Heartache on an April Night

#346 / Flood Time Capsule: 1971

On a warm spring evening 53 years ago tonight, friends from all around Huntington piled into cars to head to a May Day Eve party at the East Pea Ridge home of newspaper editor Don Hatfield and his wife, Sandy.

They had so many reasons to celebrate that Friday night. Many of them were starting major new chapters in their lives.

Roger Samples, for instance, was just days away from graduating from Marshall University, and he was ready to pursue his dream of being a teacher.

Susie and David Peyton were about to be parents (Dave Jr. would be busy being born just two months later).

Pamela and Charlie Bowen were finally getting acclimated to their new grownup post-college jobs as newspaper reporters, joining Hatfield and the Peytons in the bustling Huntington newsroom.

Such a joyful evening, but one that would end so tragically.

Those Broke Newcomers

The Bowens were still car-less in those days, so for the Hatfield party they hitched a ride with Dave and Susie.

What a comical sight they must have been, the four of them squeezing into the Peytons' Volkswagen beetle, among them a very pregnant Susie and an always-too-tall Charlie.

Once at the party, the Bowens and the Peytons went separate ways. Pamela and Charlie, having been at the Huntington Publishing Co. less than three months, didn’t yet know everyone at the party. However, as soon as they walked in, they spotted one of their oldest friends.

The Lees of Happiness

Frosty Lee (his real name was “Forrest,” but no one we knew called him that) had been in the Bowens’ circle of friends for a half a decade by then.

His wife, Patti Arrowood, was Pamela’s best friend in the Marshall journalism department, where they had been students together. Pamela and Patti were eager to have their guys meet each other, since the young men shared a lot of interests.

Both Frosty and Charlie were aspiring poets, for instance. In fact, Charlie met Frosty’s poems before he even met the poet himself. While he still was serving in Vietnam, Frosty sent verses home to Patti, who shared them with Pamela, who passed them along to Charlie.

Bowen was editor of Off Center, the student newspaper at the Ashland Community College, at the time; he loved Frosty’s work, so he published a number of the poems in the paper’s weekly “Scop Talk” column.

When Frosty got home from the war (with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart), the four friends had many days and evenings together, including regular trips to the Marshall coffeehouse to hear the music.

Roger and Dave played there, as did everyone’s musical mentor, Terry Goller, and his frequent partner, Dave Bias.

The Hatfield Party

On that April 1971 night at Sandy and Don Hatfield’s house, Patti couldn’t make the party; instead, she was working the evening shift at The Associated Press office in Charleston.

“Charlie and I spent most of our time at the party talking to Frosty,” Pamela wrote in her journal the next day. “He hadn’t been working or going to school lately, so he said he spent most of his time trying to write poems.

“We talked about all sorts of things,” Pamela continued, “including my aversion to owning a car, half-jokingly telling him that we didn’t want a car because we wanted to stay alive. He said a car made him feel very free, and that he wanted to ‘rescue’ us from city life some weekend soon and take us to their house in the country.”

Later that evening, Roger put down his guitar after an hour or so of entertaining the party crowd and wander by to join the conversation.

Pamela and Charlie didn’t yet know Rog very well, though a few months earlier they had heard him and Peyton rocking the night at a fundraiser at Ashland Community College.

Frosty seemed on a mission that night to bring all his friends together. At one point, for instance, he said he wanted Roger also to come out to the Lee house in the country. That way they all could have at least one more good blow-out before that new college degree carried the young singer/guitarist away from home.

Final Drive

“Since the party was destined to last most of the night,” Pamela wrote in the journal, “we hitched a ride home with Frosty" when he left at 11 to pick up Patti at work. "And the last thing I told him was to drive carefully.”

It turned out that Pamela and Charlie were the last of Frosty’s friends to see him alive.

A 2:30 a.m. phone call woke the Bowens. It was Don Hatfield, calling with horrible news.

A head-on collision in Dunbar.

Frosty had died in the ambulance.

Patti was at the hospital in Charleston in shock.

“It all seemed so unreal,” Pamela wrote. “We took a long walk around the park, talking about him, and finally went to sleep around 4 a.m. I woke up four hours later feeling sick, and my first thought was about what Patti would wake up to.”

Mourning

“Frosty was probably the most ‘alive’ people I’ve ever seen,” Pamela wrote. “He loved the open country and dreamed of someday owning a mountain.

“One of the best times we ever had together was a day at New River Gorge where we had a picnic lunch and waded in the river.”

Adding to the grief, Pamela wrote, was the fact that the Lees had been hoping to have a child. They had miscarried a few months earlier and, during their long talk that night at the Hatfield party, Frosty had said they were eager to try again.

An Astronomy of Love

Frosty was buried in Huntington’s Woodmere Memorial Park.

His tombstone quotes one of his lovely poems:

When your eyes are wide as flowers,
Open and hungry for seeds to send your seeing further,
I am a reflection in reflection and
Growing through every growing cell of you
And this makes an astronomy of love.

Patti and John

After Frosty’s death, Patti moved to Vermont to continue working with the AP. Three years later, she fell in love again, marrying fellow journalist John Reid.

With John, Patti occasionally traveled back to Huntington from Vermont regularly and the Reids were at a number of those crazy music parties at which David and Roger and Charlie started birthing The Flood.

The band’s founders regularly talked of Frosty as if he were a missing element in their evolution.

“He should have been here for this,” Roger would say with a sad smile.

Meanwhile, speaking of births, when John and Patti Reid's son Driscoll was born in 1976, the middle name they gave him was a memorial. They named him Forrest.