Dalton's Charles Mitchell grew out of misery to merry

DALTON, Ga. — Dr. Charles Mitchell will enjoy himself tonight and tomorrow.

“Who wouldn’t this time of year?” the Dalton High School wrestling coach and football assistant asked rhetorically. “I have a wife and a family.”

It seems so effortless to be happy now. Maybe the adage that time heals all wounds is true, but Mitchell’s joy today comes only after years of anguish, struggle, turmoil and toil.

His first vivid childhood memory is of being cast from his grandmother’s house as a 5-year-old and then trudging along dark streets behind his mother and his siblings with his meager sack of belongings slung over a tiny shoulder. His family wandered from one unlit dirt-floor shack to another.

“We were homeless. And although I didn’t know what it meant, I got a reality check real quick,” he said, recalling those first nights out in the cold that would become his life’s foundation. “We wound up living for a couple of months at the Salvation Army, and I remember asking my mom why we got to eat just once a day.

“Although I didn’t know what homeless meant, I knew something was wrong and I knew I didn’t like it. I often think, though, that I resolved even then that there was a better life and I was going to find it. I realized if I didn’t work and make things happen that such a life was what was in store for me.”

Old acquaintances who knew him as a child or in his teen years and see him now marvel openly that he didn’t wind up in jail or the morgue.

“They expect you to be what your environment produces,” Mitchell said. “I never looked at the negatives — drugs, violence and prostitution — but focused on what I needed to do to be successful.”

That focus never included Christmas. In his youth, his holiday came from whatever the Salvation Army, the Chattanooga food bank or some corporate sponsor saw fit to hand out. He doesn’t recall trimming a tree or receiving presents until he was 11.

“My grandmother tried but we were poor, really poor,” he recalled. “Christmas was just another day. I knew what a telephone was, but we didn’t have one. There were plenty of times when I didn’t get toys or gifts and plenty of times I felt like I was the only one believing something good was going to happen.”

Through each struggle, though, his mother was his rock.

“She did good by me,” Mitchell said. “She always stressed good grades. We might not have had a lot of things, but she always did the best she could. We might never have feasted, but she did what she had to do to make sure we were taken care of. To me, that was so powerful.”

His father, who struggled with alcoholism, was in and out of his life, and Mitchell recalls at least two occasions when his father tried to kill him. That came amid times when he witnessed drive-by shootings in a neighborhood ruled by drugs and drug lords.

“I saw things a kid shouldn’t have to see. I’ve seen the worst the world has to offer,” he said.

He also remembers times when his drive and initiative were shaken with earthquake ferocity.

“We moved around a lot. I was in five schools before I got to the seventh grade,” Mitchell said. “We finally had a house my eighth-grade year, but then it caught fire and burned down. I was 13 and trying to be the man of the house. I got my sisters out and then the house went boom. I was standing there in my shorts and my burned Reeboks, and I started crying.

“And then I started praying. I prayed for the basics — to stay in the same school, for clothes and a roof over my head.”

Then the first real positive influence other than his mother or grandmother entered his life.

“It was on TV when the house burned down, and a lady named Jerri Horner showed up. She’d seen the news,” Mitchell said. “I was depressed and sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and she was so positive that things were going to get better. She talked to me like I was a person. She didn’t see me as so much black trash.”

He went from an F-filled semester one year to a spot the next on Hixson Junior High’s academic bowl team, which marked him as one of the school’s brightest students.

Yet the struggles continued. He lived in East Chattanooga and went by bus from his home to downtown, where he’d catch another bus to Northgate. He often walked from the shopping center to Hixson High. That was nothing, really, compared to his return trip during football and wrestling seasons. The buses had stopped running by then and he often walked from the school back to East Chattanooga. Three hours and 45 minutes, he readily recalls.

And then along came Julian Kaufman, then a recently hired Hixson teacher and coach who now coaches at Baylor.

“The man has got to be a teacher of the year,” Mitchell said. “For me he was the teacher of a lifetime. He shared his life with me, talked about growing up poor in Atlanta and some of the struggles he’d been through. I remember thinking, ‘If he can be successful, why can’t I?’”

As a wrestler, Mitchell struggled through a winless streak that would have broken others. He continued to persevere, refusing to blame his misfortune on others and gathering again the resolve to continue.

“People made fun of me,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything about my socio-economic status or my family or parents or where I lived. People need to remember that they might have struggles but nothing can keep them from feeling good about being honest and having integrity.”

He made it to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga through a series of loans and academic grants and graduated, receiving the Dayle May award as the athlete with the highest grade point average just blocks from the Salvation Army that was one of his early homes. A master’s degree followed, and then came his specialist degree and a doctorate.

Kaufman’s influence led him into teaching and coaching, which is how he met Eduardo Gutierrez at Dalton High. Here was a kid who was classified as an illegal immigrant, a youngster who was pushed from Mexico by his mother and then to his own survival devices.

“He quit the wrestling team. When I asked his teammates about him, they encouraged me to look into his situation,” Mitchell said. “I let him back on the team and the kids came together. They had compassion for him. We went to the state duals and finished second, and it was because our kids rallied around that kid.”

With the memories of his own life still etched deeply into his being, Mitchell took $2,000 and started the citizenship process for Gutierrez, who now is a member of the U.S. Marine Corps and will be eligible next year to apply for U.S. citizenship.

“If I hadn’t gone through all the stuff I went through, I don’t know that I could have opened my heart to a youngster like Gutierrez,” Mitchell said. “There were people like Mrs. Horner and Coach Kaufman who had compassion for me. I could understand the pain, the hurt and the trouble he was enduring.

“He came to me the next year to tell me he had his green card. The change on his face and to see a kid with true honest-to-goodness hope, a million dollars couldn’t buy. He went from hopeless to hopeful. If I share my story with anybody and get them to believe and have hope, I’ll share it with a million people.

“I was born into a fourth-and-long, but what I want people to realize is that they can be anything they want to be if they really want it, and it has nothing to do with race, creed or color. I don’t really want adversity, but I look at my adversity as a blessing.”

It led, finally, to a merry Christmas.