Douglas Clapp

Published on May 9, 2019

rosedale street sign ". . . my hope is that it would retain its sort of historic, residential flavor, especially with . . . the ability for people of moderate means to be able to uh, enjoy Rosedale but also the benefits of living in Homewood generally . . ."

Chapters

Introduction

Doug Clapp describes his family background, academic history and transition into the Birmingham area.

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Gone to Church

Doug Clapp describes his introduction to Rosedale through his attendance at Bethel A.M.E.

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Move-In Day

Doug Clapp recounts his move into the Rosedale community and the strange experience of buying his first home, and waiting three years to move in.

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For the Best

Doug Clapp talks about his unique relationship with life-time Rosedale resident Miss Lisa Stewart, his friend and next-door neighbor.

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Nicknames

Doug Clapp talks about the feeling of Rosedale as a community and his experiences there as a resident.

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A Map of People

Doug Clapp explains the geography of Rosedale through individuals and their historical connections.

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The City

Doug Clapp discusses his perception of the gentrification issues Rosedale faces along with the complex and often tense relationship between Rosedale and the city of Homewood.

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Future Hope

Doug Clapp tells his hopes for the future of Rosedale as a historic neighborhood and tight-knit community.

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Transcript

ï"¿CHASE TRAUTWEIN: So OK, then, I guess, is it OK if I set this right here?
There we go. So it can pick up. Just so it has a good spot.

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: So yeah, so we figured that you would be a good person to
interview as well since you live there. Uhm, I mean, I don't think, but you've
lived there in Rosedale for a few years now, right?

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah yeah, over ten, eleven.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: OK. Yeah uhm. So just to get some background information first
and context, can, can you tell me when and where you were born?

DOUG CLAPP: I was born in Dallas, Texas in 1969.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Mhm, OK and what did your parents do for a living?

DOUG CLAPP: My dad is an intellectual property attorney so he does patents and
copyrights and trademarks and my mom was a teacher before I was born and then
she was involved in the school board and then she has worked for the Dallas
chamber of commerce doing educational issues, so yeah.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Cool and did you have, or do you have any siblings? Any
brothers and sisters?

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah I've got an older sister Julie and a younger sister Catherine.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Okay.

DOUG CLAPP: Uhm and until recently everybody still lived in the same sort of
half mile in the neighborhood of Dallas that we grew up in. Recently my sister
and her husband and kids left Dallas but for the longest time there was a small
geographical footprint that I was the only one away, off in Alabama.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, so how did you make it to Alabama, to Birmingham?

DOUG CLAPP: I went off to college and went off to grad school and then looking
for a classics teaching job is a national market and uh Samford had a job and I
applied and got the job so that's what moved me to Birmingham, was to take a job
at Samford.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Mhm. Had you ever been to the Birmingham area before?

DOUG CLAPP: I had once come down to sort of a big friends event in Birmingham
and maybe south of Birmingham, and I can sort of vaguely remember it but I had
no idea at the time that I would actually end up back here and I can't actually
place the places that I was and occasionally try to figure out where I was on
that trip. It was probably about a week down here uhm but yeah I was, it was
probably six years later that I moved down. Mid-Nineties and then I moved here
in 2001.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: OK, alright, for, to come to Samford.

DOUG CLAPP: To teach.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Cool, so I guess, coming to Samford was your introduction to
the Birmingham area.

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah it really was, it really, yepâ€¦I, I was living in
apartments right on Oxmoor near the Piggly Wiggly, not (unclear), it's really
close to the Piggly Wiggly. Mine are torn down now, now they're the Home and
Hill, Hill apartments and I went into the Piggly Wiggly and was just looking for
normal grocery products, I was looking for sort of the healthy vegetable range,
the broccoli, the green peas, the normal things that I just remember buying at,
I had lived in four or five states as a grown up at that point and I remember
not finding any of the vegetables I was used to, instead finding a variety of
peas that I had never heard of and then I didn't know that, I didn't know that
greens was more than one thing, but uh that's what the Piggly Wiggly was stocked
with--all these vegetable items, frozen vegetable items that I wasn't familiar
with and all the ones that I had sort of partaken of in every other region of
the country turned out to be there, but were a little harder to locate and I
thought "Man, I grew up in Texas. I spent several years in North Carolina in
grad school, but now I'm meeting the South" and I would have thought I had sort
of been in the South most of my life but it turns out I would have been wrong.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, yeah. Sort of a different South, I guess, because like
Carolina South is different from Alabama South and that's different from
Tennessee, for example. But yeah, yeah. So with your introduction to Birmingham
coming here, I guess, uh what were your first impressions of the Birmingham
city, the area, aside from the fact that there were different kinds of peas in
the, in the grocery stores?

DOUG CLAPP: (Laughs) I hadn't, my Texas public school education hadn't had me
think a lot about sort of the Civil Rights history of Birmingham but somehow
coming, somehow I had seen Four Little Girls uhm and known of it before I came
and the year before I got here I just had a nine month temporary job at Iowa
State and I had a student in a Latin class who happened to be an African
American woman from Chicago uhm and I, I think she sort of told me about John
Coltrane's Alabama and so I think somewhere in there I watched it and so I knew
that coming to Birmingham had this sort of a, well, a Christiany word but had
its brokenness, and I knew the history well, but it's, I knew that I was coming
into a broken place and actually I wrote part of my letter of application to
work at Samford, I had said that I was looking forward to being in a place that
would make it hard to sort of stay in an ivory tower uhm and I said it fairly
explicitly but some of the people I interviewed with, I learned something about
Birmingham when the people I interviewed with weren't clear on what I thought
would be healthy about seeing there's a real world with real problems and being
ready to engage it and so somehow when I came here, I was sort of aware of
things and sort of anticipating that uh the history of Birmingham and then what
its implications might be today uhm and then, and then yeah, I actually lived on
Oxmoor because I had just done sort of a map search. This was sort of pre, well
the interweb was just getting its feet under it, but uh I was wanting to live
sort of in a place near a grocery store, not in a big driving asphalt apartment
complex and so that's where I landed on Oxmoor in these old apartments that were
really inexpensive and then that's where, that's where I accidentally ran into
Rosedale because I was interested in a place, a place of Christian worship and
there were like ten different kinds of churches all around within a mile, so I
went and visited them all uhm and the last one I visited was Bethel A.M.E.,
corner of Rosedale Drive and Eighteenth Street and it took a little while to
visit because I couldn't figure out what time worship was, because as I learned
later it had a bivocational pastor, no one staffing any office. I had called the
number, but some broken, like answering machine or voice mail that had broken
long before and had been so filled and not checked that it was inoperable and so
finally one day, one Sunday and I think I picked ten o'clock and I went in at
ten o'clock and Bethel A.M.E. is just basically two spaces, an upstairs, which
is the worship space, a typical church with pews and an altar and a, actually a
choir loft and then the same rectangle is down beneath and that's where they
have tables and a kitchen, but everyone was just spread out. I guess the
children were probably downstairs but all the adults were in about four
different groups upstairs, because they didnâ€™t' have Sunday school classes
so they were just in different parts of the congreg--in parts of the, in
different pews and then when I opened the door, everyone turns and looks at me
and someone rushes over to greet me and I'm like "Oh, when does worship start?"
and they said at eleven o'clock and I said "I'll come back." "Oh no, no come in"
and turns out the men were in their own sort of Sunday school up in the choir
loft and so they ushered me up to the choir loft and I spent that time with them
and then I started worshipping there regularly and getting to know that
community and uh then I learned, yeah, that's how, yeah, I sort of jumped into
Rosedale because it turned out that's a Rosedale church, primarily populated by
Rosedale families uhm and so, (computer ding) so in fact within a month I had
gone to worship at Bethel A.M.E. and within a month I had got to know Rosedale
and that was really fortunate because I think people live in Homewood and not
actually even know that Rosedale is there because it's behind things and so I
got to know Rosedale in that way.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Oh yeah, mhm. Cool so your introduction was through Bethel A.M.E.--

