June 10, 2010

This June marks the second Father’s Day since my Dad passed away. I think about him frequently, partly because he bequeathed me his entire name: James Edward Reynolds. That was a decision he may have regretted from time to time, but if he did, he never mentioned it. Dad was known as “Sonny” until he met my Mom one afternoon in the late 1940s on a Selma, Alabama, street corner. (She hailed the taxi he was driving for his father’s Red Top Cab company.) She preferred the name “Jim,” or so they say. But I always enjoyed hearing our relatives call him Sonny.

My father’s future profession as an Internal Revenue Service auditor marked him as suspect in the eyes of many in the community. He prepared my tax returns every spring, and I felt helpless the first April 15 that he was no longer around. Many Selma residents who made jokes about the IRS nevertheless sought his counsel during tax season, especially at the Baptist church we attended. As April 15 loomed, Dad would get into his annual telephone shouting matches with the finance director at our church. The director had questions regarding church members’ contributions and tax deductions, and my deeply religious father always complained that the church put him in a “damn awkward situation” when they asked his advice on such matters.

After his B-24 bomber was shot down over Germany, his buddies at the air base assumed he was dead and drank a few rounds in his memory, which they charged to him. He wasn’t a drinking man. After his rescue, he refused to pay for the cocktails when presented with the bill. He didn’t like to spend money. A bowl of water filled with envelopes frequently sat on the kitchen counter, the contents soaking so that the stamps could be removed and used again. Dad never failed to pick up pennies in parking lots. Yet his generosity had no boundaries or conditions. He financed three college educations, gave his children down payments on their first homes, and tossed in a few bucks to help buy cars for his kids and grandchildren from time to time.

He spared no expense in caring for dogs, either. Someone shot our Old English sheepdog Sebastian in our backyard one night, presumably for barking. My father ran onto the patio in his boxer shorts, waving a .44 while shouting for the dog’s long-gone assailant to return for a showdown. The next day, Dad drove Sebastian to Auburn’s veterinary school, which saved the dog’s life. He and I shared a fondness for dogs. Being a pragmatic sort who wanted to prepare his son for the sadness of burying a pet, he often asked about my aging dog Nicky, only to follow with this reminder: “Son, you know you’re going to come home and find her dead one day.” I laughed and told him I was going to visit and find him dead one day. He thought that was pretty funny.

The most endearing memory of my Dad is the devoted care he gave during the last seven years of his life to my mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. In the early 1990s, my parents moved from Selma to Tuscaloosa. I spent Friday nights at their house a couple of times a month to give Dad moral support. The ritual was always the same; we went to Captain D’s for “supper.” (The evening meal was never “dinner” in our household; “dinner” described what most people refer to as lunch.) Then we watched their favorite TV program, “Wheel of Fortune,” as he and Mom attempted to solve the puzzles while commenting on Vanna White’s scandalous attire. After that it was time for Atlanta Braves baseball. Dad would make Mom stay awake until the seventh inning to keep her mind active. From season to season, the onset of her dementia could be somewhat measured as she slowly began to forget the names of Braves players. After Mom went to bed, Dad and I sat in our recliners, often watching war documentaries or reading. He usually read the Bible, whereas I might be reading a biography of Ho Chi Minh. He often expressed his disdain for the invasion of Iraq and shocked me one night when he said that had my brother and I been drafted to go to Vietnam, he would have considered sending us to Canada. I used to tease him about the “No Lottery” sign he posted in his front yard when the issue was proposed years ago, because any time he traveled through Georgia he always bought $5 worth of lottery tickets.

Dad’s pragmatism was best exhibited in 1945 during World War II, after the B-24 bomber he co-piloted was shot down over Germany. Crawling from the wreckage, my father and the pilot found themselves facing two dozen enemy solders and a German “tiger” tank. The pilot whipped out his .45 automatic, urging my father to “shoot it out” with the Nazis. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put that gun away!” Dad shouted at the pilot. Dad later discovered that his buddies at the airbase where he was stationed in England had assumed he was dead and drank a few rounds in his memory, which they charged to him. He wasn’t a drinking man. After his rescue, he refused to pay for the cocktails when presented with the bill.

In July of 2008, Dad was hospitalized for a kidney problem. He developed pneumonia and spent three weeks with a ventilator in his throat. His living will stipulated that no artificial life support was to be used, and as his condition deteriorated, my brother, sister, and I were faced with deciding at what point to carry out his wishes. He was unconscious most of the time but would open his eyes and try to talk for an hour or so every couple of days. One night he was able to remove one of the mittens he was forced to wear that prevented him from pulling out the breathing tube. He snatched the ventilator from his throat and refused to allow it to be replaced. When my sister arrived at the hospital, the first question he asked was, “Is your mother taken care of?” My sister reassured him that Mom was okay. He died the next day.

At his funeral, a soldier played “Taps” and the American flag that had draped his coffin was folded and given to my sister. The soldiers seemed to struggle while folding the flag, prompting my father’s 90-year-old sister to lean over to me and whisper, “Sonny’s up there in Heaven griping, ‘They sent rookie soldiers for my funeral.’” We quietly laughed, reassured that no one would have found the moment funnier than my father. There are good dads and lousy dads. I was blessed to have been raised by one of the good guys.

Among other things, Bob Carlton has written about film, nightlife, and food in his 32 years at the Birmingham News. In recent years, he decided to take a stab at being a food entrepreneur by launching his own brand—Bob’s Soon-To-Be-Famous Pimento Cheese.

Carlton began making pimento cheese in the late ’90s. “I would make it for people to give at Christmas or take to parties or for football tailgates or whatever. Everybody told me they loved it,” he says. At the pleading of a co-worker, Carlton decided to go legit.

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“So, I started selling it, emailing folks when I was making it. From that I went to the Pepper Place Farmers’ Market in June of 2011 for the first time. I just don’t have the time or the money to get it started in grocery stores. That’s the beauty of Pepper Place; you can have an idea, and with a little bit of money, you can at least try it out. If it works, it works. I’m not making any money, but at least I’m having fun—well, kinda having fun. If I figured it out, when it’s all said and done, I’m probably making about five dollars an hour.”

Pimento cheese, of course, is as southern as grits and catfish. The cheese spread has been introduced to generations of kids who either love it or loathe it. Carlton admits he was not always a huge fan of pimento cheese but recalls the first time it made a lasting impression. The Linden, Alabama, native was visiting his uncle in Montgomery as a teen: “I remember Uncle Charles grating cheese and getting a jar of mayonnaise and a little jar of pimentos and tossing and making pimento cheese. I don’t even know if I ate it. I just remember seeing him making it. And it just kinda struck me that you didn’t have to go to the grocery store to buy it; you could actually make it at home. It stuck with me; it didn’t inspire me at the time but somehow years later it did.” Carlton says that his recipe has evolved over time. It features, among other ingredients, a little mayonnaise and four cheeses: sharp white cheddar, Monterey Jack, hoop cheese, and mild cheddar.”

