The High-Flying Genius Behind Kaepa Shoes
Breaking a 54-year silence, an ex-priest best known as the creator of the Kaepa brand athletic shoe revealed his role in the UT tower tragedy in the Aug. 6, 2020 edition of the San Antonio Express-News.
Thomas Adams might not have lived to profit from his innovative idea for a new kind of footwear if Charles Whitman had caught him in his sights on that sunny Monday in August 1966. He never spoke publicly about how close he came to being the infamous mass murderer’s twentieth victim until his wife talked him into finally telling his part of the story.
The result was his firstperson account published in the San Antonio Express-News on the 54th anniversary of Charles Whitman’s bloody massacre on the University of Texas campus.
The 34 year Pennsylvanian began by explaining he had been in the Texas capital only six weeks. He was eager to start his new career as a licensed flight instructor while pursuing a second master’s degree in Latin American Studies at UT.
On that fateful day, Adams took a student pilot up in a Cessna-150 to prepare him for his solo. “The tower controller at Robert Mueller Airport assigned us to use Runway 34Left for a series of ‘touch-andgo’ landings, a pattern whose left turns placed our training plane within rifle range of the UT Tower.”
Adams continued: “The student pilot and I tied down the Cessna and went inside the flight-training office where we found the manager, Harvey Vincent, and three flight instructors huddled around a radio.”
He asked Vincent what was happening and got the response, “I guess you wouldn’t know unless the tower controller had advised you.
“Advised me?About what? “There’s someone shooting at people from the UT tower.”
Pressing for more details, Adams inquired, “How long has this been going on?” “Oh, for about 30 minutes or so” was Vincent’s matter-of-fact answer.
It took a moment for that revelation to sink in. When it did, an alarmed Adams raised the obvious question, “Why didn’t the airport tower controllers tell us to land?” Vincent could only shake his head and say, “I don’t know.”
About then two Austin cops burst into the office with a startling request. They wanted to borrow a plane and a pilot to fly a police sharpshooter as close as possible to the top of the tower to take out the sniper.
Vincent dismissed the dangerous idea without a second thought. “I don’t want any of my pilots flying such a mission.”
Pointing out he was the one single pilot on the payroll, Adams expressed a willingness to take the risk. A vigorous debate followed until a news bulletin on the radio made it a moot question.
“The shooter has been shot and is dead,” declared a relieved announcer.
One of eight children in a family that barely scraped by, Thomas Adams picked the priesthood for his profession. Thirteen years at a Maryknoll seminary prepared him for six years as a priest but poor health forced him to find a new calling.
He found it on a Milwaukee tennis court in 1962. In the middle of a match, the shoelace on his right shoe broke. Instead of calling it a day, he tied one piece in the bottom eyelets and the other on the top leaving the middle open. After the match, he noticed that his quick fix had provided him with more support and more comfort.
Jeannie Gratton, a high school economics teacher and his future wife, loaned Adams $350 to apply for a patent. Over the next four years, he wrote letters to every athletic shoe manufacturer in the U.S. and went so far as to visit several in Europe, but no one would give him the time of day.
Forced to start his own company, Adams made little progress and even less money. His big break seemed to come when Mitsubishi gave him an unlimited line of credit for the right to make his dream come true. But the shoes were so bad they were next to worthless, and the bank cut off his line of credit leaving him $2 million in debt.
Despite a generous $400,000 cash bailout from his brother-in-law, Adams soon found himself a month away from bankruptcy. In desperation he reached out to Wolverine, and the rest is history.
The first Kaepas hit the market in 1982, and four years later sales topped $100 million. In 1985 Wolverine made a killing selling Kaepa to another company, and not long after the acquisition Adams went his own independent way.
Tom Adams kept busy with two more shoe-related startups but nothing compared to his phenomenal success with Kaepa. He passed away from a sudden illness at age 89 the year after his Express-News article
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