Ronald Ron Wayne Robinson kept looking at his watch, anxious to get home for his daughter Sheryle's eleventh birthday party that night. Aline V. House was kicking herself for forgetting to bring her blood-pressure medication to work. Bobby G. Heard kept looking through the doorway to see if his relief was on his way up to take his place as the only guard in the prison library.
Ann Fleming was thinking about her eighty-year-old mother in a Nashville, Tennessee, nursing home. Novella M. Pollard was worried about getting her rent check in the mail on time. Elizabeth Yvonne Von Beseda's concern was the alteration of her daughter's University of Texas cheerleader uniform. All in all, it was just a routine day in Huntsville, Texas.
That routine ended abruptly with the roar a. The longest civilian-hostage-taking siege in the history of the American penal system had begun. The angry threat had just the opposite of the desired effect. Pollard, who was conducting a typing class for twenty inmates, bolted into the adjoining library office, where she dove under a deskβa maneuver that had been practiced many times in her public schoolrooms during the previous decades with its fears of nuclear missile strikes.
Bertha Mae Bert Davis, Ann Fleming, Aline House, who was using the office telephone, and librarian Linda G. Woodman looked around in a moment of bewilderment until they too took cover beneath work tables. Woodman's view of the situation was limited by the fact that she was not wearing her glasses.
Being near-sighted, she had set them aside for routine close-up work. House crouched up to see what was going on. Her first thought was that the man with the gun, whom she did not recognize, was a lone prisoner who had gone berserk and was attempting a breakout. Fleming and Woodman had more practical thoughts. They pushed a six by five-foot wooden filing cabinet against the office door to block its entranceβa useless gesture as it turned out because they were surrounded by glass partitions.