Being stingy with mayonnaise occasionally elicits scoldings from customers. “Sometimes I get fussed at because there’s not enough mayo and it’ll be too crumbly; I’ve had a couple people say, ‘Well, you know, I couldn’t even spread it, it was falling apart.’ But so many people have commented, ‘I don’t even like pimento cheese but I like yours.’ And I think that’s the reason, because most people have this idea that pimento cheese is this real ‘mayonnaisey-type, girlie-type’ thing.”

Valerie Boyd, the News employee who urged Carlton to market his product, agrees. “It’s different because it’s got that spice to it, that kick to it. It’s not your typical creamy, ‘mayonnaisey’ pimento cheese,” says Boyd, who formerly owned Homegrown Special Foods in Homewood, worked at Tria Market, and currently is employed at Sysco. To say that she loves Carlton’s pimento cheese is an understatement.

“I was working at the Birmingham News at the time. Bob was the food editor then. He told me one day that he made pimento cheese, tomato pies, and strawberry pies, and all this kind of stuff,” she says enthusiastically. “I tasted his pimento cheese and oh my God! I fell in love with it. I told him, ‘This is pimento crack!’ So I took some upstairs to the advertising department. Everybody tasted it and was going nuts. Everybody was in line placing orders. One of the graphic artists [at the newspaper] became addicted to it, too, and he actually created a logo that read ‘Pimento Crack’. But then we realized we really couldn’t do that.” She says that several employees became “followers” of Carlton’s tasty dish and all hounded him to start selling.

Boyd’s preference is eating Bob’s Soon-To-Be-Famous on scrambled eggs, while the creator himself especially loves it on hamburgers. Carlton doesn’t add the pimento cheese until the burger is almost cooked. “I don’t like it real gooey and melty; I still want to have the texture. Maybe add a couple of strips of bacon,” he explains. On a recent Saturday morning at his Pepper Place booth, he shared a delicious sandwich that his pal (and Black & White staffer) Warren Caldwell dreamed up while watching football. It’s been dubbed the Southern Belly Sammich and consists of Bob’s pimento cheese, bacon, Wickles Pickles (an Alabama-made spicy-sweet pickle), slaw, mayo, and white bread. It’s pretty darn good, too. The name is inspired by the John T. Edge book Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South.

After a successful demonstration at last year’s Southern Women’s Show, Carlton has been invited back for the October 2012 event. “I left some things out so they couldn’t copy the exact recipe. Maybe I left the cayenne pepper out. Or maybe the Worcestershire sauce,” he confesses. The main labor is chopping and grating, with “tossing it all together” being the fun part. “That’s when you know you’ve almost got it finished,” he says.

Carlton has been selling his pimento cheese at the Pepper Place Farmers’ Market on alternating Saturday mornings. He often sells out, so arrive early. Local chef Franklin Biggs, one of the founders of the Pepper Place market, says that when Carlton is not there, people look for him. Biggs often hears, “Oh darn. No pimento cheese this Saturday!” Bob Carlton will be at the Pepper Place on July 14 and 28. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/BobsPimentoCheese. &

For 34 years, Charlemagne Records in Five Points South has been a sanctuary for record fanatics, indifferent shoppers looking for birthday presents for friends, lonely souls desperate for conversation, and the occasional celebrity. Jimmy Griffin, a sweet, congenial 61-year-old fellow smitten with music, has worked at Charlemagne for three decades. (He looks 41 and has the spirit of a kid in awe of the world around him.) He’s Clint Eastwood-cool when under fire. He simply cannot be rattled, maintaining a Captain Kangaroo-calm bolstered by a teenage enthusiasm with a subtle charm capable of soothing the most savage customer. “The one thing that I remember is that no matter how hectic the store got, especially at Christmas or whatever, I never ever saw Jimmy lose it,” says local artist Marjorie Clark Boykin, who worked at Charlemagne from 1986 to 1990. “I might see him get a little flustered and inside he might be freaking out, but even if there was somebody who was being difficult, he would always deflect it with some kind of humor.”

Jimmy is indeed one of the funniest fellows in the universe. If forced to express himself to a disgruntled customer, he does so with his customary savvy and hilarious style. During a Christmas shopping season 15 or 20 years ago, a customer came in with a noose necklace and matching noose bracelets on each wrist. The store was packed and the gallows-obsessed guy was having a difficult time getting waited on. The fellow was hunting for a particular piece of classical music. As he grew more impatient, he addressed Griffin by saying: “You know, Jimmy, a scream is a terrible thing to hear.” Jimmy Griffin didn’t miss a beat and coolly responded, “I tell you, man, I bet your family will get you a portable radio for Christmas and you can listen to classical music on WBHM.”

Charlemagne Records opened for business in July 1977 at the Garages, now a popular Southside bar called the Garage Café. Launched by local singer deluxe Marian McKay Rosato, her brother Mike McKay, and Gary Bourgeois, the funky new and used-record store moved to Five Points South four months later, where it set up business sharing the first floor with a used bookstore in the structure where Charlemagne currently operates. (Bourgeois is no longer with Charlemagne. He owns Renaissance Records in Five Points South.) The record store moved upstairs in 1978 when the building’s owner decided to open an apothecary in the ground-floor space. Rosato had been in record sales before starting Charlemagne. “I worked at Sears in Vestavia; I was the record department girl,” she says with a smile. “I sold Gary (Bourgeois) a record there, James Taylor’s Walking Man, and that’s how we met.”

Charlemagne has definitely seen its share of famous customers. Tom Waits stopped by and bought an armload of albums in 2008 when he was in town playing at the Alabama Theatre. Gary Busey stopped by when he was in town filming his role as Bear Bryant in The Bear a few decades back. Busey selected a Beatles box set and threw down a $100 bill. He picked up the Beatles package with one hand and grabbed Rosato with the other. “Well all of a sudden, Gary Busey hoisted me up over his shoulder,” she recalls. Under protest from then-employee Gary Bourgeois (“I told him he couldn’t have her.”), Busey began to walk out of the store. The actor/madman eventually released Rosato and set her down at the top of the stairs that lead up to the store’s entrance. She also remembers the afternoon Carlos Santana visited the store. “He asked for Baaba Maal, an African musical artist,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have any Baaba Maal but we know who you’re talking about.’ So, he was looking around and then the mail came. And so we opened up the mail and there was a promo package in it and it was Baaba Maal. So we said to Carlos Santana, ‘Well, I guess this belongs to you,’ and we gave it to him.”

“What’s really interesting is how Jimmy started working at Charlemagne,” recalls Gary Bourgeois. “He had been working at some big mall store. I think they had closed and he was living right up the hill from Charlemagne. So he just started coming in, and he was helping us do this and do that. People started knowing who Jimmy was. After a while, we might be short-handed and Jimmy happened to be there, because, you know, Jimmy ain’t going to be happy unless he’s working in a record store. Next thing you know, Jimmy’s ringing up customers and we put him on payroll. Soon Jimmy was coming in everyday and helping us. Then you realize, ‘Wow, this guy’s really good, he really knows his stuff.’ You don’t even have to look this stuff up, he already knows what artist, what song title someone was looking for. Before you know it, Jimmy’s like an everyday fixture.”

