John Shearer: Remembering Razed Bright And City College Building On 100th Anniversary, Part 2

For the last 60-plus years, students at Bright School have experienced a North Chattanooga campus with mid-century features, several modern additions, and a classic-style colonnaded entrance.

But for those who attended the school when it was on Fortwood Street, it was a different-looking 1920s-era building designed originally by noted local architect R.H. Hunt, with a 1950s wing later added. But it had some similar traditions and even names of rooms that the later school had.

An example of the latter was the King Room, which also became the name of the initial gym in the new school and was where the library later relocated. “I remember the gym (the King Room) that was a newer addition where we would go for recess when the weather was bad,” said Louise “Tootie” Chamberlain Tual, a member of the Class of 1963.

Added Dr. Henry Aldridge, a member of the Class of 1955, in discussing the auditorium that could have been a description of the one at the current school, “We had a nicely equipped stage that had a curtain and a rehearsal area. We did plays there.”

As the second of a two-part look is taken at the history of the now-razed Bright School building on Fortwood Street that was later taken over by City College and then UTC before being torn down, Ms. Tual and Dr. Aldridge offered several positive and detailed memories.

In fact, Dr. Aldridge could still vividly recall the layout of the building nearly 70 years later. He remembers the outside playgrounds to the sides with pea gravel and swings and where football and softball would be played, although the fifth and sixth grade boys would go to the University of Chattanooga’s nearby Chamberlain Field to practice football. Miss Bright’s dog was also kept in a fenced-in area in the back.

The building itself was three stories, he added, with the first or ground floor featuring the kindergarten, manual training and music rooms, and second grade.

The second floor could be reached by going into the canopy-covered front door and walking up some stairs, he added. “On the west side was the first grade, and Miss Bright’s office was on the west side,” Dr. Aldridge recalled. “The third and fourth grade classes were also on that hall, and you went straight through to the auditorium. There was also the cafeteria there.

“At lunchtime, they opened folding doors on the Fort Wood (Street) side and that’s where the kitchen was and the cafeteria line, and they would put out long tables and chairs.”

On the top floor was the sixth-grade class and the residential area where Miss Bright and teacher Miss Margaret Ellen McCallie lived in their own sleeping quarters, Dr. Aldridge said.

The older students got to occasionally visit the apartment. “You can imagine the view from there,” he recalled. “You could see almost the whole cityscape. And it was filled with beautiful antiques.”

Another key person in operating the building, he said, was a black janitor named Henry. Henry was kind of an unsung hero whose job also included driving Ms. Bright and Ms. McCallie in a Chrysler kept in a garage on the Fifth Street side of the school.

“He showed up and did everything,” Dr. Aldridge recalled. “He set up the movie projector (for school movies) and did the sets for the plays.”

After this story was initially posted, local genealogical and historical researcher Kim Kinsey Chambers emailed to say she had found some additional information that the janitor’s full name was Henry Russell. She also learned he was a World War I veteran and that his wife, Vallie, whom he had married in 1937, was also a maid/housekeeper at Bright and for Ms. Bright and Ms. McCallie and helped take care of the dog. They also lived in at least two nearby addresses in the 900 block of East Fifth Street during the 1950s, Ms. Chambers said.

He died in 1971 and Vallie died in 1982, and they were both buried at Chattanooga’s National Cemetery.

A special memory Dr. Aldridge has of the building was during Christmastime, when Miss Bright would each year cover the building’s large windows with paper drawings of stained-glass windows, perhaps done by former art teacher Frank Baisden. The students would also perform the play, “Why the Chimes Rang.”

And on the last day before school would break for the holidays, the choir of fourth, fifth and sixth grade students would sing “The First Noel,” with Dr. Aldridge once getting to sing a solo. She would also have a large tree put up behind some closed curtains, and the students would gather, including those scheduled to begin attending school the next year.

“She would ask them to investigate, and a curtain would open, and Santa Claus would pop out, and there would be a gift for every child in the school,” he remembered. “Miss Bright knew how to do Christmas very, very well.”

Dr. Aldridge, who went on to graduate from McCallie in 1961 and became an electronic media and film studies professor at Eastern Michigan and the organist at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, also got a better peek into the life of Miss Bright because of where he lived. Residing with a grandmother at the time, although his mother had also attended there, he would walk to school early every morning from the nearby Alberta Apartments on Houston Street and be welcomed in with a ring in a way that continued the hospitable environment.