DOUG CLAPP: Yep.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Really by chance or however you want to put it, or just the
fact that you decided to visit a church.

DOUG CLAPP: I knew, I knew what A.M.E. meant, that its African Methodist
Episcopal, and so I knew that I opened those doors, odds are that I, as someone
of European ancestry through and through, Anglo and Saxon, uhm was going to see
folks who probably had different ethnic heritages, but, and so I sometimes say,
I was I think asking my wife, proposing to my wife is probably braver than that,
but it was sort of uh there was a little bravery in that, but I wanted to
worship in a Christian setting and I thought "If there's ten churches within a
mile of my house, I shouldn't be driving in my car anywhere to go to worship"
because there's every flavor that you could want and I said "OK, this one was
actually the closest church to my house" or my apartment uhm and so I thought
"OK let's give it a shot" and I ended up worshipping there for three years.
(unclear) was the pastor there, so that was, because it was Rosedale families
and this old Rosedale church, I got to learn a lot about Rosedale pretty quickly
in that way.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah I had uhm gathered from the interview I did last week that
the churches were, are and still are, a big fixture of the community in Rosedale
because you have Bethel A.M.E., Friendship, uhm there's two others.

DOUG CLAPP: Union Missionary Baptist and then Homewood Church of God is a little
bit smaller and then we probably don't count, at some point uh, just above
Spring Park, I think they still have it, but a Coptic church, so an Egyptian
Christian, I believe, sort of congregation, bottle of space and I don't think
they're there very often. They're not, they're welcome in the community, they're
just not really there so it's not a Rosedale church but there's a fifth church I
think, in Rosedale, but, and then, yeah, Friendship is, I think, probably been
the biggest, is my impression, but yeah they all have these old, old roots and a
lot of the people in the neighborhood are in those churches uhm and like anytime
we say "OK we need to let Rosedale know something" which is a community of a
couple hundred houses. It's a little, it's a little hard to figure out exactly
how to notify people of things, if there's something that concerns the whole
neighborhood, but always getting a flyer to the churches is sort of step one.
It's obligatory, you, you make sure each church has something that, typically
each church has a church secretary, not an administrative secretary, but a, sort
of an office of secretary who will read correspondence to the church and they'll
uh, you make sure they get a flyer.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: To let everyone know.

DOUG CLAPP: To let everyone know, yeah, so the churches are big and again,
they're old...

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah. And the, I mean a lot of the buildings there, like those
shotgun homes, I was reading on the registry for historical places for Rosedale
that some of those homes are you know ninety, even maybe 100 years old and still
standing as well.

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah, which, I think, one, that, so that makes them almost just
about as old as anything that you can find in the metro area uhm and two,
itâ€™s interesting to me, like I guess I'm not surprised that the older,
earlier Birmingham homes, the bigger ones that were for the wealthier folks,
that they were done with the craftsmanship and the materials that they sort of
have stood the test of time, but the fact that these shotguns have kind of held
their own is interesting to me.

[Air conditioning comes on]

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah they've still stood the test of time.

DOUG CLAPP: And essentially I don't know, and maybe y'all can help me out to
help me maybe figure this out, I think I've heard, and I could not tell you
where and how, but I know I've heard from neighbors, the house that I live in in
Rosedale that I bought, started buying in 2006, that it was actually moved there.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: So physically?

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah physically moved there and for some reason again this is like,
someone gave me the sense that maybe when UAB was expanding on the South Side,
it makes sense to me that a lot of homes would have been demolished or something
and so for some reason I had that sense, uhm that maybe the house that I
actually live in, though there had been a place for houses to be for a long
time, so one time I was working the yard, a foot in the mud, I found a pocket
watch, so before my house was there, something else, this other structure was
there, another life, there's a whole archaeology to the yard. I can't really
date, because glass bottles don't date very well.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Wow. That's interesting. You need to get Dr. Strange to lead an
excavation over there.

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah. Actually I've had--how many times, couple of times I've had my
Greek history class out, first week of class, when we're starting to learn about
the ancient Greek world and I have them uh work on a meter of our yard, a square
meter, and Dr. Flynt loans me archaeological paraphernalia and uh I pick a spot
where I know we'll find stuff but we've always found stuff and we have to try to
piece together stories.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah. That's pretty cool.

DOUG CLAPP: It's, it's interesting.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: That would be another way of getting young people, I mean
Samford students, aware of Rosedale's existence because I went here for four
years, probably drove by that area 100 times and never realized that it was
there, you know?

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah, yeah. That is, that's an interesting idea because it, again,
it's got great stories and you're, you're hearing some of the stories but
they're just fantastic stories of what that community is and how they've enjoyed
life together, how they've struggled together and I'm grateful to get to be a
part of that community now and the community's changing because those oldest
families that settled in around 1900, or a little before, a little after, a lot
of those families uhm are maybe on their last generation in Rosedale, so folks
are, folks that are most successful are scattered to you know, throughout the
country and even ones who are successful locally like uh, and I don't blame
them, but they choose to live in a not a 1,000 foot little bungalow that they
could fit in Rosedale, but they are successful and end up somewhere else rather
than Rosedale.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, yeah. Which sort of begs the question of how did you make
the decision to move and, and live in Rosedale?