“It was a gradual thing. I was working at an OZ franchise,” recalls Jimmy. “I was helping Gary at Apple Books and he said, ‘Well, come over and help some at Charlemagne, too.’ So I would spend afternoons going from one to the other, just working my way into the organization. I think at first I was working for record credit. But these were the days of post–hippie, post–peace, and post–whiskey, if you know what I mean,” Griffin says, laughing.

As a child, Griffin had an uncle who would bring over 45 rpm records. “We had a Louis Prima 45. And I would buy classical and Broadway; like I had Camelot. I didn’t get serious—and this is almost embarrassing—but I bought hootenanny (records). So I also bought Peter, Paul, and Mary, and New Christy Minstrels records,” he says. “And when the Beatles came out I bought a Beatles record, like everybody else. But at the same time, I bought the Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads the year it came out. And once I got the Rolling Stones record I didn’t buy any more Beatles records. And then I got Dylan records, and me and my buddy across the street, that’s all we did was find Dylan and Stones records and play ‘em. The Stones were coming from the blues base and the R&B base. So from listening to the Stones and Dylan, I dove off into blues and jazz.”

“I’ve always felt that Jimmy had a big impact on me,” says Brad Quinn, former singer and bassist in the band Carnival Season, who currently lives in Japan when not playing bass with underground pop hero Tommy Keene. “Back in the late ’70s, when I was about 14 years old, I used to hang out and talk music with Jimmy at a record shop in the Riverchase Galleria. I was listening to jazz—or at least I thought I was—but Jimmy quickly expanded my horizons from Bob James and Weather Report by sending me home with Coon Bid’ness by avant-jazz alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill. As I recall, it was a pretty free-blowing album and probably a bit beyond my scope. But I also really liked that Jimmy had treated me like an adult by trying to turn me on to such heavy sounds.”

Quinn also recalls getting a lesson from Griffin about the relevance of singer Freddy Fender. “I remember making some crack about Freddy Fender, who to my mind was just some kitschy cowboy singer who sold records on TV,” he says. “I knew Jimmy as a guy who was deep into jazz and blues, so I was really surprised when he came to Freddy’s defense. It was a small thing, but it made me realize that I maybe didn’t know quite as much about things as I thought I did. It also revealed how open-minded and big-hearted Jimmy was about music. I later went on to spend 13 years or so toiling away in record shops in Birmingham and Atlanta. So I suppose you could say that Jimmy was a bit of a role model. He certainly is a role model for how people should think about and listen to music.”

Tommy Stevenson, a columnist and blogger who has worked at the Tuscaloosa News for 35 years, claims he introduced Griffin to the local community. “I discovered him,” says Stevenson, laughing. “It was at a party that we crashed . . . There was this little skinny guy sitting there strumming on a guitar. I said to myself, ‘This is going to be one of my friends for the rest of my life.’ Allen Ginsberg was in town for a speaking engagement at Birmingham-Southern in 1968 and showed up at the party. Everybody was trying to impress the famous poet, playing ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’ or whatever. Jimmy picked up the guitar and started doing old Hank Williams songs and Ginsberg shot across the room and sat down beside him and made Jimmy play song after song, and Ginsberg sang along with him.”

Bart Grooms, a local writer, singer, and host of a jazz radio show on Samford University’s campus radio station WVSU-FM 91.1, gushes at the mention of Jimmy. “My initial impression—which I still have—is that he’s just one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever met. Friendly to everybody who comes in and seems to know an enormous number of people who come in,” says Grooms. “He’s incredibly musically literate. He seems to have an amazing memory for what is in the store, what he can access, what needs to be special ordered, and also stuff that he likes and can recommend. He’s never pushy about that but has often been able to say, ‘I really enjoy such and such,’ and I think is really helpful to a lot of people coming into the store. Jimmy’s been a real blessing in a lot of people’s lives and that means a lot to me and it’s meant a lot to a lot people. And I count him a friend.”

“I’ve always thought of Jimmy as a gentleman,” says Boutwell Studios co-owner Mark Harrelson. “Not only does he have an encyclopedic knowledge of his inventory, he also remembers what his customer’s individual areas of interest are.” Musician Don Tinsley worked at Charlemagne for a couple of years in the late 1980s. “When it comes to music, Jimmy Griffin seems to remember it all, I’ve never stumped him with any question as to who, what, when, or where,” says Tinsley. “I’ve heard some people refer to him as Saint Jimmy because he NEVER loses his patience or blows up at Charlemagne even when trying to help the most hard to please customers who are asking the most impossible questions. He genuinely tries to help people get the music they want, and he seems to make extremely astute observations and suggestions to aid them in finding what they are searching for and also to help broaden their musical palette.” Tinsley has played in bands with Griffin and has always been impressed with his talents as a singer and player. “He’s sings true and means it, and is a serious roots-style threat on bass drum and maracas. I played a couple of gigs with Jimmy and John McKay on harp as the Drape Vulcan Boys,” he recalls. “I couldn’t make the practice so we ran some songs by telephone and then played what I remember as a very cool and successful gig.”

Besides his day job working at Charlemagne, Jimmy Griffin played for several years with one of the greatest bands to ever come out of Birmingham, the bluesy, roots-based Trains ‘N’ Trouble. He’s modest about his fabulous, distinctive vocal talents but admits that he never lacked confidence singing for an audience. “No, I wasn’t self conscious. Like with Trains ‘N’ Trouble, playing with LaDonna Smith, Davey Williams, and John McKay, I was like sort of an amateur with three very professional people,” he says. “Plus the fact that with the improvisational aspect, we would rehearse a song but that wouldn’t necessarily be the way it would go when we played it. I was not on the level of creating new music; I was trying to be true to the nuance of the singers I admired, like Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. When I was young just playing the guitar, I loved Woody Guthrie.”

Jimmy has memories of famous performers dropping by Charlemagne. “Gene Simmons came in. He was looking for British Invasion CDs, but he had everything we could find,” he recalls. “But he ended up buying Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and Greatest Hits by Bobby Darin. Chris Robinson, formerly of the Black Crowes, came in and a customer asked him if he should buy Robinson’s new record and he said, ‘No, don’t get that, man.’” Griffin doesn’t hesitate when asked who his favorite musician is. “Sun Ra is my favorite because he does so many things. He invented a whole new language of music. I call it ‘the lope,” it’s got a loping sound. It’s like swinging or it could be totally abstract.”

Sun Ra may have invented a new musical language but Jimmy Griffin coined a new phrase for the retail record business. “We call the store business ‘psycho retail,’ because you never know what people are going to ask you in person or on the phone,” he says. “I’ve developed this thing of taking everything literally until I find out otherwise. Because you never know exactly where the customers are coming from. Psycho retail means the insanity of the different ways that people communicate or don’t communicate. And we also have the circular reasoning. There’ll be three thoughts and they’re rotated. They ask you question A. As you answer question A, they don’t respond, they ask question B. As you answer question B, they don’t really respond or make a decision, but ask question C. And as you answer question C, they go back to question A. And you could be on the phone maybe 15 minutes trying to nail down which of these three points is pertinent to the call, and what exactly we can do for them. Some of our customers, we already know who they are as soon as they say hello, and we know it’s going to take a minute.”

