The Snowball Riot of ‘65

The fatal day, 55 years ago this winter, that Cumberland Avenue was “a carnival and a nightmare”

 

I might introduce this winter’s tale with a disclaimer that you’ve probably heard some version of it before, but it’s just possible you haven’t. Even when I was in college, it was a legend from long ago, a bizarre story told by a few grizzled older boulevardiers of the Strip, and told over a pitcher at the window table at Sam and Andy’s, where you could squint your eyes and peer outside to see where it happened. You never could trust the stories you heard at Sam and Andy’s, but enjoyed them anyway, and retold them later, improving them now and then.

The snowball riot seemed to inhabit the realms more of folklore than of history, even though it had been hardly a dozen years had passed. In fact the story made the newspapers, even the national newspapers, and you can look it up. But don’t trust any given version. The story changed with the days that followed it.

I’ve been telling the story for years. It was already the weirdest snow-related story in Knoxville history, a snowball fight blamed on three very different deaths. With some new research over the holidays, it has gotten weirder. One part of the story, as we read it on the day, and the day after–and as we’ve told it over the years–is very different than what it seemed.

Here’s the short version of the story. On the first day of February, 1965, Knoxville experienced a sudden snowfall worse than the inch or two originally forecast, but whether it was five inches or 15 varies with the account. The University of Tennessee was bigger than it had ever been before, with about 14,000 students, most of whom lived either on campus or a short walk away, in Fort Sanders. That demographic fact had rarely been combined with weather like this.

The disruption can make you wonder about the context of the student unrest of the 1960s. America was anxious about racial unrest, the nuclear-arms race, and a strange new war in Indochina. But it seems likely that even without all those major changes to demonstrate for or against, crazy things would have happened on American campuses anyway. The Baby Boom was going to college. Never before had so many adolescents been concentrated in situations where they so thoroughly outnumbered the adults who were usually in charge.

Snow began falling in the middle of the day on Monday, February 1. The weather bureau predicted a couple of inches, and frigid temperatures close to zero. Some institutions, including UT, closed early. It snowed much more than that, several inches. The combination of freedom and the novelty of a big snow naturally resulted in sledding down the Hill on borrowed garbage-can lids and snowball fights in the streets.

It didn’t take long before snowballs were aimed not at other snowballers, but at cars driven by people who didn’t understand what was going on. An estimated 200 students, 500 by some accounts, mainly males, enjoyed the rare anarchy, throwing snowballs at anything that moved, then going further, breaking one boundary to push at another.

Several motorists complained of broken windows. One bus driver claimed snowballers broke 12 windows in his bus and then forced the door open to throw more snow inside. A policeman trying to control traffic at Seventeenth Street had to retreat when he was pelted with snowballs. The police got 117 calls for help that afternoon, 67 of them from Cumberland Avenue motorists. But police cruisers were pelted as thoroughly as old ladies’ DeSotos. Nobody could do much about it.

Gangs of young men coordinated to pick up small cars, with the helpless driver inside, and turn them around.

One reporter remarked that the scene of pocket anarchy was something “midway between a carnival and a nightmare.”

One man named Roland Lawson, 58, had an especially bad time of it. A longtime employee of the Fulton Sylphon factory on Third Creek had just gotten off work early, at 3:00. The safety-minded father of five, grandfather of 12, wanted to get chains for his tires before things got any worse. Eastbound on Cumberland, he “ran the gauntlet” of unexpected snowballers, and had just emerged on the other side when he ran into a utility pole at the foot of the Hill. A state trooper on the scene found him dead in his car. At UT Hospital, doctors determined he had died of a heart attack. When his wife was called to the hospital, she was pelted by snowballs, too. “It was awful,” she said. She blamed her husband’s death on shock.

About two hours later, a tractor-trailer truck drove along the same route, bound for Cincinnati with a load of frozen chickens. Behind the wheel was a young man named William Douglas Willett. Son of a tenant farmer—he helped his dad in Greene County with the farm—he had a perfect driving record. Driving up from Georgia, he was stymied by the snow, and tried to dead-reckon an alternate route for his rig eastbound along Knoxville’s Highway 70. Unfamiliar with Cumberland Avenue, he stopped for a red light at Seventeenth Street, and got pelted with snowballs. Accounts of what happened next demonstrate little other than how fallible witnesses can be. Some say he got out of his cab, shouting his displeasure with the snowballing and holding a .22 pistol, took deliberate aim at a fleeing young man, and fired. Others claimed Willett was forcefully pulled out of his cab and attacked with snowballs and shot wildly in self-defense.

What’s known is that at some point the driver fired a shot toward the students. The one he hit was a freshman from Massachusetts named Marnell Goodman, an 18-year-old folk-music guitarist. He was carried into a nearby drugstore, Evans Sundries, where volunteers tried to keep him alive. An ambulance arrived and got him to Fort Sanders Hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival.

Meanwhile, Willett, his face swollen by the beating he’d gotten from the crowd, was arrested for murder. At age 27, he was not much older than the students, and according to police, “cried like a baby” when he learned he had caused a death. He said he didn’t know what this mob was up to, feared for his life, and fired what he thought was a warning shot.

