Site Where Red Bank Gas Station Planned Full Of History

  • Friday, August 19, 2016
  • John Shearer
Food City is planning to build a Gas ’N Go gas station and retail facility at the southeast corner of Dayton Boulevard and Leawood Street in Red Bank.
 
Although the Virginia-based company has usually built its stations on the parking lots by its grocery stores, this one — which was approved by the Red Bank Commission in July but has since been protested — would be about a block south and across the street.
 
Also unusual about the site is its history. Not only were several popular eateries located there for decades, but it was also the location of a residence that was lived in by several families, including Don Seagle and his late brothers and parents.
 
“It had a great front porch with a swing on it,” Mr.
Seagle recalled recently over the phone of the 1930s-era, bungalow-style home. “It was a very nice house.”
 
But, as are most houses that are lived in long enough by the same family, it was also the scene of mourning related to the deaths of family members, according to Mr. Seagle.
 
A look at some old Chattanooga city directories on file at the library shows that about 1940, three houses were located on that stretch of Dayton Boulevard just south of and at the site where the gas station facility will be.
 
Moving northward, Walter and Nancy Gann lived at 3708 Dayton Blvd., James and Mary Moad lived at 3710, and Eugene B. Morton, a clerk at the Post Office, lived with his wife, Mamie, at 3712 – where the commercial buildings were later built.
 
Across Dayton Boulevard was Red Bank High School. The facility had been built in 1937 as a junior high and graduated its first high school class in 1941 as that part of Hamilton County was starting to grow.
 
And across Leawood Street was Red Bank Methodist Church in an R.H. Hunt-designed building that is still part of its current expanded facility.
 
The city directory of 1948 says that Charles Heard, an employee of Krystal, and his wife Frances, had by then moved to 3712 Dayton Blvd., while the Ganns and Moads continued at the other two addresses. Mr. Gann was the superintendent of the Money Order Department, while Mr. Moad was a checker with Harriman Manufacturing Co.
 
In the winter of 1949, Harold L. and Kathryn M. Seagle and their three sons moved into the residence closest to Leawood at 3712 Dayton Blvd.
 
“We moved from a St. Elmo location due to a better educational environment for the three boys,” recalled Don Seagle, the youngest of the three sons.
 
The sons – who all lived in a single bedroom at the Dayton Boulevard home -- attended the Red Bank schools, and the family became involved in Red Bank Baptist Church. Their father worked as a freight shipping agent determining transportation tariffs for the Chattanooga Manufacturers Association, while Mrs. Seagle worked as an executive assistant to the plant manager at American Lava/3M.
 
Visiting the soda fountain at the nearby pharmacy and attending movies at the Fox Theatre, which is now part of the family life center at Red Bank Baptist Church, were popular activities, he recalled. As a youngster, Mr. Seagle had a small job at the Fox of carrying the films up two flights of stairs to the projection room. His pay was getting to see the movies for free along with some popcorn.
 
Mr. Seagle recalled that Red Bank was kind of an idyllic community in the 1950s. However, he said it had no blacks or minorities, people with whom Mr. Seagle said he later became acquainted in a positive manner in his longtime work in the field of water quality study.
 
The community was also not without tragedy at that time. He recalled that his older brother, Freddy, who was then 16, was swimming at the Warner Park pool near downtown Chattanooga on June 2, 1952, when he drowned.
 
His parents or authorities originally did not realize what had happened to him after he did not come home, so their father went to investigate after the pool had closed.
 
“My father went down there with my brother (Harold Lacey Seagle Jr., who died in 1999 of cancer) and found a locker with a pin in it,” he said, adding that they realized his belongings were still there. “They went to the pool and he was just surfacing to the top.”
 
The younger Mr. Seagle said his brother had been swimming with some high school friends and they later deduced he had been jumping off the high dive platform when one of his buddies jumped into the pool behind him and accidentally landed on him.
 
Perhaps injured somehow, Freddy Seagle went to the bottom of the darker-colored pool and no one noticed him, even though a lifeguard was on duty.
 
As was common at that time, his body lay in state at the home on Dayton Boulevard in the living room before the funeral. “We all stayed together in the back room, so it was strange to see Freddy not in a bed,” Don Seagle recalled with sadness.
 
His death at such a young age and under those circumstances was considered an obvious tragedy. He had been a double Golden Gloves boxing champion and was the quarterback on the football team, his brother said.
 
