It’s a little after 10 o’clock Saturday morning and McCallie freshman Sam Laney is sweeping the steps and cleaning out a planting bed at the Community Kitchen on 11th Street.
“My mom encouraged me to volunteer for this,” said the first-year boarding student from Knoxville. “I like to clean. I need things to be in order. So helping out here was perfect for me.”
A few feet away from Laney stood senior day student Maddux Clardy. His family helped start the Grateful Gobbler 5K run/walk that begins in Coolidge Park each Thanksgiving morning. The event has raised money for the Maclellan Shelter for Families, an emergency homeless shelter, for the past 25 years.
“Just trying to help where I live,” said Clardy. “My family helps provide meals for the homeless. I want to help where I can, keeping people from being hungry.”
Ricky Thomas, McCallie’s Dean of Student Life, oversees service opportunities for the student body several times a year. Saturday saw students helping out the Community Kitchen, where there’s a food pantry, the homeless are fed, and career counseling, among other things, is provided for those who request it.
It also saw them clearing walking trails at Reflection Riding at the foot of Lookout Mountain and clearing fallen trees and limbs from Pleasant Garden Cemetery, which was the first Black-owned cemetery in Tennessee and is just a few hundred yards on the other side of Missionary Ridge from the McCallie campus.
“We usually have 30 to 40 students out here on these Saturdays,” said Thomas as he worked on the landscaping outside the Community Kitchen. “But some of our kids have SAT testing this morning and some are tied up with spring sports. So we’re probably closer to 25 today. But they love to do this, to make our community better. We always have enough students volunteer to do this work.”
The work at the Pleasant Garden Cemetery was physically demanding. By 11 in the morning, just over an hour in, English teachers Ryan Alston and Dr. Thea Autry had led a dozen or so students to clear logs and branches that turned into a pile stretching 50 yards long and five feet wide along the edge of Rowe Road on the Brainerd side of the Ridge.
“This is a historic place,” said Alston. “We’ve done a lot of work this morning, hard work, but we’ve also talked about the significance of this cemetery, and about Ed Johnson and his lynching here in Chattanooga in 1906. (Johnson is buried in Pleasant Garden.) We’ve had a very productive morning.”
Freshman boarding student Dallas Manolache was one of the students hard at work in the cemetery.
Asked what made him volunteer for this project, Manolache, who is a citizen of Romania though he now resides in Knoxville, said, “I wasn’t doing anything else this morning, so I thought I might as well help. Besides, I love doing manual labor with my friends. I’ve really enjoyed this. There’s always a new adventure to take part in at McCallie.”
Dr. Autrey had wanted her Saturday morning adventure to be at Reflection Riding, but her advisees convinced her to take on the cemetery.
“But I’ll do Reflection Riding next time,” she said with a smile. “I’m enjoying helping where I can. These are good boys. This is really hard work.”
Back at the Community Kitchen, volunteer coordinator Sadie Whitehead is asked about the McCallie kids and the work they’ve done for several years at the charity.
“They always bring a lot of energy,” she said. “They do whatever needs to be done and do it with a great attitude. Some of it is just grunt work. Heavy lifting, stocking shelves, trash pickup.
“But a lot of it has become skilled labor, too. Organizing office space. Cleaning out the deep freezer. Building storage spaces. Wherever we need help, Ricky has these boys ready to get it done.”
Whitehead then paused for a moment. “These McCallie boys,” she added, “have not only been our volunteers of the year this year. They’ve earned that the last two years.