“It was pleasantly welcoming with rules you followed,” he said of the overall school. “It was serious. Miss Bright was a very gentle and kindly, but serious, lady. And all the teachers were like little old ladies.”

Dr. Aldridge added that if a student misbehaved, Miss Bright knew how to make a youngster quickly realize what he or she had done. “She would get down to our eye level and say, 'Henry, I'm very disappointed in you. I want you to come to my office and sit on the chair outside in the hall while you think about your behavior.' That got us every time!”

He said that the last time he saw Miss Bright and Miss McCallie was in 1966 not long before she died, when he was in his first year of teaching in the Westminster Schools girls’ high school division in Atlanta. “Miss Bright had already been diagnosed with cancer, and they wanted to see me one last time. Miss Bright had a book to give me. She was so sweet and wonderful."

Among his other memories are of the surprise fire drills twice a year. There was no electrical bell system in the building, so Miss Bright would ring a bell she had, and everyone had to go outside, where the fire marshal would be.

Also, every year after the Bright School picnic at Warner Park, a class picture would be taken on the steps in front of the school, he said. He also remembered taking part in another picture when the school was breaking ground for an addition, although he would graduate before it was completed.

Louise Chamberlain Tual began attending about when the addition was new, and she remembers several interesting features, including the King Room named for two alumni brothers who had died before reaching middle age.

“That was a newer addition where we would go for recess when the weather was bad,” said Ms. Tual, who went on to become the May queen of Girls Preparatory School in 1969 and later settled in Memphis. “There was no basketball in the King Room. It was just a big room, and Miss Bright thought the purpose of it was to play and use your imagination.”

She also remembered that the school had some gym rings where one could pretend to be Tarzan and swing from one to the other.

She also recalled that the third-grade room had an interesting loft library. “You would climb the ladder, and it was a library for kids,” she said. “It was where I discovered a love of books. It was a cozy reading nook for kids.”

Ms. Tual also recalls the basement room with red linoleum floors where she often unsuccessfully attempted to take naps as a kindergartener; the morning rides with her ear, nose and throat physician father, Dr. Douglas Chamberlain; going home to Lookout Mountain via the Incline Railway and a city bus chaperoned by some UC students; getting to make shelves as a sixth grader in manual training using a table saw; and making a small rug with a loom in Ms. Jackson’s art class.

Many of these experiences continued for the students over the years, but they eventually changed in location, During her last few months of school in 1963, the move was made to the new location off Hixson Pike by Riverview. As a result, Ms. Tual was part of the first class to graduate at the current campus.

She admitted to not paying that much attention to the more expansive and modern school digs like the parents and staff would have. But she remembers the new courtyard/quadrangle, which they did not have at the old school, and graduating from the new auditorium stage.

But Ms. Tual’s greatest memory seems to be of the old school and its leader before the retiring Miss Bright was replaced by new school head Dr. Mary Dalton Davis in 1961. As an example, she has not forgotten Miss Bright’s eyes that required glasses. “Her vision must have been bad,” she recalled. “She wore wire-rim glasses, and they made her eyes big and brown. I occasionally had to go to the principal’s office, but she was really sweet. She didn’t look threatening at all.”

The Fort Wood building would later be used by the black school, City College, and then be taken over along with the school by UTC and used for administrative and campus support offices.

Efforts to track down any City College alumni through either UTC, which later catalogued them as alumni, or one or two people familiar with Chattanooga black history at that time to get their memories proved unsuccessful.

Their experiences there from 1963-69 came at a time when more opportunities were becoming available for black Chattanoogans as the walls of segregation were slowly being taken down, and this was perhaps symbolized by the building’s evolution.

Dr. Aldridge said he later had a chance to go in the structure with his daughter not long before the building was torn down in the early 1990s.

“We walked in and one of the guys there says, “Every day we have someone from Bright School wanting to see it,’ ” Mr. Aldridge recalled with a laugh. “I showed her around and it didn’t look run down. The classrooms had been turned into offices or storage, and the auditorium was still there.”

Plenty of tanglible signs still remained of this woman who had bad vision in a physical sense but good foresight educationally. And despite its later razing, memories of her and the old building still remain vividly clear in the minds of a few alumni still living as well.

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To see the first story in this series with pictures of the old school building, read here.

https://www.chattanoogan.com/2024/7/22/489955/John-Shearer-Remembering-Razed-Bright.aspx

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net