Carolyn (Gant) Towles, a retired Florida elementary school principal, was clearing out files at her home recently when she stumbled upon a piece of Chattanooga history.
Towles, 86, discovered a copy of the Chattanooga Free Press from 1936, the year she was born. A closer inspection showed it wasn't just a random newspaper but an original copy of the first Free Press edition ever published, dated Aug. 31, 1936.
"I looked at it and I was astonished, really," Towles, who lives in Longwood, Florida, near Orlando, said in a telephone interview this week. "I enjoyed reading it and gave it to my children to read."
Towles' daughter, Brenda Brewer, reached out to a Times Free Press editor about the discovery and later mailed the 86-year-old newspaper to Chattanooga to be placed in the newpaper's archives.
The banner headline on the newspaper reads "Pour Concrete On Dam Tomorrow," a reference to the then-emerging Chickamauga Dam. The front page also contained a "good luck" cartoon featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse and apparently signed by Walt Disney himself.
Towles, who graduated from Central High School here, said she left Chattanooga in 1956 after getting married. She believes it was her father, Grady Gant Sr., who saved the newspaper years ago. Gant, who died in 1994 on his 78th birthday, was active in the Republican Party here and ran an unsuccessful campaign for the Tennessee state Senate against the late Sen. Ward Crutchfield, D-Chattanooga, in 1984.
The newspaper found in Florida represents the first edition of the newspaper that later became the Chattanooga News-Free Press. In 1999, the Chattanooga Free Press (as it came to be called) merged with the Chattanooga Times under the ownership of WEHCO Media, headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, to form today's Chattanooga Times Free Press.
The Free Press was published by pioneering Publisher Roy McDonald (known to most as "Mr. Roy"), who had decided to turn a free "shopper" designed to publicize his food store chain into a daily newspaper.
Former Times-Free Press News Editor David Cooper wrote about the 1936 debut of the Chattanooga Free Press in a 2014 article.
"By (the mid-1930s), printer's ink was beginning to flow in Mr. Roy's veins and he wanted to add a Sunday edition, for which he would charge a nickel," Cooper wrote. "That came about in early 1936, but only fostered a desire to go daily. This he did on Aug. 31, 1936, head to head with The Chattanooga News in the evening and The Chattanooga Times in the morning."
Also on the front page of the debut Free Press edition, which cost 2 cents, were stories about exiled Russian Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, a double murder in California and an optimistic economic report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Inside, ads included Sears whole-house furnace systems ($189), lamps at Clemons Bros. Co. ($6.95) and Hotpoint electric ranges sold by the Tennessee Electric Power Co. ($59.25). Of course, there was also an ad for McDonald's Home Stores grocery chain. Butter was 35 cents per pound, bananas were three pounds for 14 cents and candy bars were three for 10 cents.
Meanwhile, the sports page contained coverage of the previous day's doubleheader here between the Birmingham Barons and the Chattanooga Lookouts. (Sadly, the home team lost both games.)
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