Charles Whatman

I got an email from Elisa Bolton today saying that Iris and I might be interested in this article about Charles Whitman and the Texas tower mass shooting.

I'm glad she reminded me of it because I don't seem to have bookmarked the article (I'd read it when it appeared in my RSS feed some time back). This article is based at least partially on this article in the Texas Monthly.

Claire James

I paid particular attention to the story of Claire James, then named Claire Wilson.

CLAIRE JAMES was a freshman. She teaches elementary and junior high school in Tucson, Arizona.

My boyfriend, Tom Eckman, and I were drinking coffee at the Chuck Wagon when we decided that we’d better put another nickel in the parking meter. We were walking across the South Mall, holding hands, when all of a sudden I felt like I’d stepped on a live wire, like I’d been electrocuted. I was eight months pregnant at the time. Tom said, “Baby—” and reached out for me. And then he was hit.

CLAIRE JAMES: Tom never said another word. I was lying next to him on the pavement, and I called out to him, but I knew he was dead. The shock was so great that I didn’t feel pain; it felt more like something really heavy was pressing down on me. A conservative-looking guy in a suit walked by, and I yelled at him, “Please, get a doctor! Please!” even though I still didn’t understand what was happening. He looked annoyed and said, “Get up! What do you think you’re doing?” I think he thought it was guerrilla theater, because we had started doing things like that to bring attention to the war in Vietnam.

CLAIRE JAMES: I knew immediately that I’d lost the baby. By the eighth month, your baby’s moving a lot. And after I got shot, the baby never moved.

CLAIRE JAMES: I was in intensive care for seven weeks, and I wasn’t released from the hospital until November. I had to learn how to walk again. When I went back to school in January, no one said anything to me or talked about it around me. I almost felt like I had imagined the whole thing. Not one person ever called together the students who’d been injured that day and said, “How are you?” or “We’re so sorry.” I guess that’s just the way it was—it was a measure of the times. We didn’t have the vocabulary at that point to deal with what had happened. If it was mentioned at all, it was always called “the accident.”

An interview with Claire Wilson James.

Claire Wilson James describes the experience in this audio interview

The Shooting

The shooting occured on August 1, 1966. I'm not sure if I was back from Tunisia at that point; if so, I was in Chicago and wasn't yet in Austin. I moved there in the summer of 1968, just before the Chicago police riot at the Democratic Convention.

The Tower shooting is described at length here, especially in the audio. At 33:51, the story turns to Claire Wilson James.

Helen Burkhart Mayfield

About a year after I got to Austin in the summer of 1968, my first wife left me. Suffice it to say that 1969 marked the beginning of a tumultuous period in my life, a period that ended only when I met Iris Tillman Hill, five years later. For 5 years I was, technically speaking, fucked up.

I got to know Helen Mayfield because I was searching for ways to ease my pain and turned to Helen's improvisional dance group. In spite of a naive and fairly conservative (i.e., cautious) upbringing, I had learned to dance and knew that I enjoyed it. Dancing to hippy music in the Avalon Ballroom with Marion Bruner in 1966 helped liberate me even further, so improvisational dance - which was a lot like psychotherapy - felt good to me.

Helen Burkhart Mayfield (1939–1997) was an American artist from Texas.

Mayfield was born in Blanco, Texas. After graduating from high school, she attended South West Texas State University, where she majored in art and met her future husband, Martin Mayfield. Before moving back to Austin, Texas, the two lived in New York City, where they took part in various Broadway productions. After returning to Texas, Mayfield taught modern dance, established the Renaissance Market, for people to sell their art and handicrafts, and produced a many drawings and paintings.

-- source

We danced in an uninhibited and crazy fashion. One time a small group of dancers from the dance company went to the Vulcan Gas Company, Austin's premier hippy dance and music venue. There was a band playing acid rock, which I loved. We got up and started dancing our improvisational stuff while all the stoned hippies just sat around the edge of the room staring at us. I was amazed that hippies, who had danced so wildly in San Francisco had become so catatonic in Austin a short time later. The roomate of one of the dancers told her later how uncomfortable she'd felt watching us dance so emotionally.

Here is a drawing of Helen's that was exhibited posthumously by a gallery in Waxahachie, TX:

Unknown title

Googling around finds a few more traces of her art including this long posthumus article about Helen Mayfield.

Why do I associate the Tower shootings with Helen Mayfield?

One day I was walking down the Drag with a woman from Helen's dance group. I didn't know her very well, so I suspect that we'd just run into each other. I remember nothing about the conversation except that she said that Charles Whitman had shot and killed the baby in her womb. No wonder she had to dance....

Rita Starpattern

The article that Elisa sent contains two paragraphs about Rita Starpattern:

We absolutely feel every second of it, but we also feel the unbelievable courage of people such as “the really lovely young woman with red hair,” as Wilson puts it, who ran out to try to help Wilson, lying with her on the concrete and keeping her talking.

“Only recently I’ve realized how really amazingly brave that was of her,” Wilson says. The red-haired woman’s name was Rita Starpattern, an Austinite and feminist who died in 1996, and I have to admit I have thought about what she did about once a month since I saw this movie in March during SXSW.

At about 8:00 into Claire's audio, Claire discusses Rita in a very moving way.

Iris' connection

Iris writes

I didn't know about Rita Starpattern having risked her life for one of the shooting victims. It's a total surprise. I'm sure I would remember if she had mentioned it.

Apparently Rita didn't tell people about this. A friend of hers only learned about it at Rita's funeral.

My ex and I arrived in Austin in the summer of 1968 and in that first year I met a woman whose daughter had been killed by Whitman. I've never forgotten the story she told me. Her daughter and fiance were on Guadalupe in front of the jewelry store looking at engagement rings and about to go inside when her daughter was shot and died instantly. A really horrific story. The woman lived with this memory and I had the feeling that she had to repeat it as a way to cope with the tragedy – she'd suffered this terrible loss and knew her daughter was dead but in some way she couldn't believe it and kept reliving it in telling it. It was very sad.

When I first walked around the UT campus, the Tower felt intimidating, linked as it was to those insane killings. I read several years later that they found a brain tumor when they did an autopsy on Whitman, the tumor being some sort of explanation for his actions. Do you think that's possible? probable?

The best connection of all

Iris and I met at a party at Rita Starpattern's house about 8 years after the Tower shooting.