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Sixty years ago today, August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman wheeled a footlocker on a dolly into the University of Texas Main Building in Austin and rode the elevator toward the top. Inside were a Remington 700, an M1 carbine, a pump rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, three handguns and roughly 700 rounds. Also canned food, water and a transistor radio. He was 25, an engineering student and a former Marine sharpshooter. He had picked the highest ground in central Texas and packed to stay. He killed the 28th floor receptionist, Edna Townsley, who was only there because she had swapped shifts so a friend could take a vacation. Then a family from Texarkana came up the stairs to see the view and he fired a shotgun into them at close range. At 11:48 a.m. he stepped onto the deck, 231 feet up, and began shooting people who from that height were not people to him at all. The night before, Whitman killed his mother Margaret and his wife Kathy in their beds and left notes with the bodies. He wrote that he did not understand what was compelling him, that he was a victim of unusual and irrational thoughts and crushing headaches, and he asked that his brain be examined after his death. Four months earlier he had told the university psychiatrist he was thinking about going up on the tower with a deer rifle and shooting people. He never came back for a second appointment. The autopsy found a glioblastoma near his amygdala. Governor Connally’s commission said it may have contributed but could not be proven. He was also heavy on amphetamines, deep in debt, and raised by a violent father. Sixty years of argument and nobody has settled it. He planned it too carefully for the tumor to be the whole answer, and he warned people too clearly for the warning to be the only thing that failed. His first shot hit Claire Wilson, 18 and eight months pregnant. Her unborn son died. His second killed her boyfriend Tom Eckman as he bent over her. She lay on blistering pavement for close to ninety minutes. A stranger named Rita Starpattern crawled out and lay down beside her in the open, not to move her, just so she would not die alone. Two teenagers, James Love and John Fox, finally ran into the fire and carried her out. Nothing like this had happened in America before, so people improvised. Students went for their deer rifles and started shooting at the deck. They could not hit a man behind limestone at that height, but they drove him off the parapet and forced him to fire through the drain spouts, which cut his view to slivers and let the wounded be pulled off the mall. Officer Billy Speed took cover behind a stone balustrade. A bullet found the gap between two columns and killed him. Patrolman Ramiro Martinez went into the building and started climbing. Houston McCoy caught up. Jerry Day came too. So did Allen Crum, a Co-op employee and Air Force veteran with no badge and no business being there, who had already knelt in the street to stop the bleeding in a wounded paperboy’s leg. Someone handed Crum a rifle and deputized him on the spot. They climbed the last flights past the dead, shoved aside the desk he had jammed against the door, and came out. Crum fired around a corner. The noise pushed Whitman toward the northwest corner where Martinez and McCoy were waiting. Martinez emptied his .38. McCoy put two loads of buckshot into him. 1:24 p.m. Every tactical unit in American policing traces back to that stairwell. Remember them today: Margaret Whitman Kathy Leissner Whitman Edna Townsley, 51 Marguerite Lamport, 45 Mark Gabour, 16 Baby Boy Wilson Thomas Eckman, 18 Robert Boyer, 33 Thomas Ashton, 22 Thomas Karr, 24, killed running to help someone else Paul Sonntag, 18 Claudia Rutt, 18 Harry Walchuk, 38, father of six Roy Dell Schmidt, 29 Officer Billy Paul Speed, 24 Karen Griffith, 17, died a week later David Gunby, died in 2001, ruled the seventeenth homicide Thirty-one more were wounded. The tower still stands, and it still lights up orange.

My surgeon sent me home with a flash drive of my actual surgery. Do I watch it?

The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day is deliciously arcane: It was 60 years ago today, on Saturday, July 29, 1966, that the first Batman movie debuted at the Paramount Theater in Austin. Paramount Pictures had agreed to the debut after Austin's Glastron Boat Company agreed to build, free of charge, the fancy boat used in the movie. The event drew press and publicity folks from all over. There was a parade down Congress avenue, a sold-out matinee show for youth in the afternoon and a sold-out show for adults that evening. On hand were Batman (Adam West), Robin (Burt Ward), Cat Woman (Lee Meriweather), Penguin (Burgess Meredith), and Joker (Cesar Romero). The boat, still fully functional, went up for auction in 2014. The movie is silly, campy fun, as was the TV series.