Glenwood School bridged generations

By: Clint Cooper
(Contact)

Glenwood School opened during the Depression and closed during the Vietnam War, educating the oldest pupils from the Silent Generation to the youngest baby boomers.

“It was one of the best schools,” said Dr. Robert W. Myers, a retired Chattanooga physician who attended the school in the 1930s.

When it was built, Glenwood was considered “one of the upscale communities” in the city, Dr. Myers said.

The red brick school, surrounded by wooded areas on several sides, had two floors and six large classrooms. A stream that originated in Indian Springs ran in front of the school, Dr. Myers said.

The rock wall in front of the school and the rock arched bridge over the stream were built by the Works Progress Administration, the largest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s work relief agencies, said Charles V. White, a Lookout Mountain resident who attended the school in the 1930s.

“We would cross that bridge and look at the goldfish,” said Andrea Shawnice Jones Tate, who graduated from the school in 1970. “Out there, you could imagine all kinds of things.”

Photo Courtesy of Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library -- Glenwood School, shown around 1941, served pupils for about 40 years before closing in 1971.

A play area not far from the school, for many of the early neighborhood children, was the Civil War rifle pits erected by Union soldiers on the side of Missionary Ridge, Dr. Myers said.

When it was built, Glenwood School had no auditorium, but the cafeteria had a stage for school presentations, students remembered. Later, a second-floor auditorium, with a wooden thrust stage and red velvet curtains, was added.

“I got my first taste of acting there,” said Mrs. Tate. “I remember how the floors would creak.”

Inside, the school had wide halls and marble floors, students of early and later years remembered.

Dr. Myers, who was president of his sixth-grade class, said events during his final year at the school — 1935-1936 — included Christmas and Valentine’s Day parties, graduation dinner and program and sports events sponsored by the local YMCA.

The school’s YMCA teams played five football games and one baseball game and had two track meets, he said.

It was an idyllic time, Dr. Myers said.

“Safety was not a concern,” he said.

Students & Educators

During its early years, the principal was Blanche Woodward, the students recalled.

“You didn’t mess around with her,” Mr. White, 83, said.

Of the teachers, Ruth Akers, taught at Glenwood throughout the school’s existence. She was the sponsor of the school newspaper, the B&G News, named after the school’s blue and gold colors, early students remembered.

The newspaper’s first editor was Lee S. Anderson, present editor of the Free Press editorial page in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Mrs. Tate, who became a teacher herself, said even in later years students still revered the teachers.

“Misbehaving wasn’t a concept you would entertain,” she said.

Ruth Posey, several early students remembered, taught fifth grade and then moved up and also taught them in sixth grade.

Mr. White said he was surprised to see another of his Glenwood teachers, Almeda Jones, in a class he took in the 1940s at the University of Chattanooga.

“They were good teachers altogether,” he said.

Among other students who attended Glenwood in its early days were the late Chattanooga developer Grady Jacoway and the late Chattanooga opthamologist Dr. Lawrence Lassiter.

Sharon Orr, 51, and her brother, Kenneth Paris, 50, attended the school briefly during its later years in the late 1960s. Her family had moved across the street, which she said was “very convenient” to the school.

The once segregated all-white Glenwood was by then largely black, she said.

The school by then had a basketball court, softball field and baseball field, which doubled as a football field, she said. Adjacent to the school were duplexes, where the nuns who then served the Catholic hospital lived, Mrs. Orr said.

The teachers, she said, were very friendly.

Mary Jones, who taught at Glenwood its last two years, said its last few years were “crowded with children” — she had 40 in one class — and even had several portable classrooms.

But “it was a good little community school,” she said.

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