I said, "Hey, Kenny, what are you DOING? You trying to be a tough guy?" He looked at me with glazed eyes, totally without recognition. Then he recognized me and for a split second, there was guilt and shame in his face. But in that split second, someone slipped under Kenny's left arm and scooted up one of the ladders into a tree ten feet away. Kenny turned, lowering his other arm, but it was too late to stop the student. The way was open for me to go up the ladder and into the tree. "GO!" yelled the people behind me. In that instant, I felt sorry for Kenny because I had distracted him and caused him to fail in his job. We had him. We had made a hole in the line over his position. But it wasn't my pity for him that kept me frozen to the spot. I knew if I broke that line and went up that ladder, I stood no chance of keeping my teaching job. I saw myself arrested, out of work. I hesitated. The line held.
By nine-thirty, twenty-six persons had been removed, arrested and taken to jail. The angry but now passive crowd sullenly watched as the trees were ripped by chainsaws and shattered by bulldozers. Tank Sherman was photographed applauding as the great trees fell. Any one of them, any sapling or sprout, was worth more than his life at that moment. I had never wanted to murder anyone before.
At ten-thirty, a law student stood on the stump of a huge cottonwood and read a restraining order issued by a judge, enjoining the University to "cease and desist in the removal of the trees until the matter could be studied and arbitrated." All around were the shattered remains of the trees for three hundred feet each way along the creek nearest the stadium.
After the order was read, everybody, including some of the construction workers, realized that Tank Sherman, the DPS and the Austin police had just broken the law. The cops had enforced unlawful actions. They had been ordered to come out, not by the Governor, not by the mayor of Austin, but by Tank Sherman, demagogue and alcoholic.
One of the hard hatted workers, after hearing the document read, looked around at the devastation and muttered, "Y'all got screwed."
"We ought to take this mess up to the main building and give it to the mothers," somebody said.
Hardhat said, "Why not?" He picked up his chainsaw and jerked it to life. "How big of pieces you want 'em cut in?" He started sawing the fallen trees into pieces small enough to manage.
A twelve year-old, longhaired street kid grabbed a tree limb. "To the tower!" he yelled and started dragging the limb toward the main campus.
A couple of other hardhats fired up their saws and began to chop up trees, too. Everybody grabbed up limbs and marched off up Twenty-first Street toward the tower. A half-hour later, the South entrance to the main building was barricaded more than ten feet deep in tree limbs. A growing crowd stood in the mall, shaking fists and screaming obscenities. Faces appeared at the windows of the building. The people outside chanted as one great voice, "WE WANT HARDEMAN, WE WANT HARDEMAN."
Hardeman was University president, looked upon by many students as a lackey who gave lip service to student concerns while pandering to Sherman's whims. On and on they chanted. The sun came out and it got hot. Still they stood in the sun on the concrete man and vented their outrage. Nobody came out. No cops, on university security, no president. Nobody ever came out.
There were no more arrests. They had achieved their goal. Adding seats to memorial stadium was never the real issue. It was power. The university had the power and the students didn't. In a strange way, the Waller Creek Massacre was about the war in Vietnam. Confrontations between the people and the institutions were ostensibly about environment or civil rights or equal rights, but ultimately they were about the war. The government wanted to have a war and the people, increasingly, didn't.
The next time I saw Kenny Taylor, the ex-teacher turned cop was two years later. I stopped to get gas and Kenny was working at the station. I wondered if he knew or cared about the step I hadn't taken that day, the step that might have saved the trees on Waller Creek, might have saved more that that, even....
We shook hands and said hello. He said he was moonlighting at the station; he said he was still on the force. He looked at my '71 Dodge Sportsman van and said, "Where'd you get that van, selling dope?"
Kenny and I had taught children together. I had considered him the best teacher at St. Paul; his third grade classes were the best in deportment and the best academically. Now here he was making a statement like that. It cut. He equated protesting with dealing dope.
"You know better than that, Kenny," I said. "I still owe for it." Neither of us mentioned Waller Creek. I haven't seen or heard from him since and it's been almost thirty years.
***
