50 Years Since Charles Whitman: Texas Tower shooting marked new era

wfgodot

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Living in California and too young to know there was even a state called Texas.

And you?
 
I was one year old, living in Austin with my parents. My mom worked at the telephone company with Mrs. Whitman. Both were operators. My dad came out of the chemistry building with a couple of classmates and walked into a shooting gallery. They were able to hide in bushes around that building and eventually make their way away from the shooting and off-campus.
 
I was living in Fort Worth. I was seven, but I remember it being on the news.

Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman.

Two names that this Texas child of those times knew at an early age.

Hate to say it, but after the Kennedy assassination, this didn't really hit me as being all that unusual until I got a bit older.

I think my parents "ruined" me by allowing me to watch the news every night.

Things really got weird over the coming years.

Then Charlie Manson came along in 1969 and some of the Texas stigma went to California.

Of course, Charles "Tex" Watson made sure Texas got some of that, too.
 
I was 11 years old, and remember this well. I think it sparked, in some small way, my interest in serial killers (although Whitman was a spree killer)
 
And, in day-before the Golden Anniversary 2016 Austin action....

Austin Statesman-American:

One woman dead, four others injured in Austin downtown shooting

As August 1966 began, the Troggs' "Wild Thing" was the Billboard #1 song, coming a week after Tommy James and the Shondells' "Hanky Panky" and a week before the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City."

I was 12. Indeed it was a very hot summer.
 
I was a student at the University of Florida and absolutely terrified to walk near our tower.
 
As August 1966 began, the Troggs' "Wild Thing" was the Billboard #1 song, coming a week after Tommy James and the Shondells' "Hanky Panky" and a week before the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City."

I was 12. Indeed it was a very hot summer.

Summer 1966, just a bit earlier, had provided, Top 40-wise, a #1 song (the weeks of 11 and 18 June) that read like a thesis of the '60s -- darkly definitive, it captured the zeitgeist:

[video=youtube;u6d8eKvegLI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6d8eKvegLI[/video]
 
Summer 1966, just a bit earlier, had provided, Top 40-wise, a #1 song (the weeks of 11 and 18 June) that read like a thesis of the '60s -- darkly definitive, it captured the zeitgeist:

[video=youtube;u6d8eKvegLI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6d8eKvegLI[/video]

Only RS song I've ever liked! :)
 
I have often wondered if Whitman's corpse had been able to be 'preserved' or sent into the future, what medical forensic science could tell us today about his brain tumor and in what ways it possibly affected his thoughts and actions. Still not an exact science, I know.
 
My parents met in the summer of 1966.

I wonder what if anything they remember about this.
 

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