University Life
Whitman entered the mechanical engineering program at the University of Texas on September 15, 1961. Perhaps because he was free of the discipline and routine he had experienced while stationed at Guantanamo Bay, plus his courtship of a fellow student whom he later married, Whitman was initially a poor student whose grades were largely unimpressive. His hobbies at this point included karate, scuba diving, gambling and hunting. This last hobby earned Whitman his first encounter with police when, shortly after his enrollment at the University, he and two friends were observed poaching a deer: a passer-by noted Whitman's license plate number and reported the incident to police. The trio were in the act of butchering the animal in the shower at Whitman's dormitory when arrested. Whitman was given a $100 fine for the offense.
Whitman acquired a reputation as a practical joker in his years as an architectural engineering student. However, he was also known to make morbid or chilling statements. On one occasion in 1962, as he and a fellow student named Francis Schuck, Jr. browsed at the Main Building of the University of Texas, Whitman remarked: "A person could stand off an army from atop of it (the tower) before they got him."
Read more about this topic: Charles Whitman
Famous quotes containing the words university and/or life:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The value of life lies not in the length of days but in the use you make of them; he has lived for a long time who has little lived.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)