The Lonesome Death of "Jack" Frost
When they found him, no one knew where he had been headed. No one knew when he fell, or even if it actually was a "fall", or just something more akin to a collapse. Maybe he just wanted to stop, catch his breath, and rest before pushing on toward his destination, and when he laid down... that was it.
It was February 7th, 1979, but only barely-- the first report in the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar puts his time of death in the wee hours of that that frozen Wednesday morning. The soft down of a rare Memphis snowfall, begun the night before, blanketed the city. He is described as looking as though he had curled up to sleep as the snow fell around him in the first line of the story in the Scimitar. But by the gray light of dawn, it was clear: he wasn't asleep. He was dead.
They called him "Jack Frost" around Midtown, a nickname that took on a sort of morbid irony after the way his body was discovered, but his real name was William. William H. Frost.
Midtown has always been the heart of the Memphis counter-culture, and Jack was dubbed the "unofficial mayor of Overton Square"-- one of the most visible and widely known of the neighborhood denizens. One of the elder statesman of its eclectic community of artists, writers, musicians, hippies, and small business owners was called "the original beatnik", and looked up to by the younger generation of the Cooper-Young subculture as a repository of street wisdom that helped a lot of kids, even if only by offering a "Be cool," at just the right time. Frost was a habitué of all of the bars of old Overton Square: The Mississippi River Company. Bombay Bicycle Club. The Hot Air Balloon. Yosemite Sam's. The No Name Bar, where an oil portrait of Frost that was painted by Midtown artist Charlie Miller hung on the south wall.
Daniel Grant, a former the former owner of a Midtown antique shop, arranged a wake for Jack at the P&H, and they took up a collection and had a small auction to cover his burial. Memphis Funeral Home said they would give him a funeral at no cost, so the money collected would go toward a cemetery plot. More than 150 people showed up. At least $500 was raised.
"For him?" Sculptor James Hixx is quoted as saying when asked to contribute a piece for auction at the wake. "Sure. I'll bring something good."
Frost was described by his friends as a gentle man who would never hurt anyone. He was a native Memphian, and a former mechanic. He had been married and divorced, with no children. His last relative, a sister, had pre-deceased him by a couple of years.
Aside from him alcoholism, Frost also had chronic emphysema, which made keeping a job difficult. He had apparently been trying for several years to get a pension from the welfare department, with both his Midtown friends and Frost himself repeatedly writing to both then- Senator Howard Baker and Congressman Harold Ford, whose offices promised to look into the matter, but they were all unsuccessful. So Jack did odd jobs for people. Painting signs, handyman jobs. He bounced around between the homes of his Midtown friends-- couch surfing, as we would now call it-- and lived anywhere he could.
He was also a poet, when he was sober. In 1973, a student at the Memphis Academy of Art named Lou Tippit who had befriended Frost and gave Frost a place to stay for about eight months while Tippit attended the Academy, made Frost the subject of his senior thesis. Tippit's book contained photographs of Frost, along with some of Frost's poems. The scene where Frost was found dead was less than a mile from the Art Academy campus in Overton Park. Academy librarian Robert Scarlett dug the volume out of the files and displayed it on top of the card catalog, where many of Jack's friends came to see it in the aftermath of his death. John Russell, a friend who work at the Midtown Mobil station, wrote down one called "Peculiar" as Frost recited it to him. It was printed in the Scimitar along with the story about his wake.
It seemed even the cops liked Frost, a sometimes-rare phenomenon for a drifter. The Memphis Police Department procedure for "drunk calls" at the time was to take arrestees to the lockup downtown, where they were held for five hours before being released on their own recognizance, without requiring a bond. But Midtown cops all knew Frost, both by sight and reputation, and they knew he didn't drive. So when they had to pick up Frost on public drunk or disorderly conduct calls, they would try to take him somewhere in the eastern part of Midtown to sleep it off so he so he wouldn't have to walk all the way back to Overton Square from the jail at 201 Poplar.