Jimmy has devised his own method for remaining calm under fire when business is jumping at Charlemagne. “Well, I do get rattled and I think it comes with age. I used to say that my mind is on ‘erase’ and I would kind of go from one point to the next,” he explains. “Or maybe it’s kind of like a game not to get rattled because maybe you can do a better job. I used to have a motto: ‘People didn’t realize it but I live in fear.’ The other thing is, now that I’ve been in counseling for a while, I realize how much co-dependence I’ve had since I was a young child,” he admits with laughter. “So in a way, I’m in the worst possible job for someone who’s co-dependent with the world. Passivity and co-dependence are like good traits for a retailer, but you might never get well. I have a theory about retail, that it should be democratic. Because one of my jokes is, in the Bill of Rights they have to now include the right to shop. People feel very strongly about their right to shop. That’s why you have yard sales; that’s why you have people with no money actually looking at discarded things on the side of the road, because that’s a form of shopping. So, to me, somebody buying a dollar cassette is just as important as someone buying a $200 box set. Because they might be a regular customer and they may buy 200 one-dollar cassettes over a couple of years but you may never see the box set person again. We’re trying to match people with their musical needs but the customer kind of has to run the show.”

Griffin has a personal philosophy for why people are drawn to certain genres of music while rejecting other styles. “It’s like a music festival. If you don’t like an event, you just change stages. I’ve developed this theory that started years ago at a chain store while I was running the cash register and playing Professor Longhair. And I’m all exuberant and I said, ‘Isn’t this great!’ And my customer said, ‘Not particularly.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, Professor Longhair’s not great.’ The thing about music is that it’s sound waves. When somebody’s receiving their pleasant sound waves, it’s a physiological and environmental and memory, all combined. So, deriving pleasure from music is something everybody can do and you can’t say that one pleasure source is any superior to another. But you can say that certain musicians are more skilled at making new statements.”

Gary Bourgeois told me that if I wanted to drive Jimmy crazy, I should lock him in a room with the first seven Moody Blues albums. Griffin responded: “Well what happened with the Moody Blues is that when I lived in Boston I had a roommate and he lost his girlfriend. He played this Moody Blues song over and over about a quiet day in the park and being sad. It’s just too lush for me. I can see they’re good musicians. It’s taken me years to get over the fact, for example, that Jim Morrison’s approach to a song is more dramatic than Mick Jagger’s. Or David Bowie’s approach is more dramatic. There’s something in Morrison’s voice tone to where I prefer Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And also, I prefer great non-singers. When people tell me Bob Dylan can’t sing, I say, ‘I guess you’re right but he’s so musical. So it’s not necessarily if you can hit the note, it’s how you approach the note. When I brought Dylan’s Nashville Skyline home, my Dad said, ‘Oh, you mean that fellow finally decided to start singing?’”

The final word on Jimmy Griffin comes from the second greatest musical icon in Birmingham’s storied history. Spike, former singer of punk legend GNP, believes that Jimmy Griffin just might have clairvoyant powers: “I never bought much punk stuff from Charlemagne. There are just too many other cool genres of music to choose from there. It was mostly Grateful Dead-related stuff, or reggae, or ska. It seems like every time I walked up those stairs and Jimmy was there, he would say, ‘Hey, I got this new Dead thing . . .’ or he would have some obscure ska compilation to show me. It was like he knew I was about to walk in the store. I’m pretty sure he’s that way with everyone. He must be psychic. I love that guy.” &

Paul Bryant and Ralph Jordan personified football royalty in my world. For two decades, Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan were the icons producing weekly football melodramas that starred an All-American lineup featuring Joe Namath, Pat Sullivan, Tucker Frederickson, Major Ogilvie, Snake Stabler, and Terry Henley, to name a mere handful.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, everybody had a television, but football-viewing choices were severely limited. For those games we couldn’t watch, men with unforgettable voices (Buddy Rutledge and John Forney, representing Auburn and Alabama, respectively) were the wizards broadcasting play-by-play action, casting a mesmerizing spell over autumn Saturday afternoons.

In the Beginning
Ralph Jordan became Auburn’s head football coach in 1951, winning the school’s first national championship in 1957. Dr. Lloyd Nix, a retired dentist in Decatur, Alabama, had a 19-0-1 record as the Tigers’ starting quarterback those two seasons. “I played quarterback in high school. When I got to Auburn, they told me they were going to put me at halfback,” Dr. Nix recalls on a recent afternoon. In the summer of 1957, Coach Jordan switched him to quarterback, where Nix mostly handed off or tossed the ball to his running backs. He always took the snap directly from behind the center instead of standing back several yards as today’s quarterbacks often do playing out of a typical shotgun formation. “I would have loved to run the shotgun. I would have loved to have the snap back there instead of running backwards and turning around and seeing what was going on,” he admits, laughing. “But we didn’t throw the ball much. We’d throw it maybe 15 times a game if we had to. Our defense was so good, we never did feel like we had to throw it.”

Larry Ellis was a blue-chip running back out of Murphy High in Mobile, recruited by Alabama, Florida, and Auburn, as well as approved for appointments to the Air Force Academy and West Point to play football. Ellis decided on Auburn his junior year. “Well, I was coming out of an era of impressionable football in the Southeastern Conference, very impressionable,” he says of his decision to stay close to home. The SEC’s current domination of college ball is nothing new to Ellis who played fullback from 1966 to 1968. “When I was 10 years old, Auburn had won the national championship in 1957; in 1958, LSU won the national championship; in 1960, Ole Miss and Johnny Vaught won the national championship. Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant won it in 1961 at Alabama. You think the SEC’s just now dominating? Wrong. So, as a kid, I said, ‘I’d love to be a part of that.”‘

Nobody above anybody that I met at my young, tender age compared to Ralph ‘Shug’ Jordan because, very simply, he was what we might call a ‘man’s man.’ An all-around person. His military background was unbelievable. And once you met the man, it was just infectious. He was a role model and a guy that nobody else that I had ever been around would compare to. He hooked me.”

While Jordan was generally viewed as a gentleman, Ellis saw the coach’s temper on display a few times. The 1968 Sun Bowl against Arizona was Larry Ellis’s last game. At halftime, the score was 10-10. Jordan was not happy, uncharacteristically flinging his clipboard as he ordered the team’s seniors front and center. Ellis recalls: “Shug threw his clipboard across the locker room and shouted, ‘If you sons of bitches don’t go out in the second half and exert some leadership, I’ll have every one of you in spring training!’ He told us we’d be the blocking dummies for next year’s team during the upcoming spring practice since our scholarships lasted until the end of the school year.” Auburn went on to win 34-10. One of Coach Jordan’s comments regarding leadership still moves Ellis 43 years later: “Leadership is like a cooked piece of spaghetti. You put it on a plate. If you get behind it and push it, it has no direction. But if you get in front of it and pull it, it’ll follow you anywhere.”

