The following is an original production of WTCI.

Many people make the mistake.

If we build it, they will come.

I don't believe that at all.

I believe you.

You build, you build the army.

You build the people.

You inspire people that you are fed by the wonderful people who get involved.

And through that, great things will happen.

Find out how this Chattanooga history maker helped set in motion a movement that would completely change the way people live, work and play in this community.

Tonight on the A-list, I visit the home of Rick Montague.

In 1969, Walter Cronkite famously named Chattanooga, the dirtiest city in America, stifling smog, community polarization and a dying downtown threatened the city's future.

But for those of us that now enjoy the prosperity of downtown businesses, the beauty of the riverfront and the endless opportunities for artistic and cultural expression, this dark time in Chattanooga's history seems almost unimaginable.

And it's to the credit of a few visionary community leaders that this city is not marred by its past, but lauded for its remarkable rebirth.

The Chattanooga story is one of a community coming together to make real significant and lasting change.

And it is the story of the people behind the scenes who step forward to set that change in motion.

Rick Montague is one of those people.

Well, Rick, welcome to the A-list.

Thank you.

It's an honor to be here.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Chattanooga, born here and grew up here.

Went to McCallie Bright School.

What was your childhood like?

On the one hand, it was idyllic.

You look back many years later and you see all the difficult things that were in it, but you think what an amazing opportunity with with so many wonderful people surrounding your family and friends.

Did you always think you would make Chattanooga your permanent home when you became an adult?

I think I think that was kind of a given.

And I didn't live here all my life.

I went to University of Virginia, went to Johns Hopkins, lived in North Carolina for a couple of years.

Loved to travel.

But I think I always felt that Chattanooga was something special about it for me.

What did you study in school?

I was A drama major.

Really?

As my children are.

And then I was a student of the writer Peter Taylor at UVA and of got a fellowship to Johns Hopkins in their graduate writing program and got a degree from there.

And what was your first job out of school?

I taught it by my first job out of school.

I taught at Baylor for two years.

And the interesting most interesting thing about it was that I was kind of part time and I was developing the writing program and a wonderful teacher left the school, abruptly, entered the Navy, and committed suicide, and I inherited all of his classes.

So one year out of college, I was teaching seventh graders, eighth graders, 10th graders and seniors.

I had four different preparations every day and teaching kids who were, you know, almost my age.

I bet your drama background helped you.

Yes, it did.

How long were you at Baylor as a teacher?

I was there for two years.

Then I went to Johns Hopkins and we lived in North Carolina.

And then when Herb Barks came back to be the headmaster at Baylor, I wrote him a letter and said I was not sure I wanted to keep doing what I was doing.

And he got me to come down and he hired me and I worked there for four more years.

And then what happened then?

At that time, my grandfather, father in law Carter Lupton, died, and with his death came the creation of the Lyndhurst Foundation, or what was to become the Lyndhurst Foundation.

And at same time, the burden of the family business fell to his son, Jack, my father in law at the time, and people find this hard to believe.

But it was a very difficult time in Jack's life because suddenly it was there were an awful lot of responsibilities that had been handled that were suddenly handed to him.

And I went to him and I said, you know, if they if I can help you in any way, you know, they plants all over the country.

I said, If I can help you in any way, I will.

I'd love to do it.

And he said, Well, you know, coming with this is this foundation.

It's going to be bigger than any foundation in the state.

And I don't know exactly what we're going to do, but let's find out together.

Would you be interested?

I said, Sure, I'd love to.

So that's what I did next.

It was 1977 when Rick began his journey with Lyndhurst.

The organization's roots date back to 1938, when Carter Lupton created the Memorial Welfare Foundation, focusing his efforts on local and regional philanthropy.

But when Jack Lupton took the helm after his father's death, the foundation's work grew to almost unimaginable heights.

The name was changed to the Lyndhurst Foundation, and today it is a name that holds a prestigious weight in the community.

But when Rick was assigned the task of getting Lyndhurst headed in a new direction, it was a long and uncertain process, figuring out how the foundation could best serve the community going forward.

So the timing of this is is opportune because, I mean, here we go from 1969 where Chattanooga's named the most polluted city in America to now the seventies, where there's this great opportunity to reinvent the city.

Was that part of the Lyndhurst mission when you took over?

Was was that kind of at the forefront or was it more about how can we make a difference in different communities?

What was the general mission then?

The there was no general mission.

We had the luxury because of the way the payout laws are.

We had almost two full calendar years to think about what we wanted to do, and Jack was clear that what we had done was not what he wanted to do, but he wasn't sure exactly what we ought to do.

And there was the general sense as we studied other foundations, I went all over the country.

Anybody that was doing anything that I thought was really interesting, I would just call them up and go visit them in programs that I thought were really interesting.

I'd call them up and say, you know, I'd like to know what's going on.

And after we'd been after this for a while, Jack and I agreed we wanted to hire somebody to work with me and my good friend, lifelong friend, not lifelong, but long time friend.

Jack Morrow was going to leave Baylor, and he was definitely going to leave Baylor.

