We all need help sometimes
Life is good at throwing curveballs.
As journalists, we see it a lot - life-wrecking curveballs tossed at people in the form of lost jobs, fires, auto accidents, tornadoes, floods, family tragedies. But we also see people's profound goodness and empathy. We see our community's strength when confronted with adversity.
That's why, as a newspaper, we've continued for more than a century to sponsor the Neediest Cases Fund.
It is our way of helping ordinary people - our neighbors - who fall on hard times once in a while.
Ordinary people like 49-year-old Inga Readus, who needed help to make a deposit on a new place to live after she became afraid to stay in her College Hill Courts apartment. It was about this time last year when Readus' car was stolen as she recovered from a surgery. Then more crime knocked when a woman was shot right in front of her door.
In years before, the Neediest Cases Fund helped a retired couple who lost their savings and home in the 2008 stock crash, then a short time later survived a house fire in a duplex that left the woman on oxygen with permanently damaged lungs.
The fund helped people like a veteran with a wife and two special-needs children, who were facing what seemed like an insurmountable hurdle to pay for a $3,300 car repair while the dad juggled work and other day-to-day bills.
In 2016, we saw 40 Rhea County workers who lost their jobs when Fuji Film and Goodman Manufacturing began planning to close up shop in 2017. They received help paying their utility bills and rent.
The kindness and help came thanks to you. Not us. But you, readers. You helped your neighbors. All we did, really, was tell you about them, and you did the rest.
The idea for the Times Neediest Cases Fund was born on Christmas Day 1911 in New York, when Adolph S. Ochs, then-publisher of The New York Times and of The Chattanooga Times, went out for a walk after a big turkey dinner. On the walk, he encountered a shabbily dressed man on the street who told him he had just been given Christmas dinner at a Y.M.C.A. but had nowhere to sleep.
Ochs looked him over, so the story goes, decided he looked respectable and gave him a few dollars and his card.
"If you're looking for a job," he said, "come see me tomorrow."
The encounter made Ochs feel good, and he began thinking about charity and wondering if one man's feeling might be the basis for a city's goodwill, according to an online history of the New York fund - the forerunner of the Chattanooga Neediest Cases Fund.
The following holiday season, Ochs decided to publish articles about the Hundred Neediest Cases in New York, and make an appeal for help not with a direct request for money, but with the facts of those neediest lives. That first year, the campaign lasted nine days and collected $3,630.88 (about $92,746 in today's dollars) from 117 contributors. This year it continues in New York for its 107th year and has raised more than $300 million.
Here, at home, the Chattanooga Times' Neediest Cases fund was launched in 1914.
The Times - and later the Times Free Press - have been raising money for this fund for the 104 years since, running stories twice a week from Thanksgiving until the end of December about local people who need help in their struggles to overcome tough patches in their lives.
We hope you'll help again this year. Your donations (and ours) are collected online through the United Way and at the paper. Contributions are accepted through Dec. 31 and are acknowledged in the newspaper.
We thank you. And your neighbors thank you.
The other neediest
With some help from our county government earlier this week, the neediest animals in our community will get new - and finally dry - shelter in two years.
The Hamilton County Commission on Wednesday morning voted 8-1 to approve up to $10 million to fund a new Chattanooga Humane Educational Society shelter to replace the one now housed in a 118-year-old building on Highland Park Avenue.
The new shelter's groundbreaking on 6.8 acres in the Amnicola and Highway 153 area should take place next summer, and the 36,000-square-foot facility's opening is slated for January 2021. The estimated cost is $13 million.
To pay for the county's capital allocation, commissioners took advantage of a one-time windfall following the county's 2017 property tax increase. The county also pays the society $620,970 a year for animal services - a third of the HES's $1.9 million budget. As a private, nonprofit organization, HES also raises more than $1 million a year in private donations.
For that money, the Humane Educational Society in 2017 took in 4,929 animals - 72 percent of them from unincorporated Hamilton County and the rest from small municipalities. Animal adoptions increased from 812 in 2013 to 2,308 in 2017, and animal euthanasia fell from 1,411 in 2013 to 521 last year.
With its $10 million capital allocation, county government has dutifully done its part.
It's now up to us and small municipalities to help raise the remaining $3 million.