Sarah Joyce Snider

Dr. Sarah Joyce Cupp Snider (Sally) passed away on November 5, 2024, surrounded by family and friends. Sally’s adventure began in 1941 in Stinking Creek, Tennessee, where she spent her first 17 years terrorizing friends and family by climbing the tallest trees, standing atop a sprinting mule named Doc as he ran through the mountains and letting fists fly to defend her and her family’s honor against any perceived slight. Often preemptively.

The first person from the valley to go to college, Sally entered the University of Tennessee at 17 years old. Sally spent the 1960s teaching in Lynchburg, Virginia and Dalton, Georgia. In Dalton, she once won a motorcycle race she didn’t know she had joined, became a certified Honda motorcycle mechanic, was occasionally chased from lunch counters at gunpoint because she believed her mixed race girls JV basketball and varsity track teams should be able to eat wherever they damn well pleased, and met some of her closest, lifelong friends by pulling into their driveway on her Honda Dream 90 and announcing that “they told me I should meet y’all because we’ll like each other.” Two of those friends were at her bedside when she passed away.

When not staring down the barrel of pistols in north Georgia, Sally earned her doctorate degree in education. The newly-minted Dr. Snider accepted a position as a professor of education at her beloved University of Tennessee, where she also served as student teaching coordinator. Most of the Gen X population of Knoxville was, directly or indirectly, influenced by her unconventional approach to education that combined an unshakeable belief in her students, an absolute commitment to their success, and a hillbilly’s wild individualism.

In the 1980s, Dr. Snider changed course, spending a couple of decades as the world’s most unconventional soccer mom and inspiring her son’s friends to greater academic performance by threatening to “whoop their ass” if they failed to meet her expectations, which ranged from impossibly high to insultingly low based on her esteem for each young man. During this time Sally also turned the family’s farm into one of the world’s premier Senepol cattle breeders and helped establish the breed in the United States, was at the cutting edge of the country’s (still) nascent emu farming industry, and providing her son a line unique among resumes received by AmLaw 25 law firm : “Paid for college and law school with earnings from beef cattle and emu farm.”

In the late 1990s, Dr. Snider returned to academia, teaching at Tennessee Wesleyan University, Cleveland State Community College, Lincoln Memorial University and South College. At Cleveland State, Dr. Snider created a debate team because she “thought [redacted] needs it”. That team of community college kids from Southeast Tennessee competed and won national debate tournaments against students from Ivy League universities and sent students to some of the top law schools in the country, one of whom was at her bedside when she passed away.

For her final act, Dr. Snider retired, sold all her stuff, bought a Harley Davidson Sportster and a big RV and spent several years traveling around the country before settling down to the most important job of her life: Grandma.

Sally Snider is survived by her son and daughter-in-law, Sam and Irena, grandchildren Jake and Emma, siblings Ruby Steely, Charlene Phelps, Linda Cupp and Martin Cupp, and enough nieces, nephews, cousins, friends and former students to fill Neyland Stadium. True to herself until the end, her last coherent words to her loving son were “SHUT THE HELL UP”!

In lieu of flowers, please simply take the time today to do right by someone that needs it.