And I said, if you're definitely going to leave Baylor, then I'd like you to come work with me.

And so he helped in that process where we were all massaging and thinking and strategizing and creating fake grant books to talk about.

And but there was a sense that we were not sure how we were going to do it, but we wanted everything to get better.

And we were not smart enough at that time to be able to say, Here's how you go about making a better city.

You know, that's either arrogant or foolish.

I'm not sure which.

But we never we never assumed that we would be or really wanted to be an engine for broad spread change on the of the magnitude that eventually happened.

And it didn't just happen because of us, but it we we gradually kind of fell in to that business.

We were we were very lucky.

We had a lot of great consultants, We had a lot of great energy that we could tap into.

And, you know, looking back on it, it was I guess we were lucky as hell now.

Like you said, it wasn't a solo act.

You really kind of brought the community together and and had, you know, agents from all different areas really, you know, thinkers and strategic people who were thinking about what needed to happen in Chattanooga.

Was that how Venture Chattanooga Venture came to be?

Well, the Chattanooga venture grew out of something else.

And I would say there were there were several strands that really that we looked into very, very early on.

And one of the first I was at a Council on Foundations meeting, the first that anybody from Tennessee had ever been to was in Seattle, went to a lunch, and on every plate was this little book called Learning from Seattle.

So as soon as I got back to Chattanooga, I called the guys up who had written the book, and this was a guy named Johnny Longo and his partner, Roberto Brambilla.

Through through Johnny.

We began to believe passionately in the idea of public participation, in public participation as an essential element in anything that happens that's positive in a city.

Now, for establishment figures like Jack Lupton, Rodney Davenport to believe in an ideology of public participation was unheard of in Chattanooga.

I'm not sure they would have even know what public participation was.

Eventually, as Johnny was working and we had five nights in Chattanooga and we produced something that went into every newspaper, every Sunday newspaper in Chattanooga called Chattanooga in Motion, which was an ironic title because Chattanooga was decidedly not in motion.

But it was a way for the foundation to say to the community, We're not real sure exactly where this is leading, but we want you to know that we're doing this and we want you to be part of it.

Rick's work in bringing these kind of innovative ideas to Chattanooga made him the perfect candidate to head the Moccasin Bend Task Force, a citizens group put together in the early 1980s, at a time when the city's future seemed more bleak than ever.

Rick took a bold step in putting the concepts he'd learned through Johnny Longo to the test.

Over the course of three years, the task force held a series of 65 public meetings to determine what to do with Chattanooga's dying waterfront.

Together, they came up with the Tennessee River Master Plan, a revolutionary idea of turning the river into the heart of activity for the city.

Though the concept of public participation may have seemed radical at the time, the success of the work done by the Moccasin Bend Task Force made it clear that in order to turn Chattanooga around, its people had to be involved.

And it was then that Chattanooga venture was born.

Anyone who is relatively new to the city, to Chattanooga, let's say, even within the past 15 years, probably takes for granted all that went into planning the city from those that time in the mid eighties onward.

Give us kind of a, you know, an illustration of what the landscape both economically and visually, Chattanooga, look like at that point when Chattanooga Venture started, because I feel like that transition, you know, until right now, just, you know, just 30 plus years is is dramatic.

It is dramatic.

It's downtown was sorry, the air wasn't great.

Nobody used the river.

There was a sense that everything should be done on the cheap there.

There wasn't much vision.

There wasn't much energy.

There was tremendous polarization in the city.

And there was a tremendous sense that there are certain parts of town.

Those were for black people only.

These are for white people on the mountain.

People go here, city people go every way.

You could dissect the community.

Chattanooga had dissected it and people were pretty much in their own camps and in their own tents and happy to stay there.

And an analogy would be they were playing defense.

Hardly anyone was interested in playing offense and people were angry and people were frightened and people were bitter, Peter.

People were cynical anyway.

Leadership.

Chattanooga.

People went to Indianapolis where we had a strong relationship with Partners for Livable Places and their 65 civic leaders were looking at what was going on at the Greater Indianapolis Project Committee, etc., etc., etc.. And Maybelle Harley and Tom Hiebert and Bob SEALs and I kind of broke away from the crowd one night and we said, you know, if this thing is really going to work in Chattanooga, we need to form something that's better than Gypsy.

And it's not beholden to the government but is independent and thus Chattanooga venture was born.

And then I would say that with it came a new energy that that was responding to the open invitation of the market and being a task force.

The idea that we wanted to have a vision that people would buy into and a vision that would put Chattanooga on the map of desirable places to live, to work, to build a family, that people would have a vision of a commune, actually, where we acted like a community to create new public places that are free from history and where every citizen feels welcome.

Now, out of Chattanooga venture came Vision 2000, this visioning process.

And I understand that out of the 40 goals that were set through that visioning process, about 37 were actually achieved.

Is that accurate?

Yes, that is accurate.

But also other things came out of that process that weren't among those four and they got they got done as well.

So it was a you know, it was a grand slam.

And I've got to go back to my friend Johnny Longo, who was one of the brains behind what what the Vision 2000 process would actually look like.

