Memories of snowball fights

I was watching a youtube recording of Bill Cosby on the Dean Martin Show (boy, does that age me, thinking about that). Of course, I started watching Bill Cosby on the Jack Parr Show, which was even earlier in the history of American television. Mr. Cosby looked kind of nervous and his patter wasn't as slick as it was in the later recording on the Dean Martin Show.

At any rate, Bill Cosby was telling a story about snow ball fights on the streets of Philadelphia in his childhood. He was describing the various types of snowballs: the dry, fluffy type which does little damage and the slushball which can hurt because it contains ice.

I remember one Winter in Dunwoody when a bunch of us got involved in a snowball fight and I got hit in the eye with a slushball. Those things out to be outlawed. It caught me right in the corner of my eye and stung quite a bit. I don't think the guy who threw that thing was much of a gentleman.

When I was really little and lived in Indianapolis, we had a huge snowfall which put several feet of snow on the ground. The Hintz boys next door built an igloo topped with their sandbox. But apparently, I was too young to be allowed inside the igloo. My response was to build a three foot high wall of snow across our back yard. Kind of the 'great wall of Indy', I guess. I remember a short snowball fight between the igloo inhabitants and the walled neighbors.

There is no doubt that the greatest snowball fight I ever participated in was in Athens in 1982. A serious snow storm hit the area and left a heavy layer of ice and snow on the ground which lasted four or five days. We had power, but the weather was so cold and icy that you didn't want to go out for the first several days.

Class was canceled, so I stayed in my small apartment from Monday through Thursday. Finally, on Thursday, brother Frank appeared at my patio door on my apartment. I quickly put on my heavy coat and walked out to inspect the remainder of the snow and ice.

As we stood outside my apartment, two guys started throwing snowballs at us. We responded and soon our group was a foursome. We walked around the apartment complex to find some other inhabitants at which to throw snowballs. As we maneuvered around the apartment complex, we continued to take on other groups of guys who were ripe targets for our snowballs. Each time we found a group to fight with snowballs, the group ultimately became bigger.

We soon left the apartment complex and looked for others to pelt with our snowballs. We were a pack of marauding snowmen, looking for a fight. As we ran across the campus, we encountered, defeated and incorporated more and more snowmen. As we headed up the hill where the high rise dorms were located there must have been somewhere between fifty and a hundred of us running up the Baxter Street Hill, looking for a fight.

As we encircled one of the last dorms on Baxter Street, we came upon a group of students equally as numerous as ours. Suddenly, we were trapped in a running battle where either side tried to take the high ground. The battle became a reenactment of the battle of the Little Big Horn, with both groups playing the part of the Cheyenne, Sioux and Crow, running in circles, taking the top of the hill.

Of course, there was a sincere difference in our group and the group we were taking on, since they all seemed to be athletes, specifically football players from the Athletic Dorm. Their abilities were somewhat hard to overtake.

As the snowball fight degenerated into a continual circle, Frank and I lost heart for continuing with the snowball fight and headed back to our apartments. Later, we found out that the remaining snowmen had ended the battle by throwing snowballs at trucks driving up Baxter Hill, causing some damage to the windshields of the trucks. Thankfully, that happened long after Frank and I had gone home.

It was a great lesson in group dynamics.