All Things in Moderation

UT map

I had just walked out of the Law School.

A chunk of limestone chipped off Townes Hall 30’ over my right shoulder and then I heard the c-r-a-c-k. Bullet had beaten the sound.

I had no idea what was happening. Went to my junkie little ‘62 Falcon, turned on the radio, got an earful. Drove out of range to a girlfriend’s apartment where we listened for more than an hour.

Later I learned that folks I knew had been under direct fire – nobody got hit when he shot to the northeast, where I had exited Townes Hall, only on the Mall and on Guadalupe {the Drag].

An acquaintance who later became a friend was then a grad student and a USAF Captain at Bergstrom. He walked out of the then grad library in the Tower and immediately realized what was happening. He ducked back into the doorway and listened to the shots and figured out the timing as Whitman moved around the parapet. He ran out, and pulled someone who was alive into the bushes in front of the plaza. He stayed down. I think he pulled four living victims into the shrubs over the 90 minutes. Later he was stationed in Germany and got his PhD in German military history at Heidelberg, came back to UT and went to law school, and became a lawyer in Austin as a civilian.

My later law partner’s wife was shopping on the Drag when the shooting and the panic ensued. She thought it was “The Revolution”. They owned an old black ’51 Mercedes which looked like a limo. It was 98F or so, typical August 1 in Austin. It was parked on the Drag. She got in and lay down on the floor board for more than an hour. Scared and dehydrated.

That night, at Scholz’s, the famous biergarten a few blocks south of campus, our group of law students drank under the oak tree. She downed a pitcher by herself in half an hour, and couldn’t stop shaking. Rifle shots. People running, screaming, some obviously in pain, and she too scared to get up from the floorboard, unable to help, not actually knowing if it would ever end, or what was actually happening.