An Incident on Cumberland Avenue

On the morning of February 1, 1965, the temperature in Knoxville, Tennessee, fell to 15°, and a mean dose of sleet, rain, and wind began to whip the city. Southerners hate this kind of weather more than Northerners, because they are less accustomed to it. They grumble more than Northerners; they curse more; their tempers grow shorter. When the sleet began to turn to snow around noon, and the weather bureau predicted a six-inch fall, the county schools closed for the day, and the city schools followed suit shortly, sending their pupils home at 1:30. As stalled cars began jamming the roads, everybody resigned themselves to a miserable day.

Records show that the Knoxville police received 117 phone calls requesting assistance during the afternoon and evening: 50 of the calls concerned traffic problems of varying degrees of severity, one of which was a seven-car collision on Kensington Pike; 67 of the phone calls were complaints by motorists who had been pelted by snow-balls by University of Tennessee students on Cumberland Avenue, a four-lane throughway which passes in the middle of the campus and joins US Highway 11.

Cumberland Avenue has a difficult hill in its 1700 block adjacent to the university, and a special patrolman was sent to handle traffic problems there, but the city police took no action about the student snowballing, assuming that the university’s private police could handle that, as they had in the past.

Subsequent investigations revealed that the campus police broke up the snowballing at 3:45 that afternoon, but that it had resumed around 4 p.m. The campus police never returned to the scene, being too busy helping faculty members navigate the hills of the campus, many of them in cars which were, Southern fashion, unequipped with snow chains. The Knoxville policeman was on the other side of the hill from the snowballing.

French Harris has been Knoxville’s Chief of Police for five years and was a detective for 19 years before that. Many people now want to blame him for what happened that day on Cumberland Avenue, but he has been a cop too long to be overly sensitive to criticism. A burly 50, he started as a motorcycle officer, attended the FBI National Police Academy, and worked for three years with the US Narcotics Bureau. He is popular in Knoxville and popular at the university also. Students know that he will not insist on collecting the towaway fee on an illegally parked car if the driver’s hard-luck story is convincing to him. They gripe about the severity of his enforcement of the laws against serving liquor to minors, but about nothing else.

Chief Harris has stood trial for murder twice. Each time he shot an escaping suspect; each time he was acquitted and returned to the force. He is known for his compassion and for his attempt to be fair within the limits of the law.

“I sat on the defendant’s side of the courtroom twice,” he has said. “I know what it feels like over there.”

He took morphine once before going to work with the Narcotics Bureau.

“I wanted to find out what an addict is looking for,” he explains. “It’s not enough to arrest a man. I want to understand him. Maybe, then, I can help him. And maybe I won’t have to arrest him again.”

French Harris attended a seminar on civil rights at New York University two years ago, to find out what that is all about. He is a man who wants to understand, and to be fair.

At 3:30 that afternoon a man named Roland Lawson drove through the blizzard and the student snowball gauntlet on Cumberland Avenue. Lawson, 58, was a welder at Fulton Sylphon Company in Knoxville and had left work early to have snow chains put on his car.

Roland Lawson had high blood pressure and had been warned by his doctor that undue excitement or strain might bring on a heart attack. The students on Cumberland Avenue pelted his car with snowballs as thoroughly as they pelted all the other cars passing.

Lawson drove half a block further, after passing this gauntlet, and slumped unconscious behind his wheel. The car drove off the road into a telephone pole and came to a stop. Pedestrians called an ambulance and, a few minutes before 4 p.m., Roland Law-son was declared dead of a heart attack at University Hospital.

Nobody at the hospital knew about the snowball gauntlet Lawson had passed, and French Harris did not hear about this incident for several hours. Nor did he hear that the widow of Roland Lawson had to drive through Cumberland Avenue on her way to the hospital and that her car was also plastered with snowballs by the students, severely angering and frightening her.

And French Harris did not learn, until too late, that when Mrs. Lawson saw her husband’s body at the hospital and learned where his heart attack had occurred, she immediately pronounced the theory which was to be carried all over the country by the press on the following day: Roland Lawson’s heart attack had been caused by the student snowballing.

Chief Harris did not know this theory at 4:30 p.m., when Mrs. Lawson pronounced it. If he had heard it at the time, he might have acted sooner. If he had, Knoxville would not have found itself with two more corpses to explain.

