Birthdate of fear

(In which the Blob again says "Later for you, sporty-sports," and sets off into the wider world for awhile. The usual protocols apply to those who don't wish to join me on the journey.)

First of August now, and another summer in the books, or at least it seems so these accelerated days.  The local baseball diamonds are empty. The band kids are in the high school parking lots, sweating under the hammering sun. In 12 days, they'll back in school again, the yellow buses will be running again, and wasn't it just yesterday that they spilled everyone out into what seemed an endless stretch of freedom?

Perhaps. But summer's end is not the end I think about when I think about August 1, and this August 1 in particular.

The end I think about is the end of a certain kind of American innocence, and the assumptions that formed its foundation.

This August 1, you see, is 60 years to the day since a sick man in a high place went hunting human beings.

His name was Charles Whitman, and on Aug. 1, 1966 he hauled an M1 carbine, two Remington rifles, a semi-automatic shotgun and three handguns up to the observation deck of the University of Texas tower -- which still stands, and which they still light up Texas burnt orange after every Longhorns football triumph -- and turned downtown Austin into a kill zone.

He was up there for 90 minutes until a couple of police officers took him down, and in that time, from his high place, he killed 15 people and wounded 31 more. This was after he'd stabbed his wife and mother to death, and after he'd left two victims inside who had the misfortune to encounter him on his way to the observation deck.

For most of his 25 years, he'd been a normal American male, a loving husband and dutiful son who'd whisked his mother away from his abusive father. Then a tumor bloomed inside his brain, and, in 90 terrifying minutes, Charles Whitman became something else entirely: The godfather of the American mass shooter, and the bringer of nightmares we could scarcely imagine in 1966.

Because who could conceive, back then, of an America where you could be shot dead just walking down the street? Where some random human (Even a neighbor, maybe!) could take it in his head to find someplace where other random humans congregate, and just start killing people he didn't even know?

We feared the Russkies and nuclear missiles aimed our way and the damn Commies taking over the world, in those days. We didn't fear one of our own using his Second Amendment rights to stockpile an arsenal of weapons (Two Remmies, an M-1, a shotgun and three handguns? Who needs all that?) and make war on his fellow Americans.

So now we had something else to fear, in a fearful time. And on it went from there -- from Charles Whitman to James Oliver Huberty in a McDonald's down by Mexico; to Patrick Sherrill in a post office in Edmonds, Okla.; to George Hennard in a cafeteria in Texas; to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School; to Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech; to Stephen Paddock on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel in Las Vegas, another hunter of humans in a high place.

Paddock killed 60 people and shot almost 500 when he did his deal nine years ago. Five years before that, Adam Lanza murdered 27 people, 20 of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. Another elementary school in Uvalde, Tex.; a synagogue in Pittsburgh; a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.; a supermarket in El Paso, Tex., and another in Buffalo, N.Y. ...

The blood trail of Charles Whitman, the madness and the butchery, continues apace. As does the fear that, after so many butcheries, we're either numb to or have trained ourselves not to think about anymore.

But Aug. 1, 1966 was the birthdate of that fear. And then it was very real.

I was 11 at the time, see, and we were on vacation, and that night we went to dinner somewhere. I remember, hazily, seeing a newspaper there, and the Texas tower shooting was splashed all over the front page. And when we finished dinner and walked out to the car, I remember walking very fast, because somewhere in the dark I just knew there was a man with a rifle, and that he was going to start shooting.

Like I said, I was 11 years old at the time, with an 11-year-old's overheated imagination. But I suspect I wasn't the only one who, after that day, felt a chill the next time they walked out into their quiet American lives in their quiet American town. 

And I suspect they weren't all 11, either.