At first blush, it seemed that was case again on February 6th, 1979. According to Officer Robert Scruggs and his partner Keith Riba, at around 11 p.m. they were at the Holiday Inn on Union at Claybrook so that Officer Riba could call his wife when they received a dispatch that they should go to "Station 2". This meant they should change the station on their radios to receive a communication between cars. Another patrol officer, E.L. Smith, wanted them to meet him at Solomon Alfred's with a female complainant. Riba asked Smith to phone the Holiday Inn so they could discuss it. At almost the same time, they received a call for a "drunk down" at 14 South Diana Street. They made the scene. It was dark in the building, and Scruggs nearly tripped over someone lying in the stairwell. Scruggs asked Riba to turn on his flashlight to identify the individual, since his wasn't working, but Riba had left his own flashlight back in the cruiser. It didn't matter, though, because according to Riba, Frost had his own personal "odor" that they had come to recognize. They assisted Frost to their patrol car, and discussed what to do next.
They would sometimes take Frost to a rooming house-- described in contemporaneous reports as a halfway house-- that was located on Harbert Avenue, but the lady who ran the building had been complaining to people about Riba and Scruggs leaving Frost there in that condition. To avoid the hassle with her, they dropped him off on the corner of Rembert and Jefferson, in an area near some apartment complexes where they had seen him before. Riba pulled the police car partially into the driveway of one of the buildings. The cold air seemed to have somewhat revived Frost from his drunken stupor, and Scruggs asked Frost if he way okay to make it over to the complex. Frost said he was. They told him that he could find a place there to sleep it off for the night. They watched him stagger around the corner until they lost sight of him. That was it.
Or, that was one version of "it".
But.
Patrolman E.L. Smith would testify that on the night of the 6th, who had left Solomon Alfred's to go to a nearby convenience store. On the way back to Solomon Alfred's, he had heard a voice over the radio he recognized as Riba's indicate that he and Scruggs were transporting a subject to the Harbert Street address. Upon returning to Solomon Alfred's, a mere 3 minutes after hearing the call from Riba, he had seen Riba sitting inside. Unit 426, Scruggs and Riba's patrol car, was parked-- not idling, but parked and not running-- in the Solomon Alfred's parking lot.
In his sworn statement to the police, Riba had asserted that he and Scruggs HAD taken Jack to the house on Harbert. But the manager of the "halfway house" would later testify that she never took in drunks for the police, and further said that Riba and Scruggs had never been there on February 6th.
The transport call to 1432 Harbert was totally false.
On the Saturday night prior to the day Jack Frost was found frozen to death in Overton Park, he visited his friend James Hixx. He was wearing a hospital gown. He told Hixx that the cops had beaten him up, then driven him to a secondary location and turned him out of their cruiser.
Keith Drinkard, a thirteen year old whose brother lived in the South Diana apartments where Riba and Scruggs allegedly picked up Frost near midnight, testified that on the 6th he had watched from near a balcony on the building's top floor as Riba and Scruggs pushed Frost over a landing halfway up the stairs. He said Scruggs then threw Frost over another stair landing, then stood by as Riba hit Frost on the side of the head with a flashlight. The officers then dragged him to their squad car as Frost pleaded with them not to hurt him anymore.
Aside from the obvious excessive use of force, there was another discrepancy between Drinkard's account of what ocurred at 14 South Diana and Officer Riba's account: Drinkard asserted that the arrest had taken place not near midnight on the 6th... but on the AFTERNOON of February 6th.
According to the Scimitar, the lieutenant on the scene where the body was found, shook his head as he looked at Frost's frozen corpse and said, "Lord, I hope I don't die like that."
But probably the saddest piece of commentary comes from the caption directly under the picture in the Press-Scimitar. Bold. In all caps: "DEATH VISITED SNOWY OVERTON-- AND POLICE RECOGNIZE AN OLD FRIEND."
Because it wasn't long before the implication was clear, Riba and Scruggs had violently assaulted their "old friend" William Frost on the afternoon of February 6th, possibly not for the first time.
Except this time, instead of taking him to the hospital, the house on Harbert, or even to the apartment complex at Jefferson and Rembert, Riba and Scruggs chose to dump Bill Frost in the east end of Overton Park. At some point, whether then or later, they made an active decision to cover up what they had done.
A few minutes after midnight on February 7th, just over a mile away from Overton Park in the No Name Bar, the display light shining on the oil portrait of Midtown's "Jack" Frost, the mayor of Overton Square, suddenly burned out.
Frost himself followed shortly afterward, dying somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m.
He had been lying in the park for close to twelve hours.
Questions? Comments? The discussion begins at the SM³ Media Facebook group!
