Mr. Russell and the 'Noog

A few weeks ago my roommate, Jen and I decided to get up early and head down to Chattanooga for the day.

What a fun little city!?! I totally dug it!! 

We spent about 6 hours there: walking around, shopping on Main Street and the North Shore, having lunch at Mud Pie and snapping photos of Tyler Russel’s old 1950 Chevy Truck.

The trouble with spontaneous trips, is sometimes you miss out on cool things and sometimes you hit the jack pot.

One of the cool things we missed by a day was the Four Bridges Art Festival, we had discussed going back the next day but our weekend was too busy.
After we got back to Nashville I was reading through one of the ‘Noog’s (that’s what the locals call Chattanooga) independent papers and saw we also missed out on a couple of cool shops too! Oh well, better for my pocketbook I suppose and a reason to go back to the ‘Noog in the future.

We made our way into Hanover Gallery on Frazier Avenue and struck up a conversation with the owners, David and Missy. Missy does a 3 hour painting class where you can bring in 5 or 6 of your friends and your favorite adult beverage and learn how to paint. Jen and I are all about taking this class, there is a place in Nashville that does the same thing, except you paint with up to 20 strangers and that class only last two hours. I’m definitely going to have to do the smaller, longer, more hands on version, because I can not paint to save my life. Maybe if I drink a couple bottles of wine that would help?!

After we left Frazier Ave, we headed for the Warehouse Furniture Row, Jen and I were both disappointed in the few stores that were located in the building. Such a fabulous, old rehab warehouse, but with a handful of very expensive stores, it was a bit of a let down.

Jen plugged in Antique stores into her Garmin and twice we were taking on a wild goose chase…the second chase led us up Signal Mountain into a residential neighborhood (we wondered if the people knew the Garmin was leading us to their house). It was a nice drive up Signal Mountain at least.

The first set of bad directions however, did introduce us to Tyler Russell and his 1950 Chevy Truck. Jen and I were driving down the street and there was this old beat farming truck. I yelled for Jen to stop so I could hop out and get some shots. As I’m walking around the truck snapping out walks this guy and I say “hi is this your truck?” And he says “yes it is.” I say “aww I just love this truck. My name is April, what’s your name?” He says, “I’m Tyler Russell. I’m 80 years old.” I then said “get out of town…you don’t look a day over 50”.  We had a nice conversation about what he did, how there was no way he was 80 (he even showed me his driver’s license to prove it). I then asked him for his mailing address so I could send him a few of the shots I took of him and his truck.

That weekend I printed the photos out for Mr. Russell and dropped them in the mail. A couple days later I received a call from Mr. Russell, unfortunately, I had missed his call but he left the sweetest voicemail “Miss Gulley- thank you so much for the photos of me and my big truck”. I loved hearing the appreciation and awe in his voice.

I have yet to call him back, but I hope to this week. I’d love to be there in 20 years for his 100^th birthday.