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Remembering Mai Bell Hurley: Hopeful and Helpful Arts advocate, Chattanooga leader Mai Bell Hurley dies
Mai Bell Hurley was never one to fit into molds.
The longtime arts and civic leader, who died Friday, was forever going places women infrequented and was out in front on important issues in the community. She cut a swath of leadership for those who succeeded her.
The only woman in the newsroom of the former Chattanooga News-Free Press after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina in 1950, Hurley later was an early advocate for the Tennessee Aquarium, a merged school system and the expansion of Coolidge Park, and became the first woman on the Chattanooga City Council.
She also was the first campaign chairwoman for the United Way of Greater Chattanooga, the first woman to sit on the board of First Tennessee Bank, the first chairwoman of the administrative board at her church (First-Centenary United Methodist) and the first chairwoman of Chattanooga Venture.
Outspoken and direct but never one to toot her own horn, Hurley also served on the boards of River City Co. and the Lyndhurst and Community foundations. She also worked with other organizations such as Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, ArtsBuild (then Allied Arts), Metropolitan Council of Social Services, Westside Development Corp., the Partnership for Families, Children and Adults (then Family and Children's Services), the Chattanooga Regional History Museum and GPS.
A story she related in 2000 about her brief newspaper career speaks volumes to her contributions to Chattanooga.
"I was substituting for the newspaper's (then) music critic, Lowell Lahman, at a performance of the Chattanooga Symphony," said Hurley, who also was a wife and mother, "when one of my former teachers at GPS, the late Mary Hannah Tucker, asked why I was taking notes during the concert. I told her that I was covering the event for the newspaper, and she said to me: "You never did know your limitations.'"
Chattanooga can be grateful she didn't.