“This is Contact. May I help you?”
Those are the first words heard by more than 600,000 callers to Contact of Chattanooga over the last 42 years.
For most of those years, the Rev. Fate Thomas has been a part of the volunteer telephone crisis intervention and counseling center.
Last month, he stepped down after five years as interim executive director. He had served as executive director from 1981 to 1989 and was a counselor for the agency before that.
“You can see his fingerprints all over this organization,” said Gary Paul, Contact’s new executive director. “He knew the operations pretty much as a worker … before he took over as executive director.”