Remembering Andrew “Busty” Wimsatt

Tributes to a kind and generous man, taken from us far too soon

As discussed at the top of Episode #574, Andrew Wimsatt, beloved cornerstone of The Fifth Column community, was brutally murdered on Labor Day in a sunny Austin park by a cowardly knife-wielding lunatic who snuck up behind him and attacked, utterly unprovoked. The crime is all the more shocking for the profound gentleness and decency of the victim.

We come here to remember and celebrate and express gratitude toward our friend Andrew, whose name will be etched permanently on our under-construction sixth floor recording studio, probably within the area where Never Fly Coachers will be invited to watch us podcast live. Busty, after all, probably witnessed us recording more than any other fan—coming to all the live shows except one, raising his hand on every damned Second Sunday, pouring drinks around the (very!) Stupid Table for Special Dispatch #34, post-gaming an episode or three back when we recorded at the DIY Paloma Media studio.

Andrew first buzzed across my radar in December 2013 when, over the course of a few days, three things happened for the first time: 1) The Independents television show, starring MTV’s Kennedy, Kmele, and myself, debuted on the Fox Business Network; 2) Wimsatt started following me on Twitter, and 3) he gave a four-figure donation to the Reason Foundation during our annual Webathon. It makes sense that these were related: Andrew l-o-v-e-d music, he adored the anarchic energy of Fox’s legendary late-nite show Red Eye (his pinned tweet for the past decade has been a celebration/compilation of Greg Gutfeld’s chosen outro music on The Five), and he was long attracted to the no-nonsense, structural-engineering ethos of Reason Foundation transportation-policy stalwart Bob Poole, whose annual highway report Andrew suggested improvements for.

We hung out for the first time in Austin back in September 2018, after which he started doing what Andrew Wimsatt does, which is send us (or just tweet out) clips of all us + others in the extended Fifth Column/Red Eye multiverse whenever we’d appear on other media. He was famously much quicker on the draw publicizing a new Fifth Column episode than any of the drunk co-hosts, and at some early point we just gave him the keys to our Facebook page. And oh yeah, did I know he actually saved most of the entire run of The Independents? (You can watch a few over at the Paloma Media YouTube page, which was chiefly the fruit of his labors.) When we started doing Patreon in November 2019, and created what we thought was an absurd, no-one-will-ever-go-there level of $50-a-month subscriptions, Andrew became one of the first few to Never Fly Coach. He would come to New York several times a year, including the last couple during our annual sojourns to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown. I took calling him “Busty,” for the very stupid reason that a funny British friend of mine back in the ‘90s would always refer to Kate Winslet as “Busty Winslet,” and this very accomplished transportation engineer not only took it in stride, he kind of beamed a bit when the nickname caught on in the community.

That’s the fan/Fifdom side of Andrew Wimsatt. But he was so much more than that. Let’s now hand the mic over to one of his Austin pals, who pseudonymously tweets under the handle Austin Justice. This terrific obit gives you a much fuller picture of the man:

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.

He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.

Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn’t building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.

Andrew made what we already have last longer.

He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending “Souvlaki” and “everything is alive” to anyone who’d listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair,” and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.

He made music too. He’d been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released “Reflections” under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin’s ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.

Then there was the archiving, which is maybe the most Andrew thing about him. He clipped television. Constantly, expertly, for free, for people he admired. The Fifth Column crew (@wethefifth) called him “Busty Wimsatt” and, in their newsletters, “ever-alert,” “indefatigable,” and at least once “American hero.” @MattWelch called him their most devoted cliphawker. Andrew painstakingly uploaded old episodes of “The Independents” so they wouldn’t disappear. He clipped @KatTimpf‘s Fox appearances for her Locals community. He sent @walterkirn clips of Kirn’s own jokes.

“Boy did I feel special,” Kirn wrote today. “Not many strangers will go out of their way to give another that kind of encouragement.”

He was not, for the record, employed by any of these people. He contributed old photographs to @iowahawkblog‘s Dave’s Car ID Service. He was a fixture in Austin’s science fiction community and once drove Howard Waldrop home from Worldcon. He was an executive producer of Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin’s “Director’s Cut,” and appears in it, briefly, as “Greeting Cop.” He hosted a regular libertarian beer gathering at the Johnny Cash-themed bar Mean Eyed Cat. He was, per @JTLonsdale, one of University of Austin’s (@uaustinorg) original small donors. He bought a camouflage “No Step on Snek” hat at a Texas gun show this summer and his friends heard about it.