At 9 a.m. that morning, Frank Wasserman was awakening his roommate, Marland Goodman, at New Melrose Hall, one of the most modern buildings in the University of Tennessee. Both boys were 18 and Northerners—Wasserman from Massapequa, Long Island, and Goodman from Swam-scott, a fashionable suburb of Boston—and they had been close friends ever since the Snipe Hunt.

The Snipe Hunt is an old tradition at the university. The students are mostly natives of Tennessee, but about 10 per cent of them come from out-of-state and from 85 foreign countries. When each new freshman class arrives, these outlanders hear about the wonderful Snipe Hunt.

The snipe is the most delicious bird of all, they are told, even better than the pheasant, and the woods outside of Knoxville are full of them. When the night of the snipe hunt arrives, most of the outlanders are eager to join. The natives lead them out into the woods and then simply lose them there.

There is no such bird as the snipe. Marty Goodman and Frank Wasserman had been among a group of Northerners who went on a snipe hunt in September, 1964, and, lost in the dark in an unfamiliar woods 1,000 miles from home at 3 o’clock in the morning, their status as Northern aliens had drawn them together.

They had learned something about courage and humor and loneliness and each other. We think of the snipe hunt, or the biscuit-gun which Air Force recruits are sometimes sent to look for, or the can of striped paint which apprentices in the building trades are asked to fetch, as mere pranks, but anthropologists call these rites “ordeals of initiation” and say that they provide a catharsis of shame and anxiety necessary to mark a transition from one stage of life to another. The Snipe Hunt meant something of this sort to Wasserman and Goodman.

Of the two boys, Marty Goodman was somewhat better known on the campus. His collection of folk records and folk sheet-music was large, and he was an enthusiastic folk guitarist. He would sooner talk about folk music than about any of his college subjects.

This morning, however, he was not talking about folk music, but about his girlfriend, Judy Goldberg, back in Boston, and complaining about how much he missed her. Frank Wasserman remembered that afterwards.

Marty Goodman also mentioned his mid-term paper for English 112. He had really sweated over this one, and hoped to get an A. He had received two C’s and a B-minus on his previous papers in that class. Today at 3 o’clock he would get back his midterm paper and find out if he had achieved the A he aimed for. Frank Wasserman remembered that later, also.

At 2:15 that afternoon, Julian Harris was in his office at the university. A gangling, Lincolnesque 50, Mr. Harris is director of Public Relations for the university. It’s the kind of job that keeps you awake nights. Like every other college town, Knoxville seethes with hostility toward the students and regards them as overeducated juvenile delinquents.

Knoxville, also, is the South: When you enter town on Route 11 you pass a sign saying SAVE THE REPUBLIC—IMPEACH EARL WARREN! and the John Birch Society meets in the Hotel Farragut in midtown, and you occasionally see a car still wearing a sign, bitter in defeat, saying “AuH₂O—64.”

In such an ambience, any university must be viewed with suspicion. When Chief Harris noted that the sleet was turning to snow, he thought at once of the student volunteers who help stalled motorists on Cumberland Avenue during every snowstorm. He hoped that the students would be at that job today; it would be good for the university’s image.

By 2:30 the weather was so bad that Dean of Students Charles Lewis, in his office in the administration building, told his secretary to take the rest of the day off. Dean Lewis, a sandy-haired man of 46 addicted to dapper bow-ties, remained in his office for a conference, scheduled for 4 o’clock, with four student leaders—a conference concerning the students’ objections to the university’s new service fees.

He intended to give them great leeway in stating their resentment, listen sympathetically as long as they cared to harangue him, and not reduce the fees a penny. It would be a grueling session.

Looking out his window, Dean Lewis noticed some students engaged in a harmless snowball fight. Smiling, he remembered the smaller snow of a week earlier and his own surrender to temptation crossing the yard in the morning. It is a good feeling, even when you are 46, to pick up a handful of snow, pack it tight and hard, and hurl it at a tree. And, when you are 46, it is good to hit the tree. Dean Lewis was glad, however, that none of the students had observed his outburst.

The students seen by Dean Lewis were not the only ones on the campus who were beginning to succumb to the insidious temptation of the snow. Down on West Cumberland two teams had formed on opposite sides of the Avenue and were bombarding each other over the tops of the passing cars.

Some, more venturesome, were beginning to pelt the cars also. This is a favorite juvenile sport and most of us have had our cars pelted this way once or twice every winter. Some of us are even willing to remember having done some of the pelting when we were young.

