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Man Who Made It Snow In Tampa Dies At 82

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By STEVE OTTO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 29, 2008

Every town should have a Howard Hilton, even if it ends up costing you more than you counted on, including 46 separate lawsuits in the famous "Snow Incident."

Hilton died Sunday at age 82 and there will be a memorial service Saturday at 11 a.m. at St. John's Episcopal Church in Hyde Park. There will be plenty to remember.

Hilton was from that special generation and served his time in the Pacific on a Navy destroyer. I'm not all that sure how he got from those sultry days in the Pacific to an 8-foot-high ice cube and a stewed Santa, but that's what's so great about this country.

The young veteran, recently married to his bride, Dorothy, had come to Florida after the war and had taken a job with the late Maas Brothers department stores as a copywriter in their advertising department. He moved up the ladder until he was director of all the Maas Brothers stores in the state.

Eventually Hilton left the company and went on to start his own advertising agency, teaming up with Bill Gray in 1958. "He wasn't afraid to try anything," says Gray, who is laid up at home with a bad back.

Tampa And The New South

Hilton came along at a time when Tampa was on the fringe of changing from a sleepy, blue-collar Southern town into one of those New South cities that exploded in the '60s and '70s. It was a time when there was more of a civic involvement in the city; something you don't see as much of today as we try to let government do it.

He founded a group he called "The Tampa Plan Committee," and came up with a booster campaign they called "Tampa Bright or Tampa Blight," which gets us to the Snow Incident.

You see, Hilton had this P.T. Barnum promoter instinct about him. I mean years later he would be the guy who handled the opening ceremonies and program for the Bucs' first game.

But it was in 1958 that he and his fellow boosters came up with a plan to bring people into downtown Tampa. Those shoppers who used to patronize the downtown stores were beginning to do their business out in the suburbs at the giant malls opening up across the area. The merchants association naturally went to Hilton.

Hilton had graduated from Dartmouth and figured what the city needed was a winter carnival. What he would do was shut off five blocks of Franklin Street and cover it with a blanket of snow. Not only that, there would be a ski slope, Santa and the world's largest Christmas tree.

You know, it must have seemed like such a great idea. You can almost see the small group gathered over lunch talking about how they were going to transform downtown into a winter paradise.

The first sign that it might not work came when the tree being shipped from Wisconsin by train snapped in half as the train rounded a bend in Indiana. The governor of Wisconsin said to try again, but the bulldozer sent out into the woods sank in a quagmire and wasn't able to be retrieved until spring.

A Tampa Tannenbaum

Another tree was shipped, this one from Duluth, Minn. It sank into a Tampa street and went through a sewer, sending goo oozing into the streets.

A Norwegian skier, imported for the event, came down the slope in front of thousands of awed Tampa residents. Unfortunately, a bunch of University of Tampa students had sneaked up the slope the night before with a toboggan and knocked off the snow. When the skier came flying down, he hit the chicken wire and went flying head over heels.

That night, several Tampa residents were arrested for throwing ice balls, breaking windows in stores. It went downhill from there.

An ice skater putting on a show lost her skate and it went into the crowd, slashing a bystander in the head.

A giant ice cube slipped off its stand and pinned a 5-year-old girl.

A Santa, hired to mingle with the kiddies, mingled with some booze first and had to be hauled off. Another Santa found he could sneak through a dressing room into a neighboring jewelry store and nearly cleaned out the place.

Deer, shipped in for the show, escaped and went dashing around the downtown area. And in the unseasonable hot Florida sun, the snow melted and turned to slush.

All in all, it was unquestionably the greatest show to ever come to town. Hilton went on to have a great career, but for some reason they never asked him to make it snow in Tampa again.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

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