The man lived.

He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 midcentury modern building near the Capitol. Punk rock, pop surrealism, midcentury furniture, a gentle Southern manner. He loved salt to a degree his friends used as a unit of measurement.

He was, by every single account, one of the kindest people anyone had met.

@greggutfeld: supremely gentle, willing to do just about anything for another person.

@PlanetTyrus: always positive, physically slight, with a monster laugh.

@NancyRomm says he once gave her the jacket off his back when she was getting hypothermic.

A friend of 13 years and dozens of concerts tells me he never once heard Andrew say an unpleasant thing about anyone.

Both his parents were English professors. His father, James, was a Chaucer scholar at UT Austin who died in 2023 at 96. His mother, Mary, took her doctorate at Duke, ran the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, held an endowed chair as McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at South Carolina, wrote the first full-length study of a nineteenth-century novelist almost nobody remembered, and spent five years on a public radio project designed to get ordinary people reading Faulkner and Welty.

His parents spent their careers recovering things other people had stopped reading. They taught their son to make things last longer.

His mother now has Alzheimer’s and lives in a nursing home in Round Rock. Andrew helped care for his father at the end, and then her. His routine was to drive out, walk with her, and then take a second walk alone.

He photographed what he saw on his walks. His Instagram is herons -- wading, fishing, one caught mid-wingspan over the water -- plus hawks in bare branches, a squirrel wedged in a tree hollow, a snail on a brick wall, bluebonnets, and a lot of Texas sky at the second it went orange.

Two days before he died, he was at a friend’s house for movie night, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 do “The Crawling Hand.” He spent his whole life trying to make things last longer, and he was good at it, and he was doing it right up to the end -- the second walk of the morning, until he sat on a park bench in the morning sun.

He is survived by his siblings, Alison Ross and David Joseph Wimsatt. And by his mother, who he walked with that morning, and who does not know he isn’t coming back next week.

Thank you, Austin.

Another tribute from another friend, Lawrence Person:

I first met Andrew through Karl Rehn, because Karl and I were both prog rock fans who traded tapes in college at UT. Andrew had been bandmates with Karl in high school, and roommates shortly after college. I remember playing P. D. Q. Bach’s “Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz” in their shared apartment, telling him it was the latest Philip Glass CD. When it got to the “Ko-Hosti-Tatsi” part, Andrew went “This isn’t Philip Glass.” Karl, Andrew and I were also in a band together whose entire point was to piss people off.

Being smart, geeky and well-read, Andrew naturally slipped into the orbit of my group of friends. In addition to his existing love of music, Andrew was easy to get involved in your own interests, be it science fiction, guns or politics. I sold him several books over the years, and he ended up driving Howard Waldrop and Ellen Brody back to Austin from the 2013 San Antonio Worldcon. Karl and I might have sucked him into politics equally, to the point he was doing some behind-the-scenes work for The Greg Gutfeld Show and the We the Fifth podcast. Andrew frequently flew across the country to catch a show for one of the many bands he followed, or for watching the taping of a political show. He was even an executive producer on the Penn Jillette film Director’s Cut.

Andrew loved all sorts of obscure bands I’d never heard of, but I was the one who introduced him to Slowdive. We saw three Slowdive shows in Austin, in addition to a King Crimson show and a very intense Filter/Everclear show at Liberty Lunch right after both those bands burst into prominence in the 1990s.

Andrew was a devoted son and brother, who helped care for both his ailing mother and his father James, a literary academic and occasional SDC member who died at age 96 in 2023.

Andrew spent his career as a civil engineer working for the Texas Department of Transportation and related entities. He spent stints in Fort Worth and College Station, but even then frequently drove back to Austin on weekends to see his friends.

I saw Andrew two days before he was murdered, when he came over Saturday to match movies with us, where he saw the giant collection of books someone gave me and we watched the MST3K version of The Crawling Hand.

His murder offers up several bitter ironies. He was a CHL/LTC holder who likely would have survived his assault had he been carrying that day. He owned a condo in the crime hotspot that is downtown Austin but was killed in nominally safe suburban Round Rock. Both his parents were long-lived, and Andrew, who frequently walked several miles a day, probably would have lived to a ripe old age had he not been cut down.

