Gary Pickle arrived in Austin with an invasion of crickets. A hot September night in 1963. The incoming UT student from West Texas drove a packed, brown ’57 Volkswagen bug. With the windows rolled down he heard them chirping, and in the light of mercury-vapor lamps he saw them swarming the approaching intersection of South Lamar and Barton Springs Road. When he drove through, hundreds of crickets crackled under his tires – an unforgettable sound, 60 years ago like yesterday.
“That was my abiding first day in Austin,” Pickle says. “The day I got here I said, well, I’m not leaving.”
It was the running water that struck him at first. In Big Spring, where his father ran a newspaper, the only running water was treated wastewater from sewage. Here, he could do homework on the banks of a creek just about anywhere in town. He could spend the day with friends from across Texas. He could see an opera or a country band. He could talk with high-up political movers and shakers or young people dodging the draft by seeking ever more college degrees, and in either case he found people to be polite and down to earth.
Pickle remembers his early days in Austin clearly. After graduating, he worked as a cameraman for KTBC-TV, witnessing an inordinate number of coming-of-age moments for the rapidly growing city firsthand. As the nephew of U.S. Rep. J.J. Pickle, he also had unusual closeness to the White House at the nearly mythologized time of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. LBJ was, after all, a mentor to J.J.
Getting to know the layout of a city as a TV news cameraman means learning a city through its worst events – car wrecks, crime scenes. That could sour a relationship to a city. But for Pickle, “It was love at first sight, and love that grew.” At the end of a day covering tragedy, the city always offered something to do to “wash yourself clear of it,” he says.
“I remember, before I went back to the station, the last thing I shot was some guy hosing blood off of the mall into the flower beds.” – Gary Pickle on covering the UT Tower Mass shooting in 1966
It was with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth after a leisurely lunch that Pickle was pulled into one of the most disturbing events of his life. They were leaving a cafeteria and saw a TV screen showing the UT Tower. Around lunch, Pickle expected to see a soap opera on. A receptionist in the lobby said: “Oh my God, some guy’s up in the tower shooting people.” Pickle and his friend ran to an elevator and rode up to the newsroom, grabbed their equipment, and headed straight for the mall.
There in the heat of early August, Pickle, another cameraman, and a reporter found a spot under tree foliage thinking it would protect them from the shooter’s sight. “I was getting my camera, getting ready to start filming, and this guy sitting there on the ground smoking a cigarette said, ‘I was sitting here, and a guy just got shot sitting right where you are. You better watch out. He can see you.’ And I said thank you.”
Pickle’s group moved to the third story of Batts Hall, into the office of a Portuguese professor. They slid his desk away from the window and set up there, capturing puffs of smoke coming from the tower each time. And then, feeling these puffs of smoke were not enough, they went back down to the mall for interviews. They got images of people hiding behind a flag pole and interviewed a man who had dragged several bodies away.
And then people started pouring onto the mall. It had been announced that the shooter was killed, Pickle later learned, and so masses of students and faculty emerged from hiding, a flood of people in total silence. “Eerie,” Pickle says.
“I remember, before I went back to the station, the last thing I shot was some guy hosing blood off of the mall into the flower beds. It was – well, you can imagine.”
The whole city changed because of that shooting, Pickle says. The sleepy college town turned into “a more mature place. A more sober place.”
But as ever, the city provided a way to wash off. After standing in the heat and sun to film the Tower shooting, Pickle went to the Paramount Theatre. It was dark and cool, and he watched a comedy: The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming.
Pickle has watched the city change both gradually – like with tech companies moving in – and suddenly – like with the UT Tower shooting. It’s not an overly popular opinion among his peers, but Pickle says Austin is still Austin.
“I don’t sense that the city itself has changed. It’s much more cosmopolitan than it was back then, and I’m at a different point in life than I was then, but I still feel very comfortable in this city, talking with people from any part of the city, at any level of the city. People are just that way.”
This article appears in The 35th Annual Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival.