DOUG CLAPP: Well it, so for three years, from 2001, I think sort of three, I
live by school years, so probably three full school years, I was worshipping
with Bethel A.M.E., getting to know the families that turned out to be Rosedale
families, getting to be, in particular, close to my friend Lisa Stewart and her
daughters Nadia (spelling?) Harris and LaMiesha (spelling?) and I got to know
her oldest daughter Shante (spelling?) later uhm and then somewhere in there was
one of these rezoning controversies where actually the land behind my house, the
four acres behind my house along Woodcrest, below the Embassy Suites, was
rezoned, they, we it's what's called the (?) Bird Property, I assume that was
the owner, and they wanted to sell it commercial and then I'm right here, just
get quadruple the value for it, so instead of selling four and a half acres for
$250,000, a quarter million, they sold it for maybe a million and I can goo-
Iâ€™ve never checked the records but that's what I've heard and so Rosedale
didn't want to rezone commercial because, now there's a four story office
building in my backyard. That's what I sort of knew was going to happen when I
got the house because it had already been rezoned before I bought but I ended up
at those zoning hearings and at that point, 2004, uh this is probably 2002,
three, the real estate bubble is rising that's going to burst with the great
recession and uh and there's all these proposals to turn everything into condos
and so I had this bit of activism where a lot of Homewood citizens just said, I
don't know if we appreciate enough the city's need to sort of increase its tax
base, but, but a lot of citizens said "Hey we'd love this, Homewood, to be a
place where a variety of people from a variety of socioeconomic strata could
make their home" and a, a lot of people who sort of had a choice, "I could have
lived in Vestavia Hills or I could have lived in Mountain Brook," but Homewood
offered a diversity that those cities were not able to offer, so we had all this
activism going on and I was learning Rosedale and a, a house got condemned, like
this white Harris house right behind the Express Oil and I actually, I didn't
have a ton of money, but if I could have bought it for like $20,000, I was going
to try to buy it before they condemned it because once it was condemned it was
just going to be just a harder proposition. So that's where I think started
toying with the idea of living in Rosedale and I didn't have tenure yet and as a
professor you don't, I don't think you, think you put down roots until the
school says "Hey we really like you. You can stay." But that's where, I hadn't
gotten tenure yet and this was definitely the fall of 2004, uhm two things
happened, almost, well, it was a nice sequence. First my friend Lisa Stewart
called and said that Ms. Carter had passed away next door at like eighty-eight
and her son uhm was going to want to sell the house. He had been up there taking
care of his mom but he was wanting to get back to his home in Georgia. He was
going to sell the house. She said I should buy the house and I said "Ah, I don't
have tenure. I'm not going to invest in a house right now" uhm and then within a
month, the, our apartments on Oxmoor, our let's see, what did we call it, the
Gardens, maybe? They had a meeting for us and they let us know that a developer
had purchased this really valuable property along Oxmoor and was going to change
it into, the goal there was almost all high end condos, because it was sort of
the height of the real estate bubble and uh they were really nice about it and
they were going to give us a good amount of time but they wanted to let us know
firsthand and it was a little bit heartbreaking. The guy handled it really well.
This one resident said "Oh well could we be on the list to buy the condos?" and
he handled it graciously, but it was like "Oh, these condos, we're all paying
like less than $500 a month for rent. These condos are going to start at
$500,00" so we had sort of a mismatch, so this person to be honest was probably
not going to be able to buy a condo and the vice president knew that and I
thought he handled it gracefully but, I learned that my apartments are going to
end and uh then within the week, Ms. Lisa called back and I don't know that I'm
getting this exactly right but I like to sort of give my sense of the
conversation, which is usually with Ms. Lisa not getting a word in edgewise, but
anyways uh "Myrtle told Ms. Barbara to tell Mr. Haywood that she was going to
buy that house but I told Barbara don't you tell Mr. Haywood any such thing
because Dr. Clapp is going to buy that house" and so what that means is that
Myrtle Tinsley, who has since passed away, who was the matriarch of the Lee
family, which is one of the original families of Rosedale and owns, I should do
the math and figure out the percentage of properties, but they own maybe twenty
properties in Rosedale, uhm that she wanted to add the house that I now live in
to the Lee estate and probably, presumably because the more properties they
owned, if they were able to make things go commercial, they'd uh they'd have a
better hand at it and so Ms. Tinsley had apparently, well I guess had sort of
spread the word that she wanted me to get that house because she heard that it
was going, it was going to be sold and so Ms. Lisa interrupted that chain of
communication and called me and at this point I know that I don't have
apartments to live in and so in December of 2004, Andrew Clark is a Samford alum
and after he graduated he was doing uh some residential real estate so I got
Andrew and Mr. Powell, again in the neighborhood it was Mr. Haywood, but Mr.
Haywood, Haywood is his first name, he and I sat down at Ms. Lisa's kitchen
table and we signed a contract for me to buy that property and it was never on
the market, never for sale, but he definitely wanted to get back to Georgia and
he wanted to get rid of the house and so we signed that contract December 2004.
It's the only house I've ever purchased but we closed on January something 2008.
Have you bought a house yet?

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: No (laughs).

DOUG CLAPP: It turns out that three years and a month is a very long closing
time, and a month or six weeks is a normal closing time.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: That's what I've heard.