The next day brought news of a third death from the same icy riot. A man named Walter Lee Yow said he was also a truckdriver who’d been right behind Willett’s truck. He was 55, driving another load of frozen poultry from Georgia to Lexington, by one version. When he saw what happened, he got out to help, and was hit in the side of the head with an especially hard-packed snowball that may have had a rock in it.

The icy blow badly hurt Yow’s ear, and, he said, gave him such a terrible headache that the next day he sought help at the Christenberry Infirmary on Church Avenue in downtown Knoxville. It was a respected ear, nose, and throat clinic near Walnut Street, fondly known for its 70-year-old lobby parrot, Bobby. Yow told them he couldn’t pay for their services, but the doctors agreed to see him anyway. They observed Yow had a head injury, and gave him some drugs to help with the pain. As he got up to leave Yow fainted. Doctors tried to keep him alive, but finally pronounced him dead. A medical examiner gave the preliminary assessment that he had suffered a cracked skull when he was hit with a projectile, and died of a concussion.

That’s the story you get from the early news reports, and the story I wrote about 40 years ago, in a story for the UT Daily Beacon. The “snowball orgy” resulted in three deaths: one from heart attack, one from gunshot, and one by a direct hit from a snowball.

As word of the deaths got around, campus sobered up quickly.

The incident divided the community. Some local drivers who had survived the “gauntlet” declared that if they’d been carrying guns, they would have shot the snowballers, too. Knoxville argued about the culpability of the scared young truckdriver unexpectedly attacked by strangers who shot and killed a teenager, versus the Massachusetts freshman who may or may not have been a leader of the snowball assault.

But the plight of Yow, no college boy but a poor working man, the Good Samaritan killed when he got out of his cab to try to help, seemed a simpler story, with a purely innocent victim, and elicited the sympathy of the community. UT President Andy Holt pledged $100 to an effort to raise money to bury Yow with his family in Albemarle, and UT’s student council immediately launched a popular effort to raise more. The police appealed to the public to help them find the assailant, floating the idea of a reward for information leading to an arrest. In days to come, the state legislature in Nashville postponed some regular business to consider legislation to ban the hurling of snowballs in Tennessee.

However, as detectives looked into the third dead man’s story, that innocent bystander was the one who started to look fishy.

In that week’s records, Yow’s identity seems a fluid thing. The first time he’s referred to in the News-Sentinel, Yow is described as a pre-law student who witnessed the violence from his second-floor apartment, but somehow got struck in the ear by a snowball. That was apparently a reporter’s mix-up. Yow described himself as a truck driver, passing through, heading either to Lexington or Minneapolis, or both. That wasn’t exactly true, either. Acquaintances contacted by police revealed that Yow liked to describe himself as a truckdriver, but he was really a freight handler or “helper,” who assisted in loading and unloading trucks.

In the final day of his life, Yow had called the KPD, offering himself as a witness to the Willett murder case. They found him very hard of hearing. Yow told them Willett was attacked first, and described the snowballers climbing onto his cab to open his door.

But no one on the scene remembered Yow, and few remembered seeing a second truck at the scene. What happened to it? Yow said that because he was injured, his partner drove it on to Lexington to leave Yow to recuperate in Knoxville. In attempting to contact Yow’s partner, a potential witness, they tried to reach the Norfolk-based truck line called Motor Freight, indicated on Yow’s ID, but found no evidence that such a company existed.

And then there was the fact that Yow stayed not in a cheap hotel, but at the Salvation Army, which was then on Wall Avenue, near Market Square. To police, that refuge for the homeless seemed an odd place to find an employed truck driver. How was it that Yow’s partner–or truck line–would abandon him in Knoxville with a head injury, a terrible headache, and no money at all?

At the Salvation Army, Yow told attendants he was driving from Norfolk to Minneapolis, not from Georgia to Lexington, as he’d told police. At some point he implied he’d been hauling grapefruit, not frozen chickens.

Then they made contact with a Trailways bus driver, potentially a valuable witness to the snowball riot. He had driven the regular bus from Chattanooga right through the thick of the mob, right about the time of the shooting. Yes, he said, his bus had been pelted with snowballs on Cumberland, but didn’t suffer any damage or injury to his passengers. It was more than an hour before the shooting.

But here’s the thing. The Trailways driver recognized Yow from the picture in the paper. He said the stocky, dark-complected man had gotten on his bus in Chattanooga and ridden into Knoxville as a passenger. He had sat up front, and the two had talked along the two-hour route. He said Yow talked to some women on the bus, saying he’d never been married, and feared he was getting too old for it.

If Yow saw any of the snowball fracas, it was from a warm, safe seat inside the bus. Once they got past “the gauntlet,” the driver said, the bus stalled near Henley, just four blocks short of the station. He said Yow got out and eagerly helped stranded motorists having a hard time getting a purchase on the icy street. He really did have the Good Samaritan in him. As the bus was being repaired, he helped with that, too. At the time of the shooting, several witnesses attested, Yow was indeed on Cumberland Avenue, but seven or eight blocks east of the scene, helping motorists, occasionally getting back on the bus to warm up. It was impossible that he could have witnessed the murder as he said.

