Big Books: Part 3

They Call Me Ranger Ray: From the UT Tower Sniper to Corruption in South Texas

Rio Bravo Publishing, 266 pp., $26

I was in my fourth-grade class the afternoon we heard that JFK had been assassinated in Dallas, and I was watching TV at home the day that deranged ex-Marine sharpshooter Charles Whitman transformed the UT Tower into a symbol of terror and death, the flower of the sixties turning dark and inscrutable. They Call Me Ranger Ray is the story of Ray Martinez, then an Austin policeman, who, along with Texas Ranger Houston McCoy, stormed the observation deck of the tower and dispatched Whitman in a rain of bullets. It's an act of rare bravery in a crystalline moment that Martinez could've milked for all it was worth almost 40 years ago, but instead he persevered on his modestly ambitious path to become a Texas Ranger, trading his gun for a gavel in 1994 to become Justice of the Peace in Comal County. In his non-ghosted, self-published memoir, Ramirez relegates the Tower episode to a single chapter in the life and career of a Hispanic Texan, dealing with various difficulties of unenlightened society with the same stoic cool as when he issued a ticket to a white woman at fault in a traffic mishap who turned hysterical at being issued her first traffic citation from a Mexican. Tell it to the judge, lady.