One of the candidates hoping to give the Republican Party a majority of seats in the United States Senate next month once lived and worked in Chattanooga and attended Chattanooga State Community College.
North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, challenging Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., worked at Provident (now Unum Group) and took classes at the school, then called Chattanooga State Technical Community College, in the early 1980s.
His campaign biography notes he "went to work immediately after high school and later worked his way through college with a combination of community college and extension courses, graduating at age 36."
An April 2012 profile in Business North Carolina noted that, following a promotion in the records warehouse for Service Merchandise in Nashville, Tillis' boss steered him into membership in the Association of Record Managers and Administrators International, where he saw an ad for a records-management specialist at Provident Life and Accident Insurance Co. (now Unum) in Chattanooga.
Estal Fain, who hired him at Provident, said the Jacksonville, Fla., native wasn't afraid of the computer technology emerging to track records.
"He had the can-do attitude and intelligence and records experience I was looking for," he told the Charlotte Observer in 2011. "He readily embraced new ways of doing things. He got things done."
While in Chattanooga, Tillis enrolled at the junior college.
"I was blessed with being interested in technology," he told Business North Carolina, "and that was highly sought after in the '80s."
Tim Engel, a Chattanooga information technology consultant, recalls Tillis introducing himself to him at his cubicle at Provident.
"We became friends and hung out together," he said. "We were two young guys working full time while trying to piece together a college degree. He was very sharp, smart and charming."
Engel said the then-single Tillis lived in a condominium on Signal Mountain, drove a silver Mustang and had a Siberian husky. He said they double-dated several times.
"He was a Tasmanian devil, energy-wise," he said. "We all knew he had 'it,' that he was going to be a success. He was a workaholic. We knew he was going places, at least in the business world."
Eventually, Fain gave Tillis a project organizing and cataloging records in conjunction with Wang Laboratories Inc., a now-defunct computer company based outside Boston. In time, he went to work in Boston for Wang, which, after two and a half years, moved him back to Chattanooga as product manager.
"I couldn't stand another winter there," he said.
The company then moved Tillis to Atlanta, where, in 1990, Tillis was recruited by PriceWaterhouse, the international accounting and consulting firm that became PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and he eventually graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in technology management.
Ultimately, he landed in Cornelius, N.C., a northern suburb of Charlotte, where he began his political career in 2002 as a member of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. A year later, he won a spot on the town board and in 2006 a seat in the N.C. legislature. He became its speaker in 2010.
Tillis has been named as one of 17 "GOP Legislators to Watch" by Governing Magazine and in 2011 was named national "Legislator of the Year" by the American Legislative Exchange Council.
A year ago, he helped lead a tax reform effort that will reduce North Carolina's income taxes by $2 billion over the next five years, the goal being to improve the state's business tax climate and boost job growth.
Early in the Senate campaign, Tillis was given a good shot at ousting the one-term Hagan but has remained consistently behind her, though very close, throughout. But the two most recent polls have the candidates tied.
Neither is highly popular across the state, the incumbent for her lackluster term in which she voted nearly down the line with President Obama's agenda and the challenger for being part of a General Assembly that, while decreasing taxes, reduced unemployment benefits, initiated a photo ID law for voting in 2016, added several health regulations to abortion rights and, up to now, rejected Medicaid expansion.
North Carolina is one of two states - Indiana is the other - that flopped on their warmth for Obama, supporting him in 2008 but supporting Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. So its status as a purple state - not red and not blue - makes it a key battleground in the control for the Senate.
Most pundits now give Republicans a better than even chance to win control, so - if North Carolinians do their part - a former Chattanooga State student will have a say in whether that margin is a bare minimum or better.