It was fall 1958. Tampa’s downtown businesses, particularly department stores, were losing customers to suburban malls. A young advertising executive, Howard Hilton, started his firm and landed the downtown merchants association as an early client. Wanting to make a big impression, he conceived an idea to bring holiday shoppers to the ailing downtown. The idea was big and bold, perhaps even a little crazy, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
The pitch: turn a five-block stretch of Franklin Street into a winter wonderland. There would be cold-weather animals like seals, penguins and deer. There would be a skating rink, dog sled demonstrations, a gigantic Christmas tree (perhaps the world’s tallest), Santa Claus and a five-story ski jump and toboggan run. The downtown business owners would pay for most of the carnival with a host of donations.
What could go wrong?
In a word: everything. Hilton later wrote a memoir detailing the false starts and failures of the Tampa Snow Show. Looking back, it’s a humorous tale, but at the time, Hilton wanted to bury himself in a mountain of fake snow.
The biggest problem was that the planning started too smoothly. Nearly every request was met with an enthusiastic yes. Asking the Minnesota Centennial Commission to ship a 100-foot-tall Christmas tree to Tampa? Yes! Supplying – for free – one million pounds of ice, crushed and blown into snow-like piles? Yes! A giant ski jump with a former Norwegian Olympian performing at the opening ceremony? Yes! Sled dogs, ice skaters and cold-weather animals? All yes! The only no came from the U.S. Navy when Hilton asked for an icebreaker or the U.S.S. Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine to operate under polar ice.
Once execution began, things started to fall apart. The first tree from Minnesota broke in half in transit—it was so big it required two rail cars, and it snapped on a sharp turn. The replacement tree was only half the size but still large at nearly 50 feet. It was so heavy, they had to cut a hole in the street to keep it stable. The hole was too deep, and the tree’s weight pushed it through the ground and into a large sewer line. It took a day just to clean up the mess.
Things went downhill from there. The ski slide was supposed to be covered in fake snow, but a group of University of Tampa students used the run the night before and knocked most of the ice off, leaving just the chicken wire framework. The next morning, Olympic skier Leif Svendsen went down the slide and took a nasty spill once he reached the bottom. Undeterred, he did it again flawlessly. The Snow Show was off and running for a week’s worth of headlines and headaches.
One of the biggest problems was the record-setting heat. Though it was mid-November, temperatures were in the upper 80s, melting the ice/artificial snow faster than anticipated. The dangerous ski slide was shut down before the weeklong event ended. Other problems cropped up as well. The winter-themed animals were difficult to acquire, a spectator was sliced by an ice skate during the skating exhibition, one of the Santas turned out to be a thief who broke into a jewelry store after his shift, and one of the female performers had an after-hours side business that caught the attention of Tampa’s vice cops.
(Photography Courtesy of Tampa Bay History Center)
The Tampa Snow Show ended on November 26, racking up several arrests, dozens of lawsuits, and – as promised – a lot of shoppers at downtown businesses. The City Ice Company, which supplied the fake snow, was already going out of business and this was the company’s last hurrah. Hilton’s business fared much better, and despite all of the problems, the Snow Show proved he and his partner could create a lot of buzz. Hilton received a lot of mail in the aftermath of the Snow Show, including a letter from Leif Svendsen. The skier assured Hilton that if he wanted to make the Snow Show an annual event, he’d be right there with him.
Hilton never responded.
Rodney Kite-Powell is a Tampa-born author, the official historian of Hillsborough County and the director of the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center, where he has worked since 1995.
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