DOUG CLAPP: But Ms. Carter passed away so it was part of an estate and because
it was an estate there's all these complex legal procedures and it just took
them a while. I mean you have to get, make sure every cousin, presumably, she
died without a will uhm and so they had to go through all the checks and then
her lawyer was supposed to do all these things and to be honest, until they got
a new young lawyer and this little group, small group that was working, they
just, to be honest it wasn't worth their while to get things done, so for three
years, so we signed a contract, three years later we closed but in the meantime,
about halfway through, a year and a half later, summer 2006, they actually
closed our apartments and turned them into fancy condos so I had to move out and
thatâ€™s where I wrote this lawyer and I was like "I actually don't have a
home now. Uhm and we had a contract for me to buy this house. What's the plan?"
and so they let me move in in the summer of 2006, so for a year and a half
before I actually owned the property with a legal title, I was actually living
on the property and actually renting it from them, so 2006, summer of 2006 is
when I moved into Rosedale and again, partly there was no large plans on my part
of, oh that's I had known the community and I knew a lot of people there, I was
now worshipping in a different church but I still was really good friends with
Ms. Lisa in particular and this house was next to hers so uh, so uh and it sort
of all made sense at the time, it all fell together and Samford faculty, we're
in education, there's probably a range of, pay ranges for faculty, but the
humanities and the arts and sciences are probably in the lower part in most of
the pay ranges and so to be able to purchase a house, Homewood is a fairly
expensive community and to be able to buy a house a mile and a half from campus,
which always was sort of one of my goals, was I like living close to work and
having that part of life be sane and so to end up, I guess, I can't remember,
probably the contract price was $50,000 and probably the average Homewood price,
I'm just sort of guessing now, I think I've seen it before, but you know bubble,
so I don't know what it is post bubble, but $300,000 so. If you tell anyone you
bought a house in Homewood for $50,000, I guess anywhere, if you actually bought
a house for $50,000 it's sort of stunning.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, uh yeah, the location is prime.

DOUG CLAPP: Oh it's, yeah, and thatâ€™s an interesting piece of Rosedale's
story is a lot of people say "Oh you're sitting on a gold mine" but at the very
least, it's incredibly convenient and for me I happen to work at Samford, so it
is the most convenient, but the coffee shop, the book stores, there's two book
stores, there's the two drug stores within a mile, the grocery store, and then
access to the, to the freeways, which has its up and down. I mean I've got kids
but they can't, they don't have access to the freeway, so, yeah it's incredibly
convenient and so a guy, I guess it was probably, man it might be for five years
now, I could check the county records, but a guy bought a house three doors down
from me for taxes from one of these old Rosedale families and that house had
been passed on to cousin , passed on to cousins and then finally someone had
just lost track of it and quit paying the taxes and so in Alabama, and I don't
know how other states work, but Alabama has written a really impressive return,
especially in this age of really low interest rates. Like if you buy a house for
taxes, I don't know what you're paying, you buy it in an auction, but you pay
thousands for a house, near thousands and if the family or the owner gets it
back, they have to pay, I think it's twelve percent interest, which in these
days, you can't get a percent on your bank account and then if they don't ever
want it back after three-ish years, you sort of actually own the house so this
guy bought one buy taxes a house down from me and he was going to just rent it
because of he does that he looks for houses and he rents them out but then when
he realized, like just how, what a convenient place it is, he actually just
moved in, which is great, yeah he is an interesting guy, but yeah, that just
tells me how, how convenient Rosedale is, given that this guy was just planning
to rent a house there.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: He figured "I may as well just move in and live here."

DOUG CLAPP: Just move in, yeah, yeah.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: So then it was Ms. Stewart that was the one that said "OK, I
want you in particular to come and move here?"

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah, so Ms. Lisa, Lisa Stewart had rented from Myrtle Tinsley and
the Lee family and had not been a fan and Lisa had grown up in Rosedale, her
child was in Rosedale. She had raised, I think Nadia almost all her life, raised
her girls in Rosedale. So, uh most of her life was in Rosedale and she did not
have a favorable opinion of Myrtle or the Lee family sort of as landlords so she
didn't want Myrtle to own that house. She didn't want that. She didn't want Ms.
Tinsley and the Lees to own the house next to her and she was renting the house
at the time and she actually since has been able to purchase a home about a half
mile away but she, I think part of her thought was just "I just don't want
Myrtle Tinsley to own that house because that's bad news" and uh and Ms. Lisa
makes calls like this and again it turns out, the first time she called me and
told me that, I'm like "That's not me" and the second time I'm like "OK. I don't
have anywhere else to live."

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: (laughs) "I need a roof over my head."

DOUG CLAPP: I could go look for other cheap apartments, but theyâ€™re
becoming less cheap, so I thought "Heck let's do this" and so that meant for, I
guess about five years, I lived right next to Ms. Lisa, so right up, uh, it had,
again these things are for the best. It turns out when I got married in the
summer of 2010, that it was shortly thereafter that Ms. Lisa was able to buy her
own place which she wanted because she had been renting all her life and uh the
good thing about that was, while I was single, I had a key to her house, she had
a key to my house and in fact, my first five months in the uh, in the house
after I moved in in 2006, the bathroom wasn't operating. It had one bathroom.
The toilet wasn't particularly attached, there was a large hole in the floor,
and then I'm not the handyman to fix those things, so, at that point, I was
renting and not owning it, so I had to be careful about how I did things, so
maybe I guess this says something about me and Ms. Lisa's relationship, but
every morning at five-ish I would get up and go and they would sort of
technically be asleep though I don't think she, I think she'd be awake but she'd
be in bed watching TV and I'd go take a shower at her house and then she sort of
had free range of my house, especially for my refrigerator, so I didn't, I mean
I was just one guy so had only so many groceries, so she would stash extra
stuff, she would put it in my freezer, in my fridge and so once I got married
that was going to be a less convenient, and my wife loves Ms. Lisa but was not
going to be crazy about Ms. Lisa in and out of her house stocking things up in
her fridge. But fortunately Ms. Lisa was moving away about that time, uhm though
it was funny, like the day I proposed to my wife, yeah was it the day? No, no,
no it was the, right about when I started to date Sarah, who I got married to,
that I was sort of describing this sort of setup with Ms. Lisa uh and I sort of
opened the freezer and it was pretty full and I was like, you know, "Oh, back to
the Piggly Wiggly and the peas, these frozen peas, these are mine, but they are
actually the only thing in the freezer thatâ€™s mine. Everything else is Ms.
Lisa's." So it had been at least five years where, yeah, we lived right next
door to each other and yeah she'd be in the house or I would be in the house,
but it was, and so yeah, I was obviously getting to know Rosedale more and more,
but even before I moved in I'd be over there for dinners regularly uhm because
somewhere early on, she had rented from Myrtle behind the post office on
Twenty-seventh and uh really, yeah, in my first couple of months at Bethel, I
helped her move to the house that she was renting and that's where I got to be
good friends with Lisa and then her daughter was graduating so I ended up
driving her, I would drive them down to Tuskegee to get Nadia to college and uh,
and that was sort of, and again, Ms. Lisa is about as Rosedale as you come, she
grew up there. She loves it and she raised her kids there and she knows
everybody. She's that sort of medium generation, so, and she's about sixty, so
she knows the older folks and a lot of the younger folks so it was being close
to Ms. Lisa that got me to know Rosedale the best. Started at Bethel A.M.E. and
then it was particularly through Ms. Lisa, and then yeah, she ended up telling
me to buy my house and it turned out to make sense, so I did.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: (laughs) "Yes ma'am." That kinds of speaks to the character of
the community as well. I mean, that you have them saying "OK I want you to come
in here--", well from the beginning, you walking into the church and them
welcoming you with open arms and saying "Come on in." I mean they, I can't think
of a better definition of "community" than, you know, people helping each other
out with "OK, here's part of my freezer" and then that other person says "Well,
OK you can use my restroom, or my bathroom in the morning."