The home on Dayton Boulevard had earlier been the source of some much-happier memories related to swimming. Don Seagle said the ditch behind their home would swell after a rain, so that is where he learned to swim. “My older brothers picked me up and threw me in there,” he said, adding that they also practiced trying to jump over the ditch as they grew older.
 
Don Seagle went on to graduate from Red Bank High School in 1958 in a class of about 90 students.
 
“Most of us knew each other by our first names and where we lived,” he said.
 
While he had a unique experience in that he could see his home from some of the school windows because it was just across the street, the situation worked both ways and school officials could keep an eye on him, too.
 
“I could not skip school,” he joked. “If I was missing, they knew where to get me.”
 
However, he still managed to enjoy a little harmless mischief. He said that he worked with the bookstore in the school and would regularly take money to and from a nearby bank. On the way back, he would usually stop for a hamburger and French fries at the popular Dinner Party restaurant, which was located in a still-standing building on the northwest corner of Dayton Boulevard and Leawood Street.
 
After Mr. Seagle graduated from the University of Chattanooga with a degree in chemistry under professor Dr. Irvine Grote, he began his longtime career in water treatment, analysis and consulting.
 
His parents continued to live in the home, but his father tragically died in December 1969 after trying to shovel snow outside the home, he said.
 
Don Seagle’s mother decided to move to another home near Morrison Springs Road. About the same time, the Kay’s Kastle ice cream shop firm – headed by the Kollmansperger family -- approached the family about buying the Dayton Boulevard home for a site for a new eatery.
 
The Seagle home and detached garage with a driveway were torn down, and Kay’s was built about 1970. A short time later, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened a restaurant on the north side of Kay’s in a vacant lot that Mr. Seagle said was owned by someone else.
 
The Kay’s Kastle – which was referred to as store No. 21 and served ice cream treats, hot dogs and barbecue sandwiches – was given the address of 3714 Dayton Blvd., while the KFC, store No. 20 locally, was at 3716 Dayton Blvd.
 
One or two people who attended Red Bank High School in the early 1970s do not have a lot of memories of students eating there, so it must have been more popular after school hours.
 
“Back in those days students were not allowed to leave the campus, though some did sneak over there to get lunch to avoid the cafeteria food,” recalled Doug Swafford. “Some got caught but that didn't stop them from trying!
 
“We were glad they built the Kay's there,” he added. “The only other one in Red Bank was south of Signal Mountain Boulevard in a little white building which Stovall Equipment later used.  That building is still there.”
 
For the last few years until it moved to Morrison Springs Road in 1982, Red Bank High School was somewhat unique in that it had limited parking on its school grounds, so students who drove had to park in surrounding parking lots.
 
One main place was the lot at Red Bank United Methodist Church across the street, so who knows how many students might have stopped by Kay’s or KFC for an afternoon snack after school as well.
 
According to some old city directories, a Subway sandwich eatery opened in the former Kay’s about 1990 or a few months earlier. By that time, the Kay’s chain – which had once been located in nearly every community of the Chattanooga area -- had seen its business decline as ownership changed hands, although one or two stores remained as private entities.
 
The Subway restaurant chain had started appearing in the Chattanooga market in the late 1980s, and several had already opened in the city before the one in Red Bank.
 
The Kentucky Fried Chicken lasted a little longer at the adjacent site – a total of about 25 years – before it became the Donut Palace in the mid-1990s.
 
By the early 2000s, the Donut Palace became a Mr. T’s pizza and ice cream restaurant. Subway eventually moved north on Dayton Boulevard to the former Krystal, and the old Kay’s building remained vacant, with a long-covered Kay’s sign becoming visible again in recent years.
 
And Red Bank High School, which was converted into a junior high in 1982 and a middle school in 1986, was closed in 2013 after a new middle school was built off Morrison Springs Road by the high school. The Dayton Boulevard school plant was later razed and cleared, and in recent months both sides of that block have looked a little like a ghost town.
 
Dayton Boulevard there also appears to be not nearly so heavily traveled as decades ago before Corridor J opened.
 
Although Mr. Seagle – who now lives in East Ridge -- cherishes the memories from his former home, just as Chattanoogans fondly remember stopping at the eateries, he said he welcomes the gas station.
 
“It’s a perfect prime location for a developer,” he said. “It would start some reason to come to Dayton Boulevard.”
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