|
|
Have a Seat, Please
Don Reid with John Gurwell
"But now, after calling in the details in Dallas
and leaving the prison, I would take off my coat and
walk briskly against the morning breeze. And I would
wave my coat in the air as I walked, hoping in this
way to dispel the stench of burning flesh, which I was
convinced had permeated my garments. Sometimes as I
walked and waved my coat I would laugh at myself,
thinking how foolish I would look to a citizen who
might come upon me. But I didn't want to carry that
odor into my home, where Frances and I lived in love
and happiness—if any other person than myself could
smell it . . . ."—from the book
"Don Reid," a cub reporter once wrote admiringly, "can see
as much humanity in the messy murder of a shady lady as the
coronation of a queen . . . ." Reid was a strong but gentle
man, wise and compassionate, and his discerning eyes observed
all the degradation and nobility mankind is heir to in his
thirty-five years of covering the Texas prison system for the
Huntsville Item and the Associated Press. For many years he
was publisher of the Item and later in his life spent much of
his time writing and making public speeches. Reid, who died
in 1981, was survived by his widow, Frances. The late John
Gurwell, who assisted Reid with the book, was a Houston writer
whose daughter Kathy supported the reprinting of this book.
"When Don Reid published Eyewitness in 1973, the chronicle of
his conversion from a supporter of the death penalty to an
ardent opponent, the book was an immediate sensation. Perhaps
never before in the history of the American penal system has a
man witnessed more electrocutions than Reid, who as Associated
Press and Huntsville Item representative watched 189 men die
in ‘Old Sparky,' as the electric chair in the Texas Department
of Corrections' death chamber was not so affectionately called.
This book is a powerful personal account of Reid's conversations
with many of the very men he later watched receive the eighteen
hundred volts of electricity from generators reserved for electro-
cutions and his later, almost evangelical efforts to defend the
men on Death Row from a similar fate.
"When we took this book on as a reprint, Nelda Woodall, whose
family owned the Huntsville Item while Don worked there, told me
that Don had always wanted to title the book Have a Seat, Please,
that ironic civil utterance the warden used just before the men
were strapped into the last chair they would ever take a seat in.
I promised her that if at all possible I would see that that title
was used for the book. After receiving permission from Don's beloved
Frances and Kathy Gurwell, daughter of John Gurwell, who assisted
Don with the book, I made the title change."—Paul Ruffin, Director,
Texas Review Press
_________________________________________________________
|
|