Birmingham attorney Gusty Yearout was a walk-on at Auburn. “I tried out as a freshman, I didn’t have a scholarship. I made the team and they gave me a scholarship,” Yearout says. “I came back in 1964 and got hurt. There was one coach there who didn’t like me and he was on my ass. So I finally said, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I was young and kind of immature, so I quit. But before the end of that fall season, I went to Coach Jordan and said, ‘Look, I made a mistake and had some personal issues. I just want to know if you’ll let me come back on the team.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you can come back but you don’t have a scholarship any more. You’ve got to try out again.’” During his final two years at Auburn, Yearout was elected captain of the team.

Going to law school had long been a goal for Yearout, but he was also attracted to coaching. Jordan gave him some invaluable advice. “Coach Jordan knew from the time I entered Auburn that I wanted to go to law school. When I finished in ’67, I had been accepted to law school but I had that football stuff down in my blood and in my throat,” he says. “I told Coach Jordan, ‘What I’d like to do, if you’ll hire me, is to coach for a while to see if I like it, and then go to law school if I don’t.’ Coach Jordan said, ‘Coaching is not as glamorous as you think it is. You have proven yourself as a leader and as a smart guy of football. But you have to go to law school first and then if you don’t like law school you can come back down here and I’ll hire you.’ And obviously it worked out a lot better for me to go to law school than it did to become a football coach,” he says, laughing.

Yearout credits players and staff more than head coaches for victories, however. “Coach Saban is a great coach and I think Chizik is a great coach. But basically, what wins football games is the quality of the football players and the quality of the staffs,” he says. “Head coaches have to have great talents to put all that together and motivate and all that stuff. But they don’t win games on Saturday. People get all this bulletin board stuff to motivate the team—but when you get hit the first time square in the mouth, that [motivational message] won’t work any more. You’ve just got to be ready to play. You can forget being pissed off.”

Innovation on the Field
In 1969, Auburn beat Alabama for the first time in five years using a weapon that Shug Jordan had rarely deployed—the forward pass. A sophomore quarterback named Pat Sullivan gave Auburn football a makeover by lobbing long throws downfield to split end Terry Beasley, who was legendary for running blindly at full speed with his head toward the sky looking for Sullivan’s passes.

“Coach Jordan and I were very close. He was known around the athletic department as ‘the man.’ He commanded that kind of respect,” Pat Sullivan says during a phone call on an October afternoon. “He was a Southern gentleman, but he was also a very disciplined person. He was a strict disciplinarian. We played Houston in the Bluebonnet Bowl my sophomore year. Back then, the quarterbacks called a lot of the plays. We were at their 35-yard line and it was fourth down. Coach Jordan sent the punter in. And I sent him back out and called a pass play. We didn’t complete it. I went to the sideline and Coach Jordan met me, put his arm around my neck. People in the stands may have thought he was consoling me. But he actually said, ‘You didn’t understand that I wanted to punt.’ And I said, ‘Yes sir, but I felt we ought to go for it.’ Well, he told me in no uncertain terms to go sit my rear end on the bench, to not get up until the game was over. Which I did. And I certainly never crossed him again. That was something that he and I laughed about as time went on.”

Sullivan was the first of three Heisman Trophy winners at Auburn. He recalls an intoxicated John Wayne at the Heisman banquet at New York’s Downtown Athletic Club in 1971. “When we were at the Heisman Banquet, John Wayne was the guest speaker,” Sullivan remembers. “John Wayne was well into a fifth of Scotch, and Coach Jordan got up and made a nice talk. As he was sitting back down, John Wayne reached over and put his arm around Coach Jordan and said, ‘Coach, you made a hell of a talk there. I may have a part in my next movie for you.’ And Coach Jordan never batted an eye; he looked at him and said, ‘Well, John, I come high.’ That cracked John Wayne up and he said, ‘Well, I think I can afford you.’”

By 1972, Pat Sullivan had graduated to the NFL and Auburn’s immediate future looked rather dismal. Losing the forward pass forced Jordan to return to his traditional “three yards and a cloud of dust” style of football. The shining star of this dull offense was a running back named Terry Henley, who was anything but dull—on and off the field. He was named second-team All-American and led the SEC in rushing, averaging 93.7 yards a game. Henley also loved to run his mouth, endearing himself to the media with hilarious, brash quotes. His rapport with Jordan was unique.

“Well, Coach Jordan and I had kind of a different relationship. I mean, he was the coach and I was a player. But he was my buddy, he was my friend,” Henley explains. “I’d go by his house all the time and visit with him and sit down there in the den and talk about things. He was the daddy that I never had. Now, he was tough, too, like a dad is supposed to be. But he was a wonderful, wonderful person. Coach Jordan used to tell me that he never liked to see me before one o’clock because he said it always upset his lunch if he did.”

We went to Georgia Tech my junior year. In the first half, I fumbled at the one-yard line coming out of the end zone; I fumbled at the one-yard line going in; I fumbled at midfield; and I batted a pass up in the air for the other team to intercept—all in the first half. Now, a normal coach would have set you on the bench after the second fumble . . . So we go in 7-0 at halftime.” Coach Jordan tells the team how well they’re playing despite Henley’s poor performance. He said, ‘I want Terry to apologize to y’all.’ I just sat there and I thought he was kinda joking about me apologizing. He let out some vulgarity like you’ve never heard in your life . . . and, buddy, I jumped out of that seat and I told them, ‘I apologize to all of y’all for the way I’m playing. I’ll play better in the second half.’ Well, of course, the second half I go out and rush for a hundred and something yards; caught three or four passes; I caught about a 30-yard touchdown pass that broke their backs, helped put the nail in the coffin. And I ended up as SEC Player of the Week. After I caught the pass and ran it in for the touchdown, I came to the sideline. Coach Jordan wore an old rain hat . . . He put that hat on me and he said, ‘You the damnedest player I’ve ever had. You should be the coach. Here, you wear the hat.”

Being the team’s star, Henley felt he could park wherever he desired on campus, prompting a confrontation with Jordan. “Parking tickets!” exclaims Henley, howling. “Coach Jordan called me in and he was just eating me out. He said, ‘Are you a member of the faculty? Do you work in the janitorial department here at the university?’ I said, ‘Well, no, sir.’ I didn’t know where he was going. He said, ‘Why the hell are you parking in their parking spots? I’ve got $325 worth of tickets for you. I’m not going to stand for it. You’re going to have to walk to class like the rest of them. And I mean it!’ He was getting loud with me. So I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I stood up and he said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not finished.’ I sat back down and he said, ‘You’ve got a parking ticket for parking in [Auburn University] President Philpott’s space!’ I said, ‘Well, I knew he wasn’t going to be there that day, so I parked in his spot.’ And he said, ‘How did you know he wasn’t going to be there that day?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been going out with his daughter and she told me that he was going to Tallahassee that day, so I decided to park in his spot.’”

