#OnThisDay (January 26) in 1995 I sat in Caffe Trio at the corner of Henderson and Franklin mid-morning until 1:30 or so. I’d been kind of lost for a good cup since The Hardback had closed the previous March and that corner spot was the substitute, especially on days when I was trying to work on my dissertation in Davis Library. I’d stalled a bit on that project and was tending bar at Henry’s Bistro while also adjuncting at Guilford College, a gig that would eventually turn into my first tenured faculty job.
Caffe Trio was comfortable enough, the space had once been Hector’s, a stumble-home late night much-beloved hamburger-on-pita place, and a half block down Henderson Street had once been the homes of The Internationalist and The Fair Exchange, two archetypal Chapel Hill bookstores that sat atop football player and crossword puzzle genius Tim Kirkpatrick’s neighborhood-style pub, each of which had done time as second living rooms for me in their day — sometimes all at once.
It is good o guess that I felt compelled to do dissertation work or I might have tarried longer over my coffee that day. It was a Thursday and I had no shift to work that night. The Heels, led by sophomore stars Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse had walloped Florida State the night before. I had opted out of taking classes for the Spring Semester and, no doubt annoyingly so to my dissertation advisor, was set up to sink or swim on my own momentum for the foreseeable future, stuck in the limbo of All-But-Dissertation, the mythical ABD status from which many do not emerge.
But I did go to the library and that May have saved my life because at around 2 pm that day UNC law student Wendell Williamson made his way up Henderson Street out of the deadens of Cobb Terrace with an M-1 Garand rifle, killing Ralph Walker, a local restaurant worker on his porch and a biking Kevin Reichardt, a Carolina student and lacrosse player. He also wounded Chapel Hill police officer Demetrise Stephenson. The manager of a nearby bar, ‘Tammany Hall,’ Bill Leone, an ex-Marine and student, tackled Williamson and,although wounded in the shoulder, subdued him until others could come to his aid.
I missed all that and only learned about the carnage after emerging from the library in the evening. Williamson had been a pretty frequent customer at The Hardback Café and I recognized his photo in the paper the next day. Evidently he could be odd but that wouldn’t have stood out in The Hardback. Other than pouring a beer or a coffee I had not really had any interactions with him. I often wonder about what role that watering hole and Third Place played in his life?
This ‘incident,’ happening as it did in 1995 was really a predecessor to what has become a nigh daily national occurrence - a mass shooting. 1999 and Columbine High School usually gets tabbed as “the beginning.” Of course the USA has had a history of violent “gunplay” deeply engrained in our psyche and national history reaching much farther back. From the OK Corral to Wounded Knee to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and The U. of Texas Tower sniper, we’ve engaged in bloody mayhem as a character trait.
Wendell Williamson was quite a modern, even future, American — though not really ahead of his time so much as a harbinger of things to come. He was under psychiatric care, declared not guilty by reason of insanity in trial, when last heard of - perhaps Butner’s Central Regional Hospital. Linked here is a 2015 ‘Daily Tar Heel’ retrospective.
https://www.dailytarheel.com/.../an-oral-history-of-one...
