‘I Was Scared to Death’

By LOUANN ADCOX  “I thought we were at war,” is what Gene Adcox of La Grange remembers thinking that very hot sultry day in Austin on Aug. 1, 1966, as he heard gunfire all around him. Fifty years ago Monday, Charles Whitman shot 46 people, killing 14, from an observatory  platform at the University of Texas Tower in what was the first mass shooting on a college campus in U.S. History.

“I grew up on West. 31½ St. and could see the tower from home,” Adcox said. “Although it was 50 years ago, I remember it as if it were yesterday” 

Adcox witnessed much of the frightening scene first hand.

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