DOUG CLAPP: It is, there's a lot to that where folks, I think they yeah, really,
again, a lot of these folks have known each other decades, and like so when you
show up in a meeting, they'll all use each other's nicknames, which is yeah,
which Is wonderful. So there's Buckle and Bobo and Bebe and everyoneâ€™s got
a name and you sort of start to realize that this person is that person but I
think in another way, so the Rosedale Community Development Corporation, RCDC,
and this, I, I wasn't here for this but I think in the Eighties, at least All
Saint's Episcopal and maybe some other folks helped, maybe helped Rosedale form
the RCDC and they purchased a number of, a stretch of uh B.M. Montgomery on the
west side of it and now we're just, a nonprofit owns three of these places and
one of them, a tenant who had been there, oh most of the tenants had been there
before the RCDC came into existence like the families that lived in these houses
and so they continued renting to them but a family moved out and so the RCDC
needed a new tenant and wanted a good tenant, someone to pay the rent, but also
somebody who would take advantage of the fact that they were living in a neat
neighborhood and having access to Homewood schools and I can't remember if
Dennis Bush, who was the leader of the RCDC and grew up in Rosedale, if he ever
put out a For Rent side but word got around that there was a place open and he
got sort of deluged with informal and formal applications but and this is the
Rosedale pieces, some children came by the Lee Center, the parks and rec center
that's sort of by my, behind my house on the east part of Rosedale, where Dennis
works in the evenings and they said they were really sad that they were going to
have to move away from Rosedale for whatever family reason whether it was the
rent or the house or something and uhm and so he ended up talking to that family
and they are renting the RCDC house and so that's where I guess sort of how you
expect real estate to work is sort of anonymous, "So we'll put out an ad. We
need someone to rent this place. We'll get some land and we'll hope that they're
good and the renter hopes that the landlord is good" but this was all
relationships and to my end, to my sense it was a really beautiful sense of
relationship is that Dennis cared that these kids didn't want to leave Rosedale
but they stayed in Rosedale and they didn't know about this house and the RCDC
was, was able to rent them with this house on an affordable level. And that's,
yeah, that speaks to people care about the community and so that means they care
about the people who are in that community and again with the fact that all
these people have these ties, and all these shared stories. Oh, well. You
wouldn't have been there. I was really touched that a family that's moved into
Rosedale maybe fiveish years ago, maybe a little less, uhm it's actually got a
Latino heritage, they were at a big Rosedale gathering two years ago and they
had bought this famous house, the Montgomery house on B.M. Montgomery which is
where the principal lived and was this (unclear) parts of the barber shop and it
had been up, I remember seeing it, it was up for $75,000 as is and they had
bought it and she said they thought it was going to take them a couple of months
to fix it, but it took them eighteen months but finally, and the place looks
beautiful now, whereas it had been unoccupied and pretty run down. The place is
beautiful and so we introduced them to Mr. Montgomery, aka Buckle, who lives
down by the Texaco and so he was able to start telling them Montgomery stories
and they got, again, they had no roots in Rosedale or in Homewood but to hear
that their house had these stories within this part of this longer story, they
were really excited, and so they'd learn that stuff a couple of years ago and
then a couple of months ago, she was just mentioning how much the history of it
means to them, which, yeah, it was, I mean I think it speaks to that couple,
(names unclear), that they can appreciate that story but it also speaks to the
power of story, so yeah one of my personal goals is, again yes, to sort of put
together house stories, so many of these older houses get, collect some of these
memories, not quite in this style, but collect memories specifically associated
with the house so that the people, who anyone, if the house changes hands then
we can say to the people who move in "Hey your house has a story."

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah and they know who lived there and when. That's pretty
cool. So then, uh you touched on it some with words like "community" and
"caring" and, and "history," what, can, how would you describe Rosedale, the
place itself, or how would you describe the, I guess you could say how would you
describe the place of Rosedale and then like the people as well. We've kind of
touched on that a little bit.

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah, I think, I think, so I think, I think Rosedale is in a, is in
a time of transition as some houses turn over, but right now there's this still
critical mass of folks who grew up there and all know each other and so that,
that just creates this web, a good sort of web, that as it catches you, it's a
good thing that it catches you, because you see "OK it's not just a street where
a lot of people happen to live next to each other, it's a street where people
know what's going on and know each othersâ€™ stories uhm and so Rosedale,
it's sort of the opposite of anonymous and uh and so actually I suspect that
even if people haven't lived there long, even if they don't know that they're
known, they're known, because again there's maybe a couple of hundred houses and
to me it's this positive because itâ€™s really easy for people to watch out
for each other. Uhm, like one element of that is it does, given that it's a
moderate income, ethnically diverse neighborhood, it's really normal for the
real estate world to ask "Oh, OK is it safe?" In some ways that's sort of
protected Rosedale because the racism of real estate, has made people say oh, no no.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: People don't want to go there.

DOUG CLAPP: But one of the reasons it's really safe is that yeah, everyone is
connected to everyone and, and so one of our goals with RCDC is to, as these
families give way to twenty first century Rosedale, it doesn't, that not
everyone in Rosedale has these roots that go back to the early 1900s, that
nonetheless, that sense of connection is maintained, uh, which again it'll be a
little harder but I think it's possible and you see (Julio and ?) and some of
these other families that it's doable, and that's actually the wonderful gift of
the, of the Rosedale 1900 was to be engaged in each other's lives and sort of
create this sense of neighborhood uhm that doesn't exist to a, I don't know any,
like national urban studies but it seems like it's fairly rare, sort of place
that uh--

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, I agree.