Soon over 200 students had joined in the fun. None of them noticed the effect of their snowballing on Roland Lawson.

Further up Cumberland Avenue, on the other side of the hill, students were helping stalled cars get started again. Julian Harris, the PR man, driving his secretary home, noticed them, and felt a sigh of relief at the good image they were creating for the university. He did not know about the image being created on the other side of the hill.

The Knoxville police, however, were already getting an earful of that image.

J. M. Lobetti, President of the White Star Bus Lines, called the police to report that students on West Cumberland had broken 12 windows in a stalled bus at 3 p.m., forced open the door and bombarded the driver, Robert Holder, in the face.

An anonymous cab driver complained of seeing a woman dragged out of her car and pulled by the heels through the snow. “Her pants must’ve gotten full of snow,” he said. “It was awful.”

John Rinehart complained that his car had received a broken window, snow was poured in “all over the front seat,” and that students had “manhandled” him when he opposed them.

And—in another part of town—university track students snowballed a Negro driver and he went off the road into a ditch. This last case was quickly smoothed over, however. Track coach Frank Rowe was on the scene and he forced students to contribute $50 for repairs of the vehicle and apologize to the driver.

As the mean, cold snow continued to fall, the student mob on Cumberland Avenue increased to more than 400. The air was resounding with skids, stalled motors groaning, drivers cursing, and the hilarious shrieking and laughing of the students.

Patrolman Davis Gaddis, a block away over the hill, was continually approached by motorists with complaints about the gauntlet they had run. He told them, quite correctly, that he could not leave his post, and instructed them to phone police headquarters.

Once or twice, students ranging this far east pelted Patrolman Gaddis himself, an act perhaps profoundly symbolic.

None of the students were “thinking,” of course; they were just having fun. But the fun, more and more, was taking on a ritual character, a character of assault upon every manifestation of adult authority. It was inevitable that a policeman, also, would become a target. A policeman represents the most monolithic form of authority: the State.

Frank Wasserman, the freshman from Massapequa, was studying in his room at 4 o’clock when Marty Goodman burst in, announcing that several snowball fights were in progress all over the campus and he wanted to get in on the action.

Marty had just had a serious disappointment. Trudging almost a mile across campus to Science Hall for his English 112 class, he had found a notice that class was canceled for that day. His teacher, Mrs. Nancy Fisher, a resident of Oakland, Tenn., had bogged down in the snow and turned back home. Marty would have to wait until Wednesday to learn whether or not he had gotten the A he aimed for on his midterm paper.

Frank loaned Marty a scarf, but declined to join him in the snow carnival. “I want to study for a while more,” he said. “I’ll be out later.”

Frank Wasserman was never able to remember what he studied that afternoon. A little after 6, he gave up for the day and went out to look for action. He found some of it, immediately, at the door of Melrose Hall, where a gang of seven pelted him with an avalanche of snowballs.

Unable to hold his own against these superior numbers, Frank ran, looking for friends. After getting around the corner, he slowed to a walk. Then, suddenly, a student he didn’t know ran up to him and said, “You better get back to Melrose Hall. They’ll be looking for you. Your roommate’s dead.”

“I laughed,” Frank Wasserman said later. “I was sure it was a joke. They wanted to get me back to the Hall to make a target out of me again. I was sure of it. I said, ‘Come on, you’re putting me on, fellow.’ ”

The other student was pale and sober. “It’s true,” he said glumly. “Marty’s dead. He just got shot on Cumberland Avenue.”

Frank Wasserman suddenly felt a chill of certainty, and heard himself saying, “Really? Really?” But the other’s face had already told him.

Are you marked with the mark of the beast?

Come down Daniel to the Lion’s den

Come down Daniel and join in the feast…

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Cumberland Avenue, when Marty Good-man arrived there shortly after four, was midway between a carnival and a nightmare. Buses, cars, and trucks were stalling, and somewhere between 400 and 500 students were raining snowballs on the entire scene, while the wind whipped and howled and snow continued to fall.

In one of the stalled trucks, William Douglas Willett, Jr., of Greenville, Tenn., fretted and fumed. He was lost. Trying to save time in the heavy snow, Willett had taken a new route through Knoxville and now he was on a street he didn’t recognize and snowballs were going thump, thump, thump in unending hammer blows on his windshield and he was afraid the wind-shield might break at any minute, and then, suddenly, the cab door was torn open and a dozen grinning faces appeared looking in at him.