The Man with the Voice of God
My father and grandfather went to Auburn, so the rivalry’s dynamic was established for me at an early age. The Auburn-Alabama game was the most exciting, intense day of the year. It was the only time I ever heard my mother and father discuss divorce. Despite being an Auburn fan, my mom would annually scold my father for acting like a fool when he banged his head against the wall in frustration yearly as Alabama dominated Auburn in predictable fashion. My father was a deeply religious man, so notions of Bear Bryant walking on water created a conflict. There were weekends that I was convinced my dad really thought God was a Bama fan. He would glare at the sky whenever the Tide got “a lucky break,” shaking his head while muttering, “Somebody up there sure likes the Bear.”

The Crimson Tide was going through a drought in the late ’60s when Sullivan to Beasley was the rage at Auburn. Even Vanderbilt beat the Tide. “The ‘Bear’ Bryant Show” always preceded the “The Shug Jordan Show” on television each Sunday afternoon. Both were replays of the previous day’s game, featuring each coach’s observations and analysis. At one point during Bryant’s brief “down” years, alumni became so disgruntled that Bear told them to “go to hell” during the broadcast. A few days later, Bryant apologized. Newspaper headlines around the state proclaimed: “Alumni: Bear Says You Don’t Have to Go.” He really was like God.

Wide receiver Joey Jones, current head football coach at South Alabama who played for Bryant from 1979 until the coach’s retirement in 1983, is quite familiar with Bear’s intimidating presence. Jones remembers the first time he came face to face with the coach. “I saw him right before the first practice, we’d had a big dinner the night before,” he says. “He was sitting at the table and I walked over to him and he shook my hand and I said, ‘I’m Joey Jones from Mobile, Alabama.’ He looked at me like, ‘What in the world are we doing spending a scholarship on somebody this size?’ He looked at the coach that recruited me and kind of gave him a bad look.”

The receiver learned the value of earning one’s own way. “The number one thing I learned from Coach Bryant was to make young men earn what they get. He did that with me, made me earn a starting position,” says Jones. “He didn’t give me anything, made me fight for it, and I’ll always appreciate that about him, not just rolling out the red carpet for anybody. Because when you do that, I think you get a much better, tougher football player who really had to fight for their job.”

Bryant didn’t do too much motivational talking on game day. “He did more during the week. His big speech came on Wednesday nights when we would have a big team meeting. He’d give a motivational-type talk then. It wasn’t so much during the games because they mainly worked at halftime, talking X’s and O’s and trying to make adjustments,” recalls Jones. “And even before games he wasn’t a big ‘let’s tear the door down’-kind of coach because I think he did so much of that during the week that he didn’t need that. That’s the way he operated.”

Two-time All-American running back Major Ogilvie agrees that Bryant wasn’t overly emotional. “We were really not a rah-rah kind of team. We didn’t play on emotion,” Ogilvie says. “I mean, there’s a certain amount of emotion that goes with adrenalin but we had so much poise and confidence, and we were so well prepared..” Ogilvie was on the team when Alabama won national championships in 1978 and 1979. “I was there when we won 44 games and lost four, so we had an awful lot of fun.” He recalls his introduction to Bryant well. “It was that day that I signed. I can remember going back in [his office]. I saw all the rings on his fingers,” says Ogilvie. “‘Cause keep in mind, I played on two state championships in high school and knew how much fun it was to play and be on successful teams. So, I walked back in there and asked him if I could see his rings. We chit-chatted for a minute.”

Nose tackle Bob Baumhower, who played for the Bear in the mid-1970s before starring for the NFL Miami Dolphins, came very close to chucking it all away.” He turned on a light for me, that’s for sure,” Baumhower admits with a quiet laugh. The player hadn’t had his heart in the game until that fateful meeting with Coach Bryant. “I played football for all the wrong reasons. I got talked into playing football in high school,” says Baumhower. “I enjoyed the game atmosphere and I enjoyed the camaraderie. But as far as thinking about the best I can be, I never had that mentality. I was fortunate enough to be offered a scholarship only after the signing day.”

Baumhower didn’t enjoy playing offense his freshman year, so asked to be switched to defense. The coaches agreed, but Baumhower failed to pay much attention to conditioning during the off-season. “I don’t think Coach Bryant was real impressed with my conditioning. Instead of first string I was last string. I caught an attitude and said, ‘I don’t need this.’ I left football practice,” he says. “Coach Bryant got word to me that he wanted to talk to me and my dad that afternoon. The first thing he did—after he greeted my dad really warmly—was he looked at me and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said, ‘Well, I heard you wanted to talk to me.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t talk to quitters but since you’re here, come on in.’ And he started working me right off the bat in that meeting. He made me start thinking about myself as a quitter. He asked me a question: ‘What did you do between spring practice and now to get better as a ball player and a person?’ And I couldn’t give him an answer. He went down a long list of players that had done things that he was aware of, whether it was a particularly player losing ‘x’ amount of weight, getting in better shape or a player getting stronger since the spring . . . He was real engaged at what everybody was doing to improve themselves for the betterment of the team. I couldn’t answer the question. He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t think you’re a quitter, Bob. I think you’re frustrated. But I don’t think you know what it takes to be a winner. You’ve got to change the way you think. And if you want to play for me, you’ve got to be the best that you can be and you’ve got to show me that you’re committed to give a hundred and ten percent and you want to be special.’ And I never thought in those terms before that meeting. And that’s what I mean by ‘turning my light on.’ My dad still talks about it. It changed my life.”

Baumhower and his old coach grew quite close after he left to play professional football. “The longer I got to know Coach Bryant, the better our relationship was. When I went to Miami, I would get phone calls from him, letting me know he was coming down,” Baumhower recalls. So my relationship with Coach Bryant, I still consider it a gift. And that gift, I keep getting benefits of it throughout life because he taught me so many things that have been good for me in a positive way through the years.” &

Birmingham artist and musician (and frequent New Orleans resident) Steve Lowery is a fascinating individual. His passion for creating images and colors with pencils and brushes has taken him to Yankee Stadium to draw baseball players and to Madison Square Garden to photograph and sketch boxing matches and concerts. He considers himself one of the blessed. “I’ve had the greatest life in the whole world,” he says with a warm smile.

Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Lowery earned his living as a teen playing bass and singing in bands touring the South, which included stints at the Starlight Lounge in Birmingham in the 1960s. “I almost jumped off the Redmont Hotel over a 39-year-old go-go girl when I was 15,” Lowery recalls, laughing. “I bought her a ring at Lorch’s for $90 and then found out she knew every single guy that came in the club ‘in that special way.’”

Though his musical talents were a large part of his focus, it was his skill as a painter and illustrator that shaped his life and career. At age 18 he received a scholarship to attend the Art Students League of New York. Soon the New York Yankees were using his work. A 1988 Yankee yearbook features Lowery’s sketch of pitching great Catfish Hunter lounging in the dugout, and the late famed catcher Thurman Munson in action.

	The two-minute sketch of Salvador Dali that Steve Lowery drew for the cover of The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali. (click for larger version)

“It was a dream job. I basically had a second studio in the first base dugout at Yankee Stadium,” Lowery says. “One of the greatest drawings I ever did was of Billy Martin. I went out drinking with him once. But only once, never again.”