DOUG CLAPP: And again I'm confident, so I'm an outsider, I've been there eleven
years, I've been worshipping at the churches, I've been engaged in Rosedale
sixteen years, even though I've lived there eleven years, but I'm an outsider,
so when someone is mad at someone else I probably don't know, but at the end of
the day whatever, whatever, however people frustrate each other as people must
at the end of the day there's this, it's anywhere in Rosedale that's an
identity, it's a community, so sort of the de facto, the default is, you're
going to care about people and I'm sure not everyone is nice all the time but
the default is, you're going to, yeah, be concerned for your neighbor and know
what's going on. That's sort of the default I think. Yeah and it's, I like, so,
I've been to RCDC meetings off and on almost since, well probably since 2004,
uhm but I had a lot of stretches on, off, and then more recently these last two
years have been on pretty, pretty consistently and one of my favorite things is
uhm like in the June meeting, a lot of people couldn't come, but the five, five
people who were there were all Rosedale old timers, all sixty plus, maybe
seventy plus and man, like even from them arguing about where the sidewalk was,
but that's where they just start spilling story after story of what they
remember and then you can't keep up because they're throwing out names so fast
and the places so fast and no one in Rosedale, no authentic Rosedale person,
which I am not, refers to things by their address. It's always Ms. Somebody's
house and so I can never even tell where we're talking about because it's "Oh
no," because you say "Which house is that?" "Oh it's the one behind this Ms.
Somebody's house." You're like "Oh, this Ms. Somebody's house behind that Ms.
Somebody's house. Where are we talking about?" and I don't, actually usually end
up not knowing but it usually doesn't matter that I don't know and it's all fine.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: And to them it's all clear. And they, they know exactly what...

DOUG CLAPP: So that's Rosedale. It's a map of people. I love maps. I love maps
for hiking and I love maps for taking students to Rome and I just, I like maps
and so I look at Rosedale and I know the streets and where they are, but I love,
and I'm a little bit jealous, but twentieth century Rosedale from 1900 to 2000
is a map of people and still today, like, it's a map of people uhm and, yeah, so
it's somebody's house two doors down from somebody's house and that's their
landmark and when I, I walk a lot around Homewood because my wife and I share a
car, so I think because of that I get asked for directions fairly regularly and
the easiest way, actually in these GPS days, I guess my direction asking is
dropping but I've been asked a lot of directions and landmarks are where you get
people. In Rosedale, the landmarks are the people and actually now for this
older generation, even when the people have left, the landmarks are still where
the people had been, their footprints, so that's, I haven't thought about it as
a take on history but it's, yeah the footprints of these people are everywhere,
how you define the space that you live in.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are some, on Birmingham Public
Library's website they have uh pictures of old maps of Birmingham and I've been
able to zoom in on some of them and save them to the computer and on the section
of Homedale, Homewood and Rosedale and yeah you can see the difference that, you
said maps and it reminded me of this, but the difference that Eighteenth Street
makes because it just, it goes right down the middle and streets like, I think
it was Twenty-fifth Court South--

DOUG CLAPP: Oh yeah Twenty-fifth Court.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: --that goes, you know, if you look on the map today, it's, it,
it runs across, but then Eighteenth comes and you can see where it would have
been connected, uhm so yeah you mentioned the geography of it and it reminded me
of that and with effects like the Eighteenth and the Red Mountain Expressway,
and uh which can be convenient, like you said, you're right there by the
freeway, and also tying into that geographical aspect of it, how, how do you see
Rosedale's relationship with Homewood and the surrounding communities?

DOUG CLAPP: Well my perception, and I, this, I think is a reasonable perception
from several sort of, we'll have these Rosedale community meanings where we get
anyone who wants to come, but we make, try to make sure everyone's invited to
the Lee Center and often the tone ends up being hostile and I think the metaphor
for that is, like the historical documents say "OK Rosedale was once 100 acres
and now it's twenty-five acres" so anyone who's over fifty, or even over forty,
has experienced this sort of sense of the city of Homewood, again not the
current city council and mayor, but city councils and mayors over the last fifty
years saying "Oh we're going to do this with that land and we don't care about
the consequences for the people who live there" so again, Iâ€™ve got no
problems with an Express Oil business but just past Children's Dance Foundation
or Dance Foundation by Express Oil and three houses face it. Where else do you
give permission to have an oil change business put one street away, so twenty
feet across from three front yards. Like that's, I think that's unusual, but
and, because of decisions like that the Rosedale, again the historical Rosedale
community, has felt distrustful and occasionally bitter. We do have, like Ms.
Harriet, Harriet Pullom grew up in Rosedale and still lives there right near
Friendship, she was calling and even a couple of months ago, she was calling on
her neighbors and a lot of these are people she's known all her life, although
there's reasons they could be distrustful and have negative sort of attitudes
toward the city to realize a constructive conversation is the only way to
accomplish anything and also the sense that all the folks who have run for
office are not the folks who have made these decisions. Like every four to eight
years you've got different people in and out and so the best way, but, that
being said, you have the sense that yeah, Rosedale feels like it's "Homewood
against us" and you could see why they would feel that way and you could see why
there'd be this distrust. Like my personal feeling is that although it may be
actually healthy to maintain that distrust, some--healthy in the sense that, "OK
be aware of what's going on and don't just sort of agree to things without
looking at motives," if that distrust prevents sort of conversations, then
you're out of the loop. And if you're out of the loop you're going to learn
about things last and what I learned at my two or three Rosedale sort of
rezoning hearings was, a public hearing for rezoning has very little to do with
the decision-making process and it's actually the very last piece of the process
so it's not actually even, so however the folks who are committing their time to
governing the city, however they're making their decisions, I mean I actually
would have hoped they would have thought about it a lot before a public hearing,
and then they vote pretty shortly after the public hearing, so you're like, the
public hearing isn't a place for Socratic reasoning about whether something is a
good decision and that's what my Rosedale, the Rosedale that I've been in for
fifteen years, has, what it's done, is it shows up at a hearing en masse and it
says "Don't do this to us" and the city's like, I, uh, they never have to
explain themselves, but then they just make a vote. You assume that they saw,
for them, the increase in tax dollars was stronger than the small community
losing a little more of its ground, so again, you've got this historically sort
of embittered relationship, but the nice thing is when Rosedale, so if you bring
up the city in the fifty years of history of Rosedale's shrinking, you get
frustration, but if you don't bring that up and you're just thinking about
Rosedale, you get great stories and happiness. So you've got these two sides,
the really beautiful side and then the hard side and one time the previous
mayor, who, I can't say commanded, I don't know that he commanded a great deal
of respect, but Mayor McCaughlee (spelling?) , I can't remember what exactly he
said, basically he said the old Rosedale, this 100 acres or however many it was
at that point, was a mess, and so then, in the Sixties or whenever it was that
they really transformed, but it was from the Fifties and on that they were
really transforming. He's like "You should be happy that happened" because
basically, he didn't say it in these words, I don't know if this is the right
thing to infer but like it would have been sort of urban blight and so it was a
better move to make it sort of a downtown area, but you look at Bethel A.M.E. at
the corner of Rosedale Drive and Eighteenth Street and you think "Oh OK, Bethel
A.M.E. was at the heart of the community." Now it's isolated on this strange
commercial corner and then you think "Oh, houses were spreading" and right now
the Burgess house, where Annie uhm, Annie Lee Burgess, her home across from the
Sherwin Williams on Nineteenth Street, it shows you "Oh, OK, people used to live
all around here" and I think, I don't know if this is the case, well, well I
mean Mrs. Burgess still has a house on Nineteenth Street in commercial Rosedale
and she's talked about how her mom didn't want to sell out, like the same Lee
family that helped set up, start Rosedale, they sort of engineered, my sense of
what people tell me is they sort of say "Hey we can all get rich if we sell our
homes and let Homewood develop a business district" and I think a lot of people
would say the Lee family got wealthy uhm and an interesting conversation I had,
that again, this isn't going to stand up in a court of law, but Mr. Taylor lived
in one of these shotguns behind the Express Oil and by the time I was visiting
with him, he was incredibly kind. He was a deacon at Friendship Baptist up the
road. He couldnâ€™t remember if I had seen him the week before, but he had a
lot of clear memories and he uh he talked about when they put in the Express Oil
and the interesting thing to me was how kind he was given how frustrated he was.
So he was clearly, it was not a good thing, but the Lee family chose, and he
didn't demean the Lee family, but he made it clear that the Lee family chose to
sell things in such a way that Express Oil got put in front of his house and how
disappointing that was and to his credit as a, as a human being, it was amazing
how unembittered he'd sounded even though he was describing something that
clearly was frustrating and disappointing, but you have this, this, again, when
I meet him, he's well in his eighties and he's clearly remembering. Yeah, he's
clearly remembering the shift in Rosedale from a bunch of homes to commercial
establishments and feeling like he got the short end of the stick and again, I
think I'd agree with him and even how Rosedale Drive speeds into Eighteenth
Street you could go over the mountain on 280 or you could take the six lanes
into Rosedale and every morning a lot of people take the uh curve north past the
Vulcan, Eighteenth Street becomes Twentieth and they fly, they fly, like there's
crosswalks painted there. One time I tried to cross with one of my girls in the
stroller and it's a yield and so you just don't have a chance because people are
flying down 280, if things are looking right they just want to hit up that ramp,
treat it like an on ramp and so as a, yeah, as a pedestrian you don't have a
chance and so even the way they designed that, which I don't know if that's the
Sixties or if that's the Eighties when they reworked some of that but, like
Woodcrest got put in in the Eighties.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, I'd have to look.