He opened his mouth, angry and frightened, to warn them not to go too far, but before he could say anything they began to dump pounds of snow all over him and his seat and he was hit in the face repeatedly and he reached in his glove compartment and took out the pistol provided by his company.

The students saw the gun and Willett made a threat—nobody ever remembered his exact words—and somebody (Willett later said he thought it was Marty Goodman) threw snow in his face and he got out on the running board and somebody else threw snow in his face and then he fired the gun, twice only.

For one moment, nobody moved.

The echo of the shots hung in the air and all the laughing and shouting stopped and every student held his breath to see if he was hit anywhere and then Marty Goodman crumbled and fell hard like a tree and lay still in the snow with a red stain spreading in the snow around him. The other shot had gone completely wild, but this one hit Marty Goodman in the right eye, crashed through his brain, and exited below the left ear.

With a shriek the students charged Willett. According to some witnesses, as many as 20 students landed in one pile on the truckdriver, dragging him to the ground, kicking him, hitting him, screaming. A girl student screamed, “Don’t kill him—he didn’t know what he was doing!”

Willett was finally released and allowed to return to his cab, and the police were called at 5:39, one hour and nine minutes after Mrs. Lawson had made her charge, to the hospital staff, that the students had killed her husband.

Marty Goodman’s body was carried into Evan’s Sundries, a drugstore half a block away. He was breathing. A student named Ken Elrod, 18, from Nashville, gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When the ambulance arrived and Marty Goodman was lifted for the second time, his pulse stopped. Ken Elrod rode in the ambulance to the hospital, but he was not surprised when the doctor in the emergency room, at 6:04 p.m. pronounced Marland Joseph Goodman, 18, a boy who liked folk music, dead on arrival.

The snowballing continued, with greater frenzy. The first two policemen on the scene, Detectives Robert Chadwell and Gene Huskey, were snowballed while helping to lift Goodman’s body into the ambulance.

Chadwell sounded off to the first reporter he saw. “They have no respect for an officer,” he said, “or for anyone else. They don’t act like students. They act like a bunch of idiots. One of the snowballs hit me in the back of the head, and it hurt for 30 minutes or longer.”

William Douglas Willett was taken to police headquarters and questioned by Inspector Fred Scruggs. Willett was “crying like a baby,” Scruggs said later, and kept repeating, “I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean to do it.”

Scruggs learned that Willett was employed by Bird and Cutshaw Produce Company of Greenville, Tenn., and had been driving a load of fresh-dressed poultry to Cincinnati, Ohio. Examination showed that Willett had been bruised on the left temple, nose, and mouth by snowballs, and that his left eye was swollen.

Back at the university, the snowballing was still going on. John F. Roth, a welding truck driver, called police to complain that students on Cumberland Avenue snowballed his truck, jerked open the door, and covered the front seat with snow “with me in it.”

Dean of Students Charles Lewis had finished his conference with the student leaders about fees and was about to leave when word of the Goodman shooting reached him. He went at once to the Student Center, where there were more telephones than in any other campus building, and began trying to handle the situation.

Dean Lewis, first of all, was concerned to authenticate the identification of the dead boy. Five years earlier, while he was Dean at the University of North Dakota, a mis-identification had been made of a student killed in an auto accident—it turned out later that the student had exchanged wallets with another student for some inexplicable student joke—and the wrong parents were notified that their son was dead.

Dean Lewis, therefore, began a search for someone who could positively identify the body as Marland Joseph Goodman.

Phones in the Student Center rang continually and nobody was quite sure that Willett’s second shot hadn’t hit another student. It was chaos. Julian Harris, the PR man, could not get back to the university in the storm, but Dean Lewis directed all reporters to Harris’ home phone number.

A search of the Records Department revealed that Marland Goodman had an uncle, Prof. Fred Blumberg, on the faculty of the English Department. Dean Lewis contacted Prof. Blumberg and told him, gently, that his nephew might be the boy who was shot. Prof. Blumberg agreed to go with Dean Lewis to the hospital to identify the body.

The drive through the increasingly furious snowstorm was painfully slow, and both men were too emotion-torn to speak much. At the hospital, the identification was brief.

“Yes, that’s Marty,” Prof. Blumberg said, when the body was shown.

