Remembering the Tower Shootings, Fifty Years Later
special to Lone Star Literary Life by Dave Parsons, 2011 Poet Laureate of Texas
It seemed like any predictable first of August in Austin, Texas: sunny and hot. I left my summer class in European History in the General Academics Building next to the University of Texas Tower forty minutes before the day would suddenly become infamous in the minds and hearts of the citizens of the United States: walking directly under and by the Tower to my car.
After checking in at my lifeguard job at Barton Springs, I went to legendary Scholz Garten for their 100th anniversary (and nickel beer), where I joined the crowded garden with my six-pack of Lone Star, as they had run out of tap beer at 10 am. With my fellow revelers, we were witnesses of the firefight, at that time, fully in view from the biergarten.
Since that day, a building has been erected next to Scholz’s, blocking out the full view of the Tower. But on that day our crowd could see the puffs of smoke of the sniper and the small impacts of the fire from people with rifles that the police had publicly asked to shoot at the top of the tower to suppress gunman Charles Whitman’s fire — since the Austin police at that time had only shotguns and pistols.
It was only when we heard on the transistor radios several in the crowd had, that a linesman had been shot off a utility pole about the same distance from the tower as we were, that we realized our own vulnerability. You could see everyone doing the math in their heads, thinking, if we could see his perch, then he could see the garden and he had just shot someone at the same distance.
With this news, everyone either hurriedly left, nervously went inside, or dove under the concrete tables, as I did, following a girl holding what was left of her six-pack. I remember peeking out every few minutes to get a glimpse of the Tower. As we were running out of beer, someone came out of the back door and proclaimed that it was over, and Whitman had been killed by an Austin policeman.
I learned later that one of the students and a promising pianist, Carla Sue Wheeler, a neighbor of mine, had been shot in the hand. When I think of her and the other victims, fourteen fatalities and thirty-two wounded, I am reminded of the lasting impact on not only their lives, but the many adjacent lives of their friends and families. And I remember that we that we witnesses naïvely thought the random shooting was a bizarre anomaly in our country’s history. We would have been aghast if we knew what was to follow, up to this very year.
I composed the poem “Austin Fire” with the basic details of my day, and it is included in my collections Reaching For Longer Water (Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press Consortium) and Far Out: Poems of the 60s (Wings Press), both collections released this spring.
Reading about the tower shootings
Tower Sniper: The Terror of American’s First Active Shooter on Campus
Monte Akers, Nathan Akers, and Roger Friedman, Ph.D
John M. Hardy Publishers, 2016
Hardcover, 978-0-9903714-3-4, $24.95
376 pages, 72 Photos
On August 1, 1966, University of Texas engineering student Charles Whitman went to the top of the 307-foot campus tower. Over the next 96 minutes he shot and killed 15 people and wounded 31. Tower Sniper: The Terror of America’s First Campus Active Shooter, by Monte Akers, Nathan Akers, and Dr. Roger Friedman, explores the history and personal experience of this seminal tragedy, enriches public memory, and advances our understanding of mass shootings that continue to haunt America.
The authors vigilantly examine the details leading up to the event, the shootings, and their half-century legacy in stark detail. In doing so the authors correct various myths that have been part of the public narrative for decades, such as a brain tumor having motivated Whitman’s actions, that he intentionally targeted certain victims, and that he attempted to make it appear that multiple snipers were active. Witness interviews, examination of primary sources, and handwriting analysis reveal information overlooked until now, including the factors that actually contributed to Whitman’s predatory behavior and how his death and autopsy were mishandled.
A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders
by Gary M. Lavergne
978-1574410297, 324 pages
University of North Texas Press, 1997
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas Tower and committed what was then the largest simultaneous mass murder in American history. He gunned down forty-five people inside and around the Tower before he was killed by two Austin police officers. In addition to promoting the rise of S.W.A.T. teams to respond to future crises, the murders spawned debates over issues which still plague America today: domestic violence, child abuse, drug abuse, military indoctrination, the insanity defense, and the delicate balance between civil liberties and public safety. (less)
Paperback, 324 pages
Elizabeth Crook
978-1250069221, 352 pages
Picador, reprint edition, 2015
Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction
One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction Books of the Year and a Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year
On an oppressively hot Monday in August of 1966, a student and former marine named Charles Whitman hauled a footlocker of guns to the top of the University of Texas tower and began firing on pedestrians below. Monday, Monday follows three students caught up in the massacre: Shelly, who leaves class and walks directly into the path of the bullets, and two cousins, Wyatt and Jack, who heroically rush from their classrooms to help the victims.
This searing day marks the beginning of a relationship that will entangle these three young people in a forbidden love affair, an illicit pregnancy, and a vow of silence that will span forty years. Reunited decades after the tragedy, Shelly, Wyatt, and Jack will be thrown back once more to the event that changed their lives, and confronted with the lingering power of a secret none of them are ready to reveal. With Monday, Monday,
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Austin Fire
Dave Parsons
Memories from the day of the University of Texas Tower shootings
& the 100th anniversary of Scholz’s Beer Garden on August 1, 1966.
Out of the cave
of European History class
I am struck
by squinting bright skies
strolling on the edge of the shadow
of the university tower shade
through the southeast campus quad
flip flopping to my Mustang
for my short drive to work
less than an hour before
student victim #1
will have fallen
in that very path.
I am traveling back now—
back to the pool—
down the hot tar entry
down the pebbled walkway
to Barton Springs
churning shadowy deep blue—
it’s the blues—the gushing
blues 68 degrees year-round
offering a deadening numbness
making the youngest of skin
cadaver cold and this ordinary
workday, I am just another Life-
guard cut loose too soon.
And now—again
I am driving back
again back and away
away from the many
oblique precipices—falls
hidden undercurrents
jutting stones in the blinds
of the limestone aquifer
traveling back under and through
the towering pecan trees
just a short dash—and now again
Barton Springs Road—
The Rolling Stones—Can’t Get No
Satisfaction…. everything
is heating up the day.
At Scholz’s Garden
another grand spring
100 years of beer flowing
unjudgmentally through
the many unruly seasons
through the untold
joyous and unfettered
the anonymous generations
of the deemed and the damned
and all their wagging
Did you know(s)…flying
around the ever blank
pages of air—air that receives, never
recording a single loving or gnashing word
of the produce of this imperfect garden
those sweaty hound dog days—I feel
that very air here again now—the gamey
smells of the Dutchman’s beer garden
the care free summer women
laughing braless in loose tie-dyes
swilling nickel Lone Stars
aiming flirtatious glances
then firing their deadly frank stares
swinging suntanned legs
to the juke box beats
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
play a song for me…all
positioned between
the two towers: the capitol dome
topped with Lady Liberty
and UT’s apex and bastille of education
and there now…and again—white puffs—
Sniper! Sniper!
Girls first! diving under
stone gray concrete tables
towering turquoise sky
ragged clouds
ripping the battle blue
drifting…mist like…hiding
momentarily gun site portals,
and our shade tree bunkers
fiery memories
imbedded
like so many stray shots—
He was a crew cut
every mother’s son
Boy Scout—Marine
sharpshooter
again all paths of mine—
In his last note to the world
Charles Whitman
requested an autopsy
with special consideration
to his brain…they found
a tiny, cloudy gray mass
of malignant tissue lined
in crimson—seems it’s
always the smallest of embers.
First appeared in Color of Mourning, Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press Consortium. Published with permission of the author.
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