Local newspapers from 50 years ago, the first week of 1972, offer tastes of what we are still dealing with in 2022, proposals that never came to fruition and portents of things that did.
While Chattanooga Mayor Robert Kirk Walker was pictured smiling and drenched in streamers on the front page of the Jan. 1 edition of the Chattanooga News-Free Press, the city had a lot going on.
Walker and the then-City Commission, in that first week, were dealing with an annexation resolution that would take 11 parcels into the city at once, the thought – according to one commissioner – being, “It’s better to take the castor oil in one dose.”
While today’s Hamilton County Election Commission handles all matters dealing with voting precincts – recently reducing 135 precincts to 88, with few polling location changes for 2022 – the City Commission 50 years ago authorized four new voting precincts for annexed areas but “took under advisement” splitting several precincts to have a more equalized number of voters in each.
The early 1972 commission also discussed cable television being offered in the area but learned the Federal Communications Commission had yet to allow clearance for foreign – meaning out of the area – signals for the city. Cable television would not become a reality in the area until the end of the 1970s.