50 years ago today

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What? You ask. 50 years ago, August 1st, 1966, a mad man climbed up on the University of Texas tower and started shooting at people. Where was I? I had been watching TV in Point Pleasant Beach, NJ. My mom called and said: "Come on! We have to go catch the plane." I was just dialing down the TV when the news broke in with a shot of the UT tower. "Wait!" I called to my family. "There is something happening in Austin!" I turned back up the TV and a report came on about a shooter in the University tower. Mom and my siblings along with my grandfather came back inside. "There's someone shooting from the Tower," I told them, kind of giving them the briefest of updates. We watched the report for several minutes, but we had to leave to catch the plane. Now, this was 1966, so we didn't have to get to the airport HOURS ahead of time to check in. Needless to say, this is pretty much all what we talked about on the plane back to Texas. Happily, nobody we knew was killed or otherwise harmed that day. Having said that, it seemed that everyone we knew was on or near campus that day. 3 friends had gone to campus to a movie with their father who was teaching summer school. Another family friend had gone to a restaurant down around campus for lunch with friends. Charles Whitman shot 40 people, killing 16 that day before he was shot and killed himself. Until that time, there was no such thing as mass shootings, SWAT teams, heck, there wasn't even EMS, the ambulances were hearses from the funeral homes! A lot has changed since that hot summer day in Austin Texas and those of us who remember it have probably changed the most.