“I remember that moment every day,” Dean Lewis said a month later, “and I think I always will, as long as I live.”

The sheet was drawn back over the dead boy’s face, and the two men walked silently out of the hospital and back to their car to begin again the painful five-mile-an-hour drive through the still-falling snow.

It was 8:30, and back at the university the snowballing was finally ending, but the incident was far from over.

Frank Wasserman returned late that night to the room he and Marty had shared. He looked at Marty’s guitar, Marty’s books, Marty’s sheet music, Marty’s records, and started to get undressed for bed. He found that he couldn’t sleep in that room.

You read about hundreds, thousands of corpses in the Congo or Vietnam or West Berlin and it means nothing; a boy shares your room for a few months and then suddenly he’s not there and it means something more than you can ever speak.

Frank Wasserman put his clothes back on and got out of that room, fast. He stayed in the room of another freshman, Jack Topchick, of Passaic, N.J., that night.

At the same time, approximately, a man named Walter Lee Yow was checking into the Salvation Army shelter in Knoxville. His head was bothering him, and he complained about being hit, while driving a truck down Cumberland Avenue, behind the ear, by a particularly hard snowball with ice in it. Neither the police nor the university were to hear about Mr. Yow until the following day.

February 2nd began as sheer hell for Dean Lewis and Julian Harris. Local reporters, hearing about Lawson’s heart attack, grew increasingly hostile in their questioning of university officials.

“I could feel an ulcer starting as soon as I heard about Lawson,” Harris said later, “and each reporter made it grow a few millimeters.”

It would have grown even faster if Harris had known that Walter Lee Yow awoke that morning, in the Salvation Army shelter, with his head hurting even more, and called the police to volunteer to testify for Willett. “He shot in self-defense,” Yow said. “Those students were completely out of hand.” Yow agreed to come down to headquarters to make a statement, but said he wanted to see a doctor first.

Dr. Henry Christenberry was the doctor to whom Yow went. A genial 53, he is a native of Knoxville, although he studied at the NYU-Bellevue medical school. Examining the wound behind Yow’s ear, Dr. Christenberry decided that it might be serious. Yow suddenly stood up and began walking about agitatedly, complaining of the pain, and then, very slowly, sank to the floor in a coma.

“Ken, come in here!” Dr. Christenberry shouted. His brother, Dr. Kenneth Christenberry, 49, rushed in from the adjoining office. The two doctors worked over Yow’s body for half an hour, administering oxygen and adrenalin and then, desperately, massaging his heart. It was no use. At 4:30, they pronounced him dead “of multiple concussions and brain damage.”

The University of Tennessee now had three corpses to explain.

And now that the fury of the students was exhausted, the fury of the townspeople began.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel editorialized that night: “Yesterday’s terrifying demonstration by temporary maniacs must never happen again.” The people of Knoxville were even more emphatic, and their letters poured into the papers.

Sam T. Hodges of 712 Boggs Avenue wrote:

Manning B. Kirby, Jr., of 8021 Hayden Drive wrote:

Mrs. Maie Roberts of 2441 Woodbine Avenue wrote:

Mrs. W. G. House of Louden, Tenn., wrote:

Mrs. J. L. Hans of Rockwood, Tenn., wrote:

B. J. Pritchard of 5613 Scenic Hills Road wrote:

And a student named John S. Moak replied in kind, much to the distress of the university officials:

Dean Lewis, sensitive to the town’s emotions, warned students not to write any more such inflammatory letters, but angry correspondence from townspeople continued to pour into the News-Sentinel for two weeks.

On Wednesday, English 112 met without Marty Goodman. Mrs. Nancy Fisher, the teacher, found that she couldn’t remember what young Goodman had looked like; he hadn’t particularly distinguished himself in that class. Returning the midterm papers, she found Goodman’s and saw that she had given him the A he had hoped for.

Meanwhile, a committee was started in Greenville, by Willett’s employer, Cutshaw, and $100,000 was raised for Willett’s defense. Knoxville Police Chief French Harris learned that Willett, a farm boy, was very popular in Greenville, and that his reputation with employers and townspeople was excellent.

“I can understand how that farm boy felt with all those kids throwing snow and ice in his face,” Chief Harris reflected to an inquirer. “I can understand the kids, too,” he added. “They were just having fun. It’s terrible, terrible for everybody.”