Lowery began to pick up more illustration work, drawing the jacket cover of Chasin’ the Trane, a book on saxophonist John Coltrane that includes testimonies from friends, fellow musicians, and fans praising the jazz great. One of those fans whose praise of Coltrane was included in the book was a 17-year-old teen named Bart Grooms from Birmingham. Grooms has written about jazz for Black & White and laughs when he recalls that he had simply written a paragraph about what Coltrane meant to him after seeing a solicitation for such in DownBeat magazine. “I didn’t even realize they had published it until several years later when I was in college,” Grooms said in a recent conversation.

Steve Lowery’s talents took him to the White House in 1978 where he sketched Andrés Segovia as the famed classical guitarist entertained President Jimmy Carter and a roomful of guests. “I started drawing and Segovia looked at me,” Lowery remembers. “And what it was, he smelled the ink from my pen so I put my pen up and I did a pencil drawing. It took about 15 minutes. I drew two more sketches of him. Segovia was one of the absolute highlights of my life.”

Lowery also worked at the New York Times sports department when the paper preferred a rendering to a photograph. One of his first assignments was a Jets game at Shea Stadium where it was so cold his pen sometimes wouldn’t work. His love of New Orleans later led to friendships with the Neville Brothers, whose band portrait he painted one night after first seeing them at Tipitina’s. A boxing fanatic, Lowery had ringside seats at Madison Square Garden for the first Ali versus Frazier fight, where he chatted with artist LeRoy Neiman as they both complained about Frank Sinatra, who was shooting pictures of the bout for Life magazine. Sinatra kept blocking audience members’ views whenever he stood to snap pictures.

“I was an artist with Madison Square Garden [and had illustrated] about 30 different title fights, which is what gave me access to get in to shoot bands,” he says, “which led to the Zeppelin tour and all this other stuff.” Lowery did his share of photography as well, making portraits of legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant. He also illustrated the jacket cover of Turn Around, a book about Bryant’s first year as coach at the University of Alabama.

However, perhaps his most memorable brush with fame was the day he met Salvador Dali. “I went to art school and I felt pretty hot but I knew nothing technically about art. I just knew I could draw and I’d been drawing since I was four,” Lowery recalls. (“The first drawings I remember making; I used to put tracing paper on my grandmother’s black and white TV and trace Cousin Cliff’s ‘Droodles.’”) “Eventually I went to work at Doubleday—Fifth Avenue and 57th Street—right across the street from Tiffany. Doubleday was the greatest bookstore in the world. There was a wealth of information that I had access to,” recalls Lowery. “I made $67 a week and I’d spend 40 bucks of it on books. And every great artist I ever met came in that store. Dali was the third or fourth one. Dali came in with his wife Gala one day, and he was staying part of the year at the St. Regis Hotel, three blocks down the street. So he came in and I walked up to him and I told him that I had been admiring his work and he looked at me and he said, ‘Do you know who Velázquez is?’ I told him no and he bought me a $200 Velázquez book.”

	Lowery clowns around with legendary boxing promoter Don King and fighter Roberto Duran. (click for larger version)

Dali often showed up at the art school that Lowery was attending. He finally found the courage to approach the famed surrealist to ask if he could sketch him. “Dali came in one afternoon and I’d been getting my nerve up, so I walked over to him and asked if I could make a drawing of him. And he said, ‘Sure.’” He gave Lowery two minutes to draw the portrait. Once completed, Dali looked at the sketch but made no comment. A month later Dali’s agent came to the school and said to Lowery, “Dali wants to see you.” “So I went to the hotel and I brought the sketchbook. I went in and Dali is sitting there working on this incredible series of nudes. He says, ‘The book, the book!’ So I handed him the sketchbook that I had drawn him in, he opened it up and tears out the drawing of him and handed me a check for $5,000 and says, ‘This is for my autobiography.’ I bought an Armani jacket that afternoon, I swear. So it came out, it was the drawing for the cover of a book called The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali.” &

To inquire about artwork for purchase, contact Lowery on his Facebook page.

Anyone driving through Five Points South in recent years has probably noticed exquisitely-crafted carousel horses in the windows of the apartments directly above Dave’s Pub. In recent months, the animals have migrated half a block across Highland Avenue to the basement of the Hassinger Daniels mansion located next to the new Chick-Fil-A. The carousel horses are created by master craftsman and sculptor Ira Chaffin and his students at the Chaffin Carousel Carving School.

Chaffin, a professional bronze sculptor whose commissioned work includes statues on campus of two of UAB’s first three presidents—S. Richardson Hill and Charles McCallum, began carving antique-style carousel animals in 2001 after a friend in Chattanooga taught him the old-fashioned method of gluing together blocks of wood from which a piece is to be carved (called a “carving blank”).

	Sculptor and carving craftsman Ira Chaffin chisels a horse’s head. (Photos: Owen Stayner.) (click for larger version)

Soon after his introduction to carousel horses, Chaffin began teaching wood carving at the Woodcraft Store in Pelham. In 2009 he opened the Chaffin Carving School above Dave’s Pub. Four months ago, he and his wife—an architect for UAB—bought the Hassinger Daniels mansion, where his wife will operate a bed and breakfast while Ira will maintain his studio space in the large basement. (They are only the third owners of the home in over 100 years, according to Chaffin.)

Walking into Chaffin’s basement studio is to enter an enchanted land, where colorful creatures mounted on carousel poles capture the imagination. “We’re not really carving for the carousel industry. All of the students that come here are just doing it for themselves as projects that will probably end up in someone’s home,” he says. Though obviously a labor-intensive, skilled craft, Chaffin insists that sculpting a carousel animal is not as intimidating as one might think. “About half the people I work with have never carved before,” he says. “For instance, that little western-style pony is the first project carved by a local grandmother.”

The gorgeous pony is quite elaborate and includes a carved rifle and pistol as separate pieces that are kept in holsters made into the carved saddle. The pony has a natural horse-hair tail, which Chaffin purchases from a supplier. Horse tails can also be carved from the wooden body instead of using real hair. “My job is to teach people how to use the tools, how to make good artistic decisions, and kind of keep an eye on their progress,” the sculptor explains. “People ask, ‘How long does it take to carve wood?’ And I jokingly say, ‘Well, about an hour!’ It doesn’t take long to use a chisel and hit it with a mallet. The hard part is making artistic decisions about what to carve, what to take away (with the tools) and so forth. So I kind of make that my job as the helper and instructor, to guide them along the way.”

His students can choose any animal to carve. “We’ve done carousel lions, giraffes, warthogs, bunny rabbits . . . but the most popular are horses.” The carousel bunny was carved by a semi-retired doctor at UAB, who has completed several different animals. “He has grandchildren, so you can bet that everybody is going to get an heirloom piece from Grandpa one day,” Chaffin says, laughing.