He was a sturdy friend, and I will miss him greatly.

Another Texas pal was the great history podcaster Jack Henneman. His remembrance, in part:

I got to know Andrew only four or five years ago. He had become a fan of the History of the Americans Podcast (of which I am … fond), and invited me to a meet-up of people he thought would be similarly-minded at the Mean Eyed Cat Bar in Austin, which happens to be a short walk from my house.

How did Andrew know they were similarly-minded? They were all fans of The Fifth Column Podcast, which you probably know is libertarian-ish, at least insofar as its hosts are intellectually consistent free market and free speech types who cannot abide the current versions of the Republicans and Democrats. Their fans are loyal, and their meet-ups, formal and informal, involve smart people who have a good sense of humor sharing ideas and laughs. That was high cotton for Andrew.

Anyway, Andrew was by no means one of my closest friends, but I had drinks with him 2-3 times a year, mostly at the MEC, and he had been over to the house a few times, and I would run into him at virtually any event in the libertarian ecosystem in Austin, whether for FIRE, Reason Weekend, or the University of Austin. People in all these organizations knew Andrew, and he was universally liked as a generous and kind fellow who never had a bad word to say about anybody. We need more of such people, and now we’ve lost one.

There will be a gathering at the Mean Eyed Cat this Monday at 7 p.m., organized by Iowahawk. Who, in his Car ID Service posting of today, writes:

It’s a melancholy day at Dave’s Car ID Service, as we bid farewell to one of our most frequent and valued contributors - Andrew Wimsatt. […]

I think our mutual friend @AnnaZ perfectly summed up Andrew as “everybody’s biggest fan.” His various fandoms include countless bands, visual artists, podcasters, @wethefifth, @reason, @uaustinorg, and @TheFIREorg. And I am humbled that one of his fandoms was Dave’s Car ID Service.

You may have noticed from reading the various tributes to him over the past few days his adjectives: kind, generous, warm, positive, never had an unkind word about anyone. All true. But he seldom spoke about himself, despite having a very distinguished career as a civil engineer in road materials research. He was far more interested in talking about you, with zero expectation of anything in return. He was the least transactional person in a hyper-transactional world.

If you were lucky enough to have Andrew as a fan he was generous with his time and support, and in my case, that support included loads of his old family photos with mystery cars. I can’t fully repay my debt to him for that.

But I’d like to dedicate this episode of Dave’s Car ID Service to him, and use those photos to illustrate the life a genuine mensch.

Our own Ileana Knollenberg expands on some of those themes:

Busty was incredibly competent, accomplished, and knowledgeable, yet in conversation he mostly asked others about themselves. He was heavily involved in raising and caring for his much younger brother, and cared for his ailing mother to the very end. He traveled all over the country to be with people whose company he enjoyed, without fanfare. In @wethefifth circles, we just expected him to be there, and he usually was. He gave his time, energy, and effort to various groups of people just because, and I don’t think he realized his contribution was unusual or extraordinary. We met in person less than a dozen times, yet he remembered details about me, and would ask about my daughters and my work as if he were personally acquainted with them. He never missed an opportunity to offer genuine appreciation, and he had a special way of making one feel important and loved instantly.

All the tributes I’m seeing from people who were tangentially connected with him make it clear that his goodness was transcendent, independent of tribal, geographical, or familial allegiances. Having met Andrew has made my, and many other people’s lives, richer. That’s a legacy to aspire to.

Is it time to embed a 2017 Andrew Wimsatt lecture on pavement design? Hell yes it is:

As importantly, here’s a video of his band, the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, prog-rocking their song “Solitary” in a park:

Fox News has been doing a good job remembering and honoring Andrew. Gutfeld and Kat Timpf and Tyrus and Kennedy have all tweeted tributes. As I told Timpf Thursday (and which she knew better than I!), Andrew loved her & her work so damned much.

Other tributes have come from Fifdom faves Liz Wolfe, Nancy Rommelmann, Kat Rosenfield, Greg Lukianoff, Nick Gillespie, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Peter Meijer, and no doubt countless more.

I hope that all of us, starting with me, can take from Andrew’s example inspiration to become a better and more cheerful and selfless person. There is a giant and gentle hole in our community that will never be filled, but the more we try the more we’ll remember our dearly departed friend. RIP Busty.