass-shootings have increased dramatically, and usually in so-called "gun free" zones. To think that preventing lawful carry of a concealed handgun on campus is going to make you safer is ignoring reality so you can feel good about yourself.

It's a comic ritual. People look at the evidence, conduct studies and then after "analysis" tell you that it confirms what they believed before they looked at any evidence. On the fitness tread there is a great discussion of the "scientific studies" that led the widespread recommendation of low fat, high carb diets, a disastrous 30 year rabbit trail many have followed. Ironically, the published studies recommending the low fat diet contained contrarian evidence that the scientist failed to consider during their analysis.