Kennedy: Chattanooga's secret weapon

An aerial view of downtown Chattanooga.
An aerial view of downtown Chattanooga.
photo Mark Kennedy

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Chattanooga named among best places to retire

I was relaxing at home one night last week, flipping through a copy of Money magazine, when I spotted an article called "Best Places to Retire 2015."

"I wonder," I thought.

Flipping to the article - one of those fold-out jobs that takes two hands to manage - I quickly scanned the list.

Bingo. Chattanooga. Right there in the Top 20. Singled out for a vibrant arts scene and a low cost of living.

Residents of the Scenic City have been conditioned to believe that if there is a "best city" list out there, we should be on it. Chattanooga's trending notoriety as one of the best mid-sized cities in America is as unstoppable as a locomotive.

Choo choo!

The next day, I got an email from a reader, Ed Gilmour, 58, who had a similar experience. He happened upon a Yahoo! website recently that promised to reveal the "coolest cities" in America, as crowned by AroundMe.com.

"I wonder ," Gilmour thought as he clicked through to the article.

Bingo. Chattanooga. Right there.

Gilmour, who moved to Chattanooga from Wisconsin as a teenager and lived here much of his life, recently moved to Baton Rouge, La., for work. He is an enlisted man in Chattanooga's army of ambassadors, whose word-of-mouth testimonials about the Scenic City are as powerful as any magazine article.

Gilmour is among those long-time residents who lived Chattanooga's rags-to-riches story; and he well-remembers the "rags" stage.

"When I was in my teens and 20s, I wanted to get out of Chattanooga," Gilmour wrote in his e-mail. "It was a dying city and downtown was a ghost town. There was nothing to do except (go to) the clubs on Brainerd Road."

Boy, how times have changed.

Like a dowdy person who has dropped 30 pounds, Chattanooga seems to never tire of looking at itself in the mirror.

And what does it see? Outdoor mecca. Emerging auto industry hub. Vibrant downtown. High-tech business magnetism. All things that would have been impossible to envision through the thick industrial smog of the 1970s.

Gilmour came from a town in the Midwest, Rockford, Ill., a place that he says still seems caught in its post-industrial funk. Chattanooga, on the other hand, has reinvented itself since Gilmour arrived here in 1974.

"I remember coming over Missionary Ridge and not being able to see Lookout Mountain because of the smog," he said. "Back then, white houses had to be repainted every few years."

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Gilmour worked in downtown Chattanooga, doing building maintenance at Patten Towers and later stocking newspapers in downtown racks. He remembers walking for blocks and blocks at night and seeing nobody around.

"I remember walking to Krystal on Cherry Street and the whole city seemed deserted," he said in an interview.

Now, he says, everywhere he goes in Louisiana, people are talking about Chattanooga.

A work associate in Louisiana recently confided that she and her husband hope to retire to Chattanooga - a dream no doubt bolstered by the new Money retirement-town list.

During a chance encounter at his Baton Rouge fitness club, Gilmour said he recently had a conversation with a man who said his wife was swimming laps as part of her training for an upcoming Ironman race in - where else - Chattanooga.

At some point all this notoriety stops being coincidence and starts being truth. And I suppose pride is a good thing if it fuels the desire to stay on top.

"I'm proud to be from Chattanooga, and I tell people about it all the time," Gilmour says.

But if life teaches us anything, it's that popularity and notoriety can be fleeting. The only thing we have to fear is hubris.

Contentment is contagious. There is more work to do.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@ timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/ mkennedycolumnist.

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