When they found him, no one knew where he had been headed. No one knew when he fell, or even if it actually was a "fall", or just something more akin to a collapse. Maybe he just wanted to stop, catch his breath, and rest before pushing on toward his destination, and when he laid down... that was it.
It was February 7th, 1979, but only barely-- the first report in the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar puts his time of death in the wee hours of that that frozen Wednesday morning. The soft down of a rare Memphis snowfall, begun the night before, blanketed the city. He is described as looking as though he had curled up to sleep as the snow fell around him in the first line of the story in the Scimitar. But by the gray light of dawn, it was clear: he wasn't asleep. He was dead.
They called him "Jack Frost" around Midtown, a nickname that took on a sort of morbid irony after the way his body was discovered, but his real name was William. William H. Frost.
Midtown has always been the heart of the Memphis counter-culture, and Jack was dubbed the "unofficial mayor of Overton Square"-- one of the most visible and widely known of the neighborhood denizens. One of the elder statesman of its eclectic community of artists, writers, musicians, hippies, and small business owners was called "the original beatnik", and looked up to by the younger generation of the Cooper-Young subculture as a repository of street wisdom that helped a lot of kids, even if only by offering a "Be cool," at just the right time. Frost was a habitué of all of the bars of old Overton Square: The Mississippi River Company. Bombay Bicycle Club. The Hot Air Balloon. Yosemite Sam's. The No Name Bar, where an oil portrait of Frost that was painted by Midtown artist Charlie Miller hung on the south wall.
Daniel Grant, a former the former owner of a Midtown antique shop, arranged a wake for Jack at the P&H, and they took up a collection and had a small auction to cover his burial. Memphis Funeral Home said they would give him a funeral at no cost, so the money collected would go toward a cemetery plot. More than 150 people showed up. At least $500 was raised.
"For him?" Sculptor James Hixx is quoted as saying when asked to contribute a piece for auction at the wake. "Sure. I'll bring something good."
Frost was described by his friends as a gentle man who would never hurt anyone. He was a native Memphian, and a former mechanic. He had been married and divorced, with no children. His last relative, a sister, had pre-deceased him by a couple of years.
Aside from him alcoholism, Frost also had chronic emphysema, which made keeping a job difficult. He had apparently been trying for several years to get a pension from the welfare department, with both his Midtown friends and Frost himself repeatedly writing to both then- Senator Howard Baker and Congressman Harold Ford, whose offices promised to look into the matter, but they were all unsuccessful. So Jack did odd jobs for people. Painting signs, handyman jobs. He bounced around between the homes of his Midtown friends-- couch surfing, as we would now call it-- and lived anywhere he could.
He was also a poet, when he was sober. In 1973, a student at the Memphis Academy of Art named Lou Tippit who had befriended Frost and gave Frost a place to stay for about eight months while Tippit attended the Academy, made Frost the subject of his senior thesis. Tippit's book contained photographs of Frost, along with some of Frost's poems. The scene where Frost was found dead was less than a mile from the Art Academy campus in Overton Park. Academy librarian Robert Scarlett dug the volume out of the files and displayed it on top of the card catalog, where many of Jack's friends came to see it in the aftermath of his death. John Russell, a friend who work at the Midtown Mobil station, wrote down one called "Peculiar" as Frost recited it to him. It was printed in the Scimitar along with the story about his wake.
It seemed even the cops liked Frost, a sometimes-rare phenomenon for a drifter. The Memphis Police Department procedure for "drunk calls" at the time was to take arrestees to the lockup downtown, where they were held for five hours before being released on their own recognizance, without requiring a bond. But Midtown cops all knew Frost, both by sight and reputation, and they knew he didn't drive. So when they had to pick up Frost on public drunk or disorderly conduct calls, they would try to take him somewhere in the eastern part of Midtown to sleep it off so he so he wouldn't have to walk all the way back to Overton Square from the jail at 201 Poplar.