By 6:00 that evening, he was a few blocks farther east, at the Trailways station, where he stretched out on a bench and took a nap. It was then on Main Street, at the corner of Gay. In a locker there, police found Yow’s luggage, a suitcase with some trucker-type uniforms in it, but no further clues.

But by that time, police were learning lots of things about Yow. One was that the 55-year-old was very ill, with several disorders of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys, some of them potentially serious. They also learned that he had a rap sheet, with police charges from Florida to Indiana, where he’d been accused of everything from check kiting to murder. He’d done time in prison. And on some occasions in the past, he had offered himself as a false witness.

No one in 1965 seemed to remember it, but Yow had gained some national attention, eleven years earlier, when he claimed to have witnessed the abduction, rape, and murder of a seven-year-old girl in Miami, even suggesting that he was complicit in that crime, himself. The whole nation was following the 1954 case, and his name and even his photograph appeared in hundreds of newspapers. Florida police interrogated Yow, and determined that he was making it all up. But that crime was never solved.

Although Knoxville papers never refer to Yow’s ethnicity, in Florida he often claimed to be “four-thirds Cherokee.” In the ’50s, a less ethnically sensitive time, Florida police had dubbed him “Chief Crazy Horse.”

The Knoxville Journal was following the ever-changing story of Walter Lee Yow until, the week after his death, a previously cooperative police detective responded, “You don’t want to look into that anymore”–but added “The story Yow told about being hit with a snowball is a lie.” Other officers responded with no comment.

What they probably learned before the Knoxville public was that Yow’s revealed medical conditions, along with the results of his autopsy, conducted at UT Hospital, caused the medical examiner to reconsider his verdict that his death came due to a fractured skull. He had a head injury, and a punctured eardrum—but the head injury had dirt and bits of rock in it, not what you’d expect from a snowball unless it was packed with dirt and rock. Detectives speculated that he might have been injured before the snowball riot. Yow had died from his medical problems, along with the medications—painkillers, perhaps—given him at the Christenberry Infirmary. The unnamed drugs, they said, would probably not have caused his death under ordinary circumstances, but his extraordinary assortment of illnesses, caused a reaction was enough to kill him.

On his death certificate, only recently made a public document, Yow’s death was due to a “hyper-reactive state to drugs,” with secondary contributing factors “emphysema and asthma” and “coronary artery disease,” with further mention of “chronic renal disease.” It was not his head injury–snowball-inflicted or not–that caused Yow’s death.

Only after all that was an additional factor added, “trauma to ear, infection and bleeding, followed by drugs.” On the back of the document is the scrawl, “Date and place of acc. [accident, presumably] was never determined on this man.”

We remember his name today only because of a murder he didn’t witness and a snowball that didn’t kill him.

Various parts of the story were covered in national papers, including the New York Daily News. After a few weeks, Knoxville, perhaps puzzled, stopped talking about it much. About a year later, Paul Krassner’s unconventional publication, The Realist, ran a full account of it all as a cover story, “The Fatal Snowball Fights on Cumberland Avenue.” It’s probably the longest and most interesting piece ever published about the Snowball Orgy.

Its author was offbeat journalist Robert Anton Wilson, whose name may ring a bell. By the ’70s, he was a well-known novelist and author of philosophy whose popular books brought him something more than a cult following. Along with Timothy Leary and a few others, Wilson (1933-2007) represented “the counterculture of the counterculture.” His prevailing theme, equally unsettling to the Left and the Right, that reality was unknowable.

He was not yet famous when he was reporting in Knoxville, but may have encountered some early intimations of that “agnostic” philosophy in Knoxville covering the story of the snow riots.

Although it’s riddled with little errors, the thoughtful story, or essay, included surprising insights about the kaleidoscopic perspectives of witnesses. “In one way or another, every man sees his own image in what happened on Cumberland Avenue,” Wilson wrote.

One might assume a counterculture journalist to take the side of the students against the police, the administration, and the pistol-packing truck driver, but Wilson didn’t. He interviewed KPD Chief French Harris, the tough-as-nails former motorcycle cop and detective who had twice been accused of murder, but proved himself not guilty. Wilson presents the police chief as the Buddha-like calm center of the story.

Harris said he sympathized with all sides, and remarked on the unknowability of the complicated scene.

“College kids stick together and support one another’s stories,” he remarked, with an aside that Wilson took to be ironic: “Like police officers.”

Chief Harris speculated about Yow’s strange story. “Maybe he just wanted to get his name in the papers. Maybe he wanted the university to pay for his injury, wherever he got it. Or maybe the injury affected his brain, and he really didn’t know what happened to him. I try to understand everything that comes in this door, but there’s a lot about the human mind I’ll never understand.”

Chief Harris articulated the philosophy that Wilson became famous for.

Wilson remarked that the police were promising to beef up patrols on Cumberland, but added a prediction about our habit of trying to prepare for specific disasters after they happen.

“The next ‘incident’ of this sort will be at another university, and will be equally unexpected when it strikes.”

There would be a lot of unexpected incidents on college campuses across the country over the next five years.

By Jack Neely, Knoxville History Project