But Chief Harris was already ordering a skeptical reevaluation of the Walter Lee Yow death. It seemed unlikely, Harris felt, that a truck driver, such as Yow claimed to be, would be staying at a Salvation Army shelter.

A check of trucking lines that pass through Knoxville failed to reveal any Walter Lee Yow among the employees.

Harris then ordered a check to determine if Yow had entered Knoxville by any other means. A bus driver was finally located who positively identified Yow as a man who had ridden into Knoxville on his bus on February 1st at 2 p.m. The bus had not passed anywhere near Cumberland Avenue.

Where, then, had Yow received his injury? Why had he lied about it? Where did he come from, and what were his motives? Chief Harris has learned a few things, but the major mystery remains.

Walter Lee Yow was a “freight handler”—he wandered about the country taking temporary jobs loading and unloading trucks. Evidently, he regarded his job as less dignified than a driver’s job and was in the habit of calling himself a driver. He had hitched a free ride on the bus by pretending to be a driver whose truck had broken down in the snow. No such truck was ever found. Had he perhaps wandered out to Cumberland Avenue and been struck by a student snowball? Chief Harris had doubts about it: The bus driver recalls that Yow complained about his head pain when he picked him up outside Knoxville over an hour before the snowballing began.

The mystery of Walter Lee Yow may never be solved.

“Maybe he just wanted to get his name in the papers,” Chief Harris says. “Maybe he hoped to get the university to pay for his head injury, wherever he got it. Or maybe the injury affected his brain and he really didn’t know what happened to him.”

Chief Harris shrugged.

“I try to understand everything that comes in this door, but there’s a lot about the human mind I’ll never understand. Violence always brings out some people who get mixed up in it for reasons you never understand, and you wonder if they understand it themselves.”

Perhaps we can hazard a guess at Walter Lee Yow’s motives. The people who wrote indignant letters to the Knoxville News-Sentinel provide a clue as to what drew Yow into the maelstrom of death on Cumberland Avenue. Like them, he saw a great big beautiful orgy of violence, and wanted to involve himself, to impose his own meaning upon it.

His head injury gave him his entrance.

Others had to be satisfied with vicariously pulling the trigger for Willett and defending themselves under the guise of defending him, or, like student Moak, threatening riot if Willett’s corpse were not added to the previous corpses. In one way or another, every man sees his own image in what happened on Cumberland Avenue.

A few things have been learned about Yow. He was a bachelor, 55, and came from Aubermarle, North Carolina. Natives of Aubermarle say that he was “nice to children” and always gave lots of candy away to the children in his neighborhood when he visited home. But nobody knows where he got his head injury, and nobody knows, for sure, why he lied about it.

The police were still investigating, and so was the university. Dean Lewis said that every student definitely identified as being among the snowballers on February 1 would be suspended.

Chief Harris was not optimistic that enough evidence would ever be collected to place definite criminal charges against any student. “College kids stick together and support one another’s stories,” he said. “Like police officers,” he adds ironically.

The university police patrol Cumberland Avenue in every snowstorm now, but that is probably not necessary. The next “incident” of this sort will be at another university, and will be equally unexpected when it strikes.

The University of Tennessee’s students did make the news again before the end of February, however. Eleven of them were arrested on February 23rd for breaking into Chattanooga National Park and stealing a Civil War cannon weighing one-half ton. The cannon is federal property, and the crime is a federal crime.

Boys will be boys.

A few months later—on May 28th, 1965—the Grand Jury of Knoxville County convened and heard the case of the State against William Douglas Willett, truck driver, charged with homicide. After consideration, they refused to “return a True Bill,” which means, legally, that the State had not proven an indictable charge. In other words, a case of felonious homicide “beyond a reasonable doubt” was not supported by the facts. In effect, this verdict meant that Willett must be presumed, legally, to have shot in defense of his life. The truck driver walked out of court a free man, if any man is ever free.

And there it ended.

Why did it all happen? One can only answer as German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg answered in August 1914, when von Bülow asked: “Well, tell me at least how it got started?” According to von Bülow’s memoirs, Bethmann Hollweg “raised his long, thin arms to heaven and answered in a dull exhausted voice, ‘Oh—if I only knew.’ ”

It snowed heavily again this February in Knoxville—one storm covered the streets for a week, January 28th to February 4th—but there were no snowball fights on Cumberland Avenue. When death falls from the air again in this “meaningless” way it could as easily occur among a group of adults, or at a meeting of a government cabinet.