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It was just after 12:30 Saturday afternoon and the McCallie tennis courts that had been converted to pickleball for the annual Family Weekend tournament had become a pizza oven. As Robin Roberts watched her husband John, and their son, Benjamin '27, fight off both the heat and a worthy opponent to defend the title they won at last year’s tourney, she said, “I wish we’d sent Benjamin here sooner. From his relationships with the faculty, to his maturation as a young man, to McCallie’s spiritual component, this is such a special place.”
They came from all over this past weekend for Family Weekend and the fifth edition of the Big Blue World Cultural Fair.
Some, like the Robertses or David Miller of Knoxville, took part because, as Miller said of his son Deacon '28, “I just like getting to spend the weekend with my son. I enjoy being around him and seeing what he does here.”
Added Deacon, “I like the community here, and I like the dorms, all the guys I live with. The classes are a lot more challenging than I was used to.”
The oppressive heat and humidity affected both the pickleball tourney and the Cultural Fair, which was held inside the non-air-conditioned Student Activities Center.
But the weather didn’t lessen the participation in either event. The pickleball tournament had a full field of twenty parent-son teams. The Cultural Fair was packed, as usual, with visitors, booths filled with food from around the world, musicians, and a marvelous Korean dance group and drum corps from Huntsville, Alabama.
Said Ivy Icu, who recently moved to Chattanooga from Nigeria with her three young sons, “This is wonderful. All the different cultures. The performers. The food. A friend told me we had to come to this, and I’m so glad we did. I hope we can come back next year.”
Seong-Joo Jeong ‘90 rotated off the Board of Trustees this past year. For years, he has cooked and served much of the wonderful food served at the Korean table at the Cultural Fair.
“I wish we could have done this on a day it wasn’t so hot,” he said with a smile after serving noodles for two hours. “But the turnout was great, as always. We have such an international school, so many cultures represented, and this event does so much to celebrate that every year.”
Longtime Development Department employee Bess Steverson and the Parents Council started the Big Blue World Cultural Fair four years ago as a way to celebrate the school’s cultural diversity.
“It just brings a great joy to me to see the McCallie family coming together,” said Steverson, who is now semi-retired and handed the reins of the fair to Robin Posey this year. “It makes those McCallie families from different cultures know they belong to and are cherished by the McCallie community.”
Posey noted that this year’s fair couldn’t have gone off as smoothly as it did without “volunteer co-chairs Janet Meyer, Mark Ankar, and Camelia Ankar providing great leadership and support to make sure we didn’t miss a beat.”
But what most impressed her was what she saw from new McCallie families hosting food tables. “A few ran out of food but would enthusiastically tell me they’d bring double the amount next year,” she said. “It’s an incredible feeling when you have new volunteers who are so energized that they’re ready to do it again next year before this year’s event even ends.”
Despite the heat, and a Saturday afternoon thunderstorm, and a football loss on Friday night, Family Weekend and the Big Blue World Cultural Fair again showed McCallie at its best.
As she sweated through her husband’s and son’s final match of the pickleball tourney, Robin Roberts said, “Seeing Benjamin mature as a young man in academics, socially and athletics is all a parent could ask for. (Faculty member) Roo Daniels’s influence on him has been profound. When you come to this weekend and get a glimpse of him interacting with his peers, you know sending him to McCallie was the best thing we could have done for him.”
- community
- culture fair
- family weekend