DOUG CLAPP: They didn't think about, they clearly didn't think about people
living there and so one request that the city's trying to work on is, the bulk
of the houses are on the west side behind the post office, but the parks and rec
is on the east side and it is fairly unsafe to get there, because Eighteenth
Street is a very busy street, the way the lights work, someone is always going,
someone's always going some direction, even if, even if some people are stopped,
someone else has permission to go and so to cross that street is, I do it some
and it's just kind of crazy and so they're trying to work at sort of putting
things back together, uh so yeah, but that's the hard side and that's where my
neighbors, I can appreciate and again, that injustice that was done then and how
could have things been done in a way that was more respectful to, again, these
are people having lives, how can we not make their lives harder with these decisions.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: And they've heard these promises over and over and over the
decades and it seems like they've been you know kind of fed up with having no
results and nothing to follow up.

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah, yeah. But it's an interesting study, because we really have
almost zero power and the way, well, even, we could elect Ward One and if
Rosedale sort of, sort of communicated a consensus and we got 100 votes out
there, we could really swing Ward One because maybe, I don't know if there's
500, 600, 700 (unclear) votes cast in Ward One but if we sort of maximized our
voting potential, we could probably make or break candidates, the two candidates
in Ward One, but the thing that's been dawning on me the last couple of years
is, our candidates, our representatives can completely support what Rosedale is
up to and there are four other wards so there's eight other votes and the
council president, nine other votes, we could just have a lot of nine to two
votes, if a vote about zoning Rosedale come up, so one of the things that we're
really starting to work on is to think "OK how can our little neighborhood,
which is just 200 houses but how can we let the council know that we're real,
we're personable, how can we not show up at a hearing and say we're angry" but
instead say "Hey when you make the decisions you impact us and all eleven of you
that get to vote, we sort of need to be in touch with," because yeah there's
this long sense of injustice, but the current folks, they're like "Oh we didn't
do that to you," and that's a reasonable thing to sort of feel but we do want
them to be feeling their votes, thinking about as they vote, because I don't
know where this, I've been thinking about talking to the city council about
this, when I first got into town and started engaging in Rosedale, a buddy, a
good friend (air conditioning comes on) said "My cousin owns a little
apartment," so we got two, maybe three blocks of four apartments, three blocks
of four apartments on my side, there are two on the bottom, two on the top,
small little things, but he bought it so he could flip it, because Rosedale's
going to flip and so there's this sense, since the Eighties, there's been this
sense of the larger sort of business community that "OK Rosedaleâ€™s only
going to be in this neighborhood for so long and it's really convenient
property" and I'm pretty sure that it can't flip, because like behind me there
are three homes, Habitat For Humanity houses. On the other side, some nonprofits
own some houses, like, we're going to try to show the council how it's actually
not that flippable, so, if you do any little piecemeal rezoning all you're doing
is harming people that are going to be there for a while, like my home, we're
going to be there for a long time. It's so convenient for me, like, I don't,
apparently I just learned there's some website where you can say "Make me move"
or you just sort of offer people to bid you out of your house and I remember
from my family, I wouldn't want to sell out Rosedale but I think any of us in
Rosedale would be like, if someone says, so let's do something absolutely
ludicrous, $10 million, I'm probably going to move. Like, I'll be real, I'm not
going to make $10 million in my life time. I'm going to move. Nobody's going to
offer me $10 million, but then how low do you go? Well you offer me the value of
a house, I'm not about to move. Where am I going to find a house, like if you
offer me a title to another house that's within a mile and a half of Samford
that I could walk to safely...

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, the chances are pretty slim.