So, you know, that was a relationship that had been nurtured for almost ten years.

And that was just one of the one of the final act.

But yeah, the Vision 2000 process was was an amazing success.

What was your most proud accomplishment from that visioning process?

The my my proudest not accomplishment, my proudest observation, my proudest experience was to walk in to UTC the first night and and see that the room was packed and then to come back for every other meeting and see that the room was packed.

And, you know, that just reinforced my belief that everything was going to be great.

It was.

And it was Rick's willingness to take bold steps in new directions that aided Chattanooga in getting to where it is today.

The city successes are due to the power of its people who came together against all odds, to breathe new life into a city that seemed to have lost all hope.

And those that set Chattanooga Venture in motion will be the first to attribute its successes to the hard work done by thousands of citizens who united to make a positive impact on their community.

But though Rick remains humble about his own role in Chattanooga's renaissance.

There's no denying that his vision and leadership have made an immeasurable impact on everyone who calls Chattanooga home.

Do you consider yourself a visionary?

If you had asked me that question years ago, I would have said no.

But people tell me that I am so.

I don't.

I guess I've had the good fortune to be able to see a lot of things and to think about them with with smart people like Jack Morrow and Maybelle and and you can put some pieces together and see farther down the road.

A lot of people don't have that luxury, you know?

So, you know, I would be happy to have that wrapped around my neck, but I wouldn't think I'd use it for myself.

Who have been your greatest inspirations?

I think one that I really would like to talk about in in this context is someone who is modest and who is rarely, if ever, recognized and apologized for doing this because she is so modest that if there were a hand in all of this and it's an invisible hand, it's the hand of Alice Lupton, and I had the pleasure to get to know her at a formative age because I was in high school.

She's a theologian, she's a scholar, she's a thinker, she's an activist.

And I have no doubt in my mind that if it were not for her, that her scholarship, her heart, her passion, the Jack Lupton we all knew and loved and feared would have been an uncontrollable force.

And she helped him understand the the intellectual, the emotional, the patient were that that went into all of this.

And I have no doubt that the great love he had for Chattanooga was a direct result of the great compassion and love that she has for mankind.

And what more can you can you ask than to have had your life influenced so dramatically and to be able to?

That's really you know, if you were to ask me what was in the drinking water that did it all, I would I would trace it back to that.

So looking ahead, if if we're going to to have a vision for Chattanooga for the next 25 years, for all of those people who are, you know, of the citizens today who think that the book has a great middle so far but has yet to reach its ending, is has still chapters to be written.

What would you say to those people and what would you like to see in those next chapters?

I was so excited when I went to the recent aquarium dinner speech presentation to look around a packed auditorium and everybody in the room was younger than I was.

And it wasn't, you know, it was a whole auditorium filled with it.

And I thought, you know, we're in great shape because this next generation is involved in something that has a central location is symbolically important and and has other important aspects connected to it.

It is my hope that there will continue to be signals from institutions and leaders that say to everybody, you're important.

We need you.

Come on along.

And if everybody knows they've got a stake in the community and that we can create the the two way communication so they can have input and you can get feedback and and then a process whereby we work together to get it right and to be willing to fail, but to work together, then, you know, what more can you ask for?

And from my point of view, you can't ask for anything more than that.

From those first tentative steps in formulating a new vision for the Lyndhurst Foundation back in 1977.

Rick Montague has never stopped seeking ways to ensure a bright future for Chattanooga.

And though his philanthropic efforts are still ongoing these days, Rick makes sure to take time for himself and his family when he's not busy working for the betterment of his community.

You might find him writing a novel or a play, or maybe strumming one of the beautiful old guitars from his unique collection.

This one is the third guitar that was made for me by a Vietnam vet who lives in Red Bank.

Wow.

And I would have you know, I would have asked him to build more of them for me.

But he moved to New Mexico and quit.

But he was a wonderful guitar maker.

My teacher introduced me to him.

And this one is as close to an imitation as we could possibly make of a Gibson guitar.

And it's detailing is exquisite.

It's a great guitar.

But the most wonderful thing about it was when I gave him a check for it and how I was getting into the car.

And he said, You know, I think you help me pay for one year's tuition at Baylor for my son, whos graduated and gone to college.

And to be able to, you know, to know the guy and to go out to his workshop and have him show me the guitars as as they were evolving and then see the quality of his workmanship and just, you know, the warmth of the friendship.

And so it's been a great thing for.

Warmth and friendship are among the many words that resonate around the life Rick Montague leads.

And as we've seen, there are many facets to this man many call a visionary.

So we couldn't let the interview end without hearing from yet another side of this true Chattanooga Renaissance man.

Okay, I got to get a little bit warmed up here.

Make sure.

I've been around the world in a plane.

Designed the latest IBM brain.

But lately, how I'm smart and because I cant get started with you.

I do 100 yards in ten flat.

The Prince of Wales has copy by hand the Vanderbilts.

I visit.

But say, what is it with you?

When first we met.

How you related me, Pat.

You devastated me yet now you deflated me.

Dear You my Waterloo in that enough.

It never is.