How Was It Back In 2014?

Chattanooga was but a spry septuagenarian when one of its most recent storytellers first encountered it.

Now 175, the city has had its story told and recorded over the last several weeks by several handfuls of people of various ages so that city residents in 100 years will know what life was like in the Scenic City way back in 2014.

The oral history project was part of the city's 175th birthday, which has been celebrated throughout the month with mini-events across the area.

Recordings of those who told their stories, from an individual over 100 years old to Mayor Andy Berke to men and women in their 20s, will be buried in the future as part of a time capsule, likely in Coolidge Park, as part of the events that mark the city's birthday.

The recordings, collected and collated by Michael Edward Miller of WUTC, are not a dry history of what happened in 1931 or 1959 or 1992 but rather how life was experienced by the disparate individuals who volunteered their stories.

Chattanooga City Councilman Moses Freeman, 76, is one of those.

The city he remembered from childhood seemed "very, very small," he said, and the Westside community in which he was raised had "dirt roads," little electricity, homes of wood papered over with cardboard, heat from "dirty coal" and wood, outdoor toilets and ice delivered by an iceman.

At one point, he became a newsboy, peddling newspapers on downtown street corners.

Travis Price, 28, a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, is nearly 50 years younger than Freeman, but he encountered that same downtown as a skater, who discovered the remnants of underground Chattanooga by disappearing through manhole covers and climbing down to see a city that had been raised after flooding in the early 20th century.

"There were certain dangers involved," he said, reflecting on his exploits of more than a decade ago.

Marion Otis Smith, 72, has never lived in Chattanooga but spent most of his life exploring caves within a short drive of the city.

Now a resident of Rock Island in Warren County, he has explored, among others, Lookout Mountain Cave, where Union and Confederate soldiers had been before him during the Civil War, and Ellison's Cave on Pigeon Mountain, a spur of Lookout Mountain in Walker County, Ga., where he helped with initial explorations deeper into the cave.

Nicole Price, 30, a data clerk at a small law office and a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees like her brother, Travis, also trod where Civil War soldiers had been, having grown up on Missionary Ridge, the scene of one of the battles in the war.

"From our big, wraparound porch, we could see the whole city," she said.

Many of the storytellers, according to Miller, told of a Chattanooga where "there was not anything going on" but expressed amazement of "how Chattanooga changed" in the past 25 years.

Storytellers asserted how the city still has strides it can take in breaking down barriers, he said, but marveled in the changes.

Freeman, especially, has seen changes from a heavily segregated city where used boilers for heating, used books and used supplies were sent to the historically black Howard High School he attended after then all-white Chattanooga High School got all the use it could out of them.

"We didn't feel good about that," he said, "but you had to accept it. Nobody really wanted us to raise trouble." Parents, he said, feared if their children spoke up, "something would happen to us. And we would grow up and not get jobs. We were asked to go along silently."

Although separate public facilities for whites and blacks disappeared in Chattanooga by the mid-1960 and schools began to integrate by the late 1960s, Freeman said it wasn't until the election of John Franklin, a black educator and business owner, as city commissioner in 1971 that social changes sped up.

"It was more than symbolic," he said of the man he served as executive assistant. "He jumped in politically, socially, educationally. [His status] placed him in the middle of issues, and people saw he was a quality person, a renaissance man. If he was a product [of the black community], they could accept him or anyone who could be like him."

Nicole Price said even today there's a "struggle of the new and old" in the city. "We're progressive," but some people still won't rent to "unmarrieds."

"I think we're getting there," she said.

Travis Price said he grew up feeling claustrophobic in Chattanooga, that you were always "going to run into somebody you know."

Today, he said, "what I thought I hated is what makes it great. I like my life [here], and I couldn't imagine replacing it."

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