DOUG CLAPP: So I feel like Rosedale is going to be a neighborhood for a long
time and we need to try to convince the market that it is, because what I'm
saying are the facts, not what I want. I'm saying there are a number of houses,
there are enough houses that are just stuck being houses that the market is
misunderstanding yeah the nature of the ownership in Rosedale and if the market
could sort of hear, I don't know if this is going to be a neighborhood for long,
then we would face a second danger, which would be gentrification, which I in
some ways contribute to, but right now I think I'd rather Rosedale worry about
gentrification, than about commercialization, because, and again, for the next
while, the only people, it's going to be someone getting a little bit brave to
say "I'm going to move into Homewood" if they're a gentrifier, they're going to
be a little bit of a pioneer. If it was someone who would be happy to live in
Rosedale then they're not probably a gentrifier.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah if they just would like it as is.

DOUG CLAPP: Yeah, so those are things we're thinking about as we move on (unclear).

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, that actually kind of, you answered a question that I was
going to ask about what your hopes or what you see for Rosedale's future are.

DOUG CLAPP: My hope is that, and some of this is hard, but my hope is that it
would retain its sort of historic, residential flavor, especially with, and this
is the anti-gentrification, with the ability for people of moderate means to be
able to uhm enjoy Rosedale but also the benefits of living in Homewood
generally, so in Homewood, about half the homes are apartments and half the
homes are houses, the number that are houses that a family that's not at the
upper half of our economy or, well above the upper half of our economy could
afford are slim and so I think, and again the city, there's not a lot they could
do because this is a market thing but I think there's some ways we could come up
with thinking of trying to help preserve (air conditioning turns off) uhm
Rosedale as a footprint or at least some before, the RCDC, as long as we own our
three houses, that's three houses that people can live in who aren't rich and
there are some other efforts to try to, so for me, and I (unclear) away, so for
me, the only way that can succeed is for nonprofits or interested parties to
sort of build this bank of homes that might be actually rented rather than sold
because as soon as you're selling things you, again, the market comes in charge
and become vehicles for gentrification, but if, if uh like if the RCDC could
actually, we don't have a great deal of money, but if we could somehow get more
houses and rent, say, five to ten houses, that's at least ten houses that are a
moderate income and we'd sort of be anti-gentrifying because to be honest the
people who, a lot of people that make the big mansions just aren't going to put
a big mansion even down the block from a moderately priced little bungalow
that's not going to change.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah that's very out of place.

DOUG CLAPP: So, so that's where, to me, how do you prevent gentrification or how
do you harness gentrification, then at the end of the day you still have to
control properties, you have to control enough properties that keeps the flavor
of the neighborhood uncomfortable for the kind of people that, to be honest, if
they're uncomfortable with who we are now, we're not really interested in them
joining us and I think we can, in a good way, keep them uncomfortable.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, yeah. They would have no interest to stay there
permanently. Yeah.

DOUG CLAPP: Like yeah if you could always have a couple of houses where the
people are, have a Buick and not a Lexus, then if someone who moves in who has a
Lexus, that's fine, if they're happy with Rosedale sort of as it is but to be
honest, a lot of people with the Lexuses aren't going to feel that comfortable
near a Buick, so that's my sort of hope for harnessing the market. I don't have
any business experience so that may be completely worthless, (Chase laughs) but
that's my hope. It's historic, moderate income, residential, preserving its sort
of sense of history and community within the larger Homewood. Like Homewood can
have a strong sense of community. I don't know if they have, the half of
Homewood that lives in the apartments particularly participates in that, it may.
I don't know that they do, but uh but for Rosedale to have its own little
community within Homewood, I think is marvelous and maybe sort of at the scale
that you actually need because a couple of hundred houses, you can sort of think
about, uh if you think about Edgewood, OK, maybe you can know your block, but
you can't know Edgewood.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Right and you can't know everyone outside of your block like
you would in Rosedale. Yeah, yeah. I think that's all that I have unless there's
anything else you feel like you would like to address.

DOUG CLAPP: No, no, you pushed my Rosedale button. I do love Rosedale. I love a
lot of the people and I love how I've been welcomed and how my family's been
welcomed, so the last bit I'll give is this story. I mean, it's not really a
narrative story, but every time there's an election, a lot of the elections,
there's a voting place at the Lee Center, so our parks and rec that's right
behind my house and it's old school Rosedale or at least the election judges, so
Ms. Edwards, Mr. Montgomery, uhm Ms. Cunningham from the west side, uhm who else
is often there? But uh it's really fun just to walk in an election, I see these
people all the time, a lot of other places, but to bring my girls up to vote
with me, my girls are toddling, they're not voting, but just to be welcomed,
it's just this sort of little picture of how welcoming it is, to be known and
have folks be excited I'm there to vote. It did make me laugh because my wife,
in the presidential primary, she was asked which, whether she wanted a
Democratic or Republican ballot, which is, youâ€™ve got to ask, because
people have to vote in one primary or the other and she, she's not that into
politics, so she, she wasn't anticipating that question, so it threw her for a
second, because she was thinking "I'm not a registered Democrat, I'm not a
registered Republican" and then uh she was sort of thinking to vote in the
Republican primary because it was the 2016 primaries so it was contentious and
uh to sort of throw the weight on the Republican side, but she was not able in
that split second with these four senior African American neighbors, who know us
and care about us, asking if she wanted Democrat or Republican, she couldn't
bring herself to say Republican. I don't think she actually thought about it a
great deal, more of a reaction, response, but she said Democratic.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: (Laughs) Sort of an "Oh, yeah."

DOUG CLAPP: And it would have been interesting if she had said Republican, what
the talk would have been in the neighborhood. I think we still would have been
loved and respected but uh but I'm confident that that would have been a topic
of conversation.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah (laughs). "There's a couple of Republicans down the
street." Yeah, something like that. Thatâ€™s funny. Yeah well cool; I, I
appreciate you taking time.

DOUG CLAPP: Thanks for letting me talk about Rosedale.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: Yeah, definitely. Uh, let's see. We do have, do you mind
signing a release form? Let's see.

DOUG CLAPP: Oh, I can do that.

CHASE TRAUTWEIN: We do these just for every person that we interview and I can
turn this off.

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Interviewer	Chase Trautwein
Interviewee	Douglas Clapp
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Accession	SUHist/Rosedale/008

Douglas Clapp

Chapters

Introduction

Gone to Church

Move-In Day

For the Best

Nicknames

A Map of People

The City

Future Hope

Transcript

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