Austin's Day of Infamy – Part 3
Too many new stories today not to start a new post:
- The Statesman has an article with a lot of good discussion, The Forgetting: 40 years later, the story of the Tower sniper has grown hazy at UT.
- KVUE has an interview with Ramiro Martinez
- A story from the Wichita Eagle
- News8Austin has an interview with KTBC photographer, Gordon Wilkison, who filmed during the event for the only television station in town at the time.
- KEYE has a compilation of KTBC radio coverage from that day.
- Burnt Orange Report’s Karl-Thomas posts his weekly column which focuses on the tower this time.
- Daily Texan, of course, has several articles today.
Both Donewaiting and SXSWBaby point out that the SXSW 2007 site is live. I’m still recovering from this year.
-
Trudeau nails the idiocy of the flag burning amendment which was barely defeated in the Senate this year. I’m sure we’ll see it again the next time an election rolls around.
Today is not only the 40th anniversary of the UT Tower shootings, but it’s also MTV’s 25th anniversary. SuicideGirls has a post on some of the highlights. The Wife and I noticed that VH1 was re-running the first day of MTV programming last night. It’s pretty much common knowledge at this point, but who knows what the first video was? Many remember the name of the song, but you get extra points for naming the band. No googling!
We didn’t get cable at my house until 1985. Prior to that, my only real exposure to MTV was on the a school ski trip to Breckenridge in 1984. I remember everyone drooling over the video for “Like a Virgin” and the Lost Weekend with Van Halen contest that they were advertising like crazy. I also happened to run across a video for Rush’s “Distant Early Warning” last night, which is from the same era and remains one of my favorite Rush songs.
The rush of MTV nostalgia capped off and weekend full of catching up and trips down memory lane. One of my high school friends (high school, middle school and college, actually) got married here in Austin on Saturday and nearly a third of my graduating high school class was in town. We were a small class, only 30 guys total. Yep, guys. It was an all boys school. It ran fifth grade through twelfth grade, although I started there in sixth. It was run by hungarian monks, making for an unusual school experience to say the least. We took a fair number of pictures of everyone and their families (this is one of those times when Flickr’s ability to add notes comes in handy). It’d be tough to track down a shot from school of the ten of us. I might have a class picture somewhere, maybe I can scan it and photoshop it to match the stuff we took this weekend. That’d be pretty sweet.