Main Street war story
January 10, 2014
Temple Ligon
January 10, 2014
In August 1986, I moved from Houston to Columbia to work in marketing for Stevens & Wilkinson, the Atlanta-based architecture and engineering firm. My wife was winding down in her lawyer position with Mobil Oil in Houston, as she had already tendered her resignation that May, and we had planned on an October move for her. A few months later her friends at Mobil told her she was about to be asked to locate in London had she not left the company.
For a couple of months as a temporary bachelor in Columbia I was not in any hurry to get home in the early evening. Instead I regularly dropped by the Capitol News for my journals to take to the Capitol Café next door, both in the 1200 block of Main Street.
In my previous life as a student and a cab driver in the early 1970s, I was a fixture at the two Capitols, where I did much of my reading. The food was awful, albeit affordable, but the people were great, and the convenience was hard to beat. The news shop closed at 11:00 p.m., and the restaurant tried to close for cleaning between 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning. The Myrtle Beach edition of The State was put into the café’s sidewalk dispenser ’round midnight, giving us night owls a jump on the rest of the city.
On September 8, 1986, at a little past nine at night, I was checking out the offerings on the magazine rack at Capitol News when I joined the chase after a bank robber. As I later found out, a night deposit in a canvas bag was taking place at the First Citizens drive-through on Lady Street, facing Main. This was an every-night occurrence, probably, because the robbers, two men, were waiting in the bushes next to the night deposit drawer, waiting for the next canvas-bag deposit.
As the robbers came running by me inside the door at Capitol News, I saw where just one was carrying a canvas bag, and I went after the man with the bag. The risk was with whatever else he could have been carrying, such as a personal weapon. The second man split off at the corner of Main and Gervais and ran away on the grounds of the State Capitol.
As my target ran up the ramp into the NBNC garage, he was getting winded and slowing down a little. I was a distance runner in decent shape, a marathoner; he was not. On the other hand, he was big and a real threat had he ever stopped and turned around. I’m not sure what I would have done. Then I gained an ally. A fellow vigilante ran up alongside me as we scrambled through the NCNB garage and he stayed with me, thank goodness, as we came down the ramp onto Sumter Street.
Another piece of critical help came from the Blue Ribbon cab driver who happened to drive by as we kept our man pinned down on the curb. The cab driver used his radio to call for the police.
Below is my official police report of what exactly happened. Since I have recalled combat experiences from the late 1960s in South Vietnam, an isolated incident in the late 1980s on Main Street bears review in a similar vein. It happened, and no one said thank you. Never did. But I was used to that.
(signed)
John Temple Ligon
Stevens & Wilkinson, Inc.
1401 Main Street
Columbia SC 29201
9/8/86
Standing inside Capitol News, I heard someone yell, Stop! Thief! (9:10 p.m., approx.) I saw the suspect running south on the sidewalk, and I ran after him.
He went down Main, east on Gervais, behind #1 Main and the Supreme Court Building, towards the west side of the Palmetto Club, out from behind the Claude Creason Building onto Lady Street, right (south) on Sumter, left (east) on Gervais, through a couple of levels of the NCNB (old Bankers Trust) garage, out back onto Sumter heading north, right (east) on Lady, U-turn on Lady, back (west) towards Sumter, across Sumter in front of a pick-up where the subject jumped in to get away.
We (two of us) pulled the suspect out of the back of the pick-up and held him while we got assistance and, within probably three minutes, the police.
I left the scene then to return for my Wall St. Journal, a hamburger and a Coors at the Capitol Café.