	The carousel bunny was made by a UAB physician. (click for larger version)

The type of wood traditionally used in carving carousel animals is bass wood. “I buy two-inch thick timber from the supplier and glue up enough to make a large enough object for carving for what we want to do,” he explains. “It’s not a situation where we go out and find a gigantic tree. People sometimes assume that.” Creating a horse’s head is probably the most challenging task to master. “Well, I think doing the head study is probably the most intimidating part because you have to do the eyes, in the case of a horse you have to do the teeth. The head is somewhat detailed, although some of the students can get pretty extravagant with their saddles,” he says. The finished figures are painted with either acrylic or oil paint. “Some of the students, I think, sometimes struggle through the carving process just so they can have the fun of painting the animals,” says Chaffin with a laugh. “That’s when the animals really come alive, when they’re painted.”

For access to images as reference material so that students can choose the style animal they want to create, Chaffin has plenty of resources. “I have lots of books and I subscribe to a couple of magazines that cater to the carnival and carousel trade,” he says. “So we have lots of picture references. And we actually have plans that were drawn based on the old carousel animals from back around the 1900s.”

Some students come up with their own design from pictures they have at home, especially family horses. “What I really need is a side view of whatever animal they want to do,” explains Chaffin. The image is then blown up with an overhead projector onto the wall of the studio. A paper cutout of the animal is made so that the size of the wood blank from which the animal will be carved can then be determined. When asked how long it takes to carve a horse, Chaffin grins and replies, “Well, that’s the grand question, and I can never answer very easily. I can use myself as an example. I can produce a completed horse in about a month of hard work, if you think in terms of eight to ten hour days. I have students who putter around for a year or more getting something done because they don’t have the time to devote to it and it sort of drags on. So it depends on how much time someone can devote to the project.”

A California native who studied sculpture at the University of Southern California, Chaffin has taught at the New York Academy of Art and Graduate School of Figurative Art in New York City as well as the 92nd Street YMCA on the Upper East Side; the Palm Springs Village Center for the Arts; and the California State University at San Marcos, among other schools. He also instructs during week-long stints at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina.

The hey-day of the carousel was between 1880 and 1930. Few antique carousels are left in the United States, says Chaffin. The nearest antique carousel to Alabama is located in Meridian, Mississippi. True antique carousels use wooden figures, while animals on modern machines are usually fiberglass or cast aluminum, which can be mass produced from molds. Antique carousels are much more popular in Europe. American carousels turn counter clockwise while European machines rotate clockwise. “There’s an interesting story behind that, which is probably a story I can’t verify but it’s a sensible story,” Chaffin says. “Most of the population is right-handed. And before everybody started suing each other right and left, here in America when you rode the carousel you played a game called ‘Going for the Brass Ring.’ There used to be a dispenser on carousels that would hold out rings, most of which were steel. You’d grab one as you came around and if you happened to get one of the few brass rings, you got a free ride. That’s where the term ‘going for the brass ring’ comes from.”

Coney Island used to have 20 antique carousels. Now the fabled amusement park has only one, which Chaffin not only got to ride alone on one visit, but also got to play Going for the Brass Ring. “Years ago they stopped playing that game because you could see drunk teenagers falling off the carousel and people getting sued,” he says. “A couple of years ago, I had the great fortune of being at Coney Island on a morning when no one was there except the carousel operator,” he recalls. “I told the operator of my interest in carousels and that I was very involved with carving animals. Suddenly he brought out an old brass ring machine!” says Chaffin, excitement rising in his voice. “It was a clown figure and his arm stuck out and it kept feeding me rings. It was great fun and I got to do that!”

	(click for larger version)

He points at a magnificent hippogriff creature a student has just finished. “I’m told that it’s a figure in the Harry Potter books. I’m not really in tune to all that,” he admits. “But this hippogriff is a mythological figure. It’s kind of a horse’s body with wings and a bird’s head,” explains Chaffin. “It’s a nice piece but it’s not really a carousel piece because you can’t sit on it, the wings are in the way!” Chaffin Carousel Carving School is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Thursday evening hours are 6 to 9 p.m. On occasion he’ll open on a Saturday if his schedule permits. For prices and other information, go to http://Irachaffinsculpture.com/chaffin.html. &

For 34 years, Charlemagne Records in Five Points South has been a sanctuary for record fanatics, indifferent shoppers looking for birthday presents for friends, lonely souls desperate for conversation, and the occasional celebrity. Jimmy Griffin, a sweet, congenial 61-year-old fellow smitten with music, has worked at Charlemagne for three decades. (He looks 41 and has the spirit of a kid in awe of the world around him.) He’s Clint Eastwood-cool when under fire. He simply cannot be rattled, maintaining a Captain Kangaroo-calm bolstered by a teenage enthusiasm with a subtle charm capable of soothing the most savage customer. “The one thing that I remember is that no matter how hectic the store got, especially at Christmas or whatever, I never ever saw Jimmy lose it,” says local artist Marjorie Clark Boykin, who worked at Charlemagne from 1986 to 1990. “I might see him get a little flustered and inside he might be freaking out, but even if there was somebody who was being difficult, he would always deflect it with some kind of humor.”

Jimmy is indeed one of the funniest fellows in the universe. If forced to express himself to a disgruntled customer, he does so with his customary savvy and hilarious style. During a Christmas shopping season 15 or 20 years ago, a customer came in with a noose necklace and matching noose bracelets on each wrist. The store was packed and the gallows-obsessed guy was having a difficult time getting waited on. The fellow was hunting for a particular piece of classical music. As he grew more impatient, he addressed Griffin by saying: “You know, Jimmy, a scream is a terrible thing to hear.” Jimmy Griffin didn’t miss a beat and coolly responded, “I tell you, man, I bet your family will get you a portable radio for Christmas and you can listen to classical music on WBHM.”

Charlemagne Records opened for business in July 1977 at the Garages, now a popular Southside bar called the Garage Café. Launched by local singer deluxe Marian McKay Rosato, her brother Mike McKay, and Gary Bourgeois, the funky new and used-record store moved to Five Points South four months later, where it set up business sharing the first floor with a used bookstore in the structure where Charlemagne currently operates. (Bourgeois is no longer with Charlemagne. He owns Renaissance Records in Five Points South.) The record store moved upstairs in 1978 when the building’s owner decided to open an apothecary in the ground-floor space. Rosato had been in record sales before starting Charlemagne. “I worked at Sears in Vestavia; I was the record department girl,” she says with a smile. “I sold Gary (Bourgeois) a record there, James Taylor’s Walking Man, and that’s how we met.”

Charlemagne has definitely seen its share of famous customers. Tom Waits stopped by and bought an armload of albums in 2008 when he was in town playing at the Alabama Theatre. Gary Busey stopped by when he was in town filming his role as Bear Bryant in The Bear a few decades back. Busey selected a Beatles box set and threw down a $100 bill. He picked up the Beatles package with one hand and grabbed Rosato with the other. “Well all of a sudden, Gary Busey hoisted me up over his shoulder,” she recalls. Under protest from then-employee Gary Bourgeois (“I told him he couldn’t have her.”), Busey began to walk out of the store. The actor/madman eventually released Rosato and set her down at the top of the stairs that lead up to the store’s entrance. She also remembers the afternoon Carlos Santana visited the store. “He