At first blush, it seemed that was case again on February 6th, 1979. According to Officer Robert Scruggs and his partner Keith Riba, at around 11 p.m. they were at the Holiday Inn on Union at Claybrook so that Officer Riba could call his wife when they received a dispatch that they should go to "Station 2". This meant they should change the station on their radios to receive a communication between cars. Another patrol officer, E.L. Smith, wanted them to meet him at Solomon Alfred's with a female complainant. Riba asked Smith to phone the Holiday Inn so they could discuss it. At almost the same time, they received a call for a "drunk down" at 14 South Diana Street. They made the scene. It was dark in the building, and Scruggs nearly tripped over someone lying in the stairwell. Scruggs asked Riba to turn on his flashlight to identify the individual, since his wasn't working, but Riba had left his own flashlight back in the cruiser. It didn't matter, though, because according to Riba, Frost had his own personal "odor" that they had come to recognize. They assisted Frost to their patrol car, and discussed what to do next.
They would sometimes take Frost to a rooming house-- described in contemporaneous reports as a halfway house-- that was located on Harbert Avenue, but the lady who ran the building had been complaining to people about Riba and Scruggs leaving Frost there in that condition. To avoid the hassle with her, they dropped him off on the corner of Rembert and Jefferson, in an area near some apartment complexes where they had seen him before. Riba pulled the police car partially into the driveway of one of the buildings. The cold air seemed to have somewhat revived Frost from his drunken stupor, and Scruggs asked Frost if he way okay to make it over to the complex. Frost said he was. They told him that he could find a place there to sleep it off for the night. They watched him stagger around the corner until they lost sight of him. That was it.
Or, that was one version of "it".
But.
Patrolman E.L. Smith would testify that on the night of the 6th, who had left Solomon Alfred's to go to a nearby convenience store. On the way back to Solomon Alfred's, he had heard a voice over the radio he recognized as Riba's indicate that he and Scruggs were transporting a subject to the Harbert Street address. Upon returning to Solomon Alfred's, a mere 3 minutes after hearing the call from Riba, he had seen Riba sitting inside. Unit 426, Scruggs and Riba's patrol car, was parked-- not idling, but parked and not running-- in the Solomon Alfred's parking lot.
In his sworn statement to the police, Riba had asserted that he and Scruggs HAD taken Jack to the house on Harbert. But the manager of the "halfway house" would later testify that she never took in drunks for the police, and further said that Riba and Scruggs had never been there on February 6th.
The transport call to 1432 Harbert was totally false.
On the Saturday night prior to the day Jack Frost was found frozen to death in Overton Park, he visited his friend James Hixx. He was wearing a hospital gown. He told Hixx that the cops had beaten him up, then driven him to a secondary location and turned him out of their cruiser.
Keith Drinkard, a thirteen year old whose brother lived in the South Diana apartments where Riba and Scruggs allegedly picked up Frost near midnight, testified that on the 6th he had watched from near a balcony on the building's top floor as Riba and Scruggs pushed Frost over a landing halfway up the stairs. He said Scruggs then threw Frost over another stair landing, then stood by as Riba hit Frost on the side of the head with a flashlight. The officers then dragged him to their squad car as Frost pleaded with them not to hurt him anymore.
Aside from the obvious excessive use of force, there was another discrepancy between Drinkard's account of what ocurred at 14 South Diana and Officer Riba's account: Drinkard asserted that the arrest had taken place not near midnight on the 6th... but on the AFTERNOON of February 6th.
According to the Scimitar, the lieutenant on the scene where the body was found, shook his head as he looked at Frost's frozen corpse and said, "Lord, I hope I don't die like that."
But probably the saddest piece of commentary comes from the caption directly under the picture in the Press-Scimitar. Bold. In all caps: "DEATH VISITED SNOWY OVERTON-- AND POLICE RECOGNIZE AN OLD FRIEND."
Because it wasn't long before the implication was clear, Riba and Scruggs had violently assaulted their "old friend" William Frost on the afternoon of February 6th, possibly not for the first time.
Except this time, instead of taking him to the hospital, the house on Harbert, or even to the apartment complex at Jefferson and Rembert, Riba and Scruggs chose to dump Bill Frost in the east end of Overton Park. At some point, whether then or later, they made an active decision to cover up what they had done.
A few minutes after midnight on February 7th, just over a mile away from Overton Park in the No Name Bar, the display light shining on the oil portrait of Midtown's "Jack" Frost, the mayor of Overton Square, suddenly burned out.
Frost himself followed shortly afterward, dying somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m.
He had been lying in the park for close to twelve hours.
Questions? Comments? The discussion begins at the SM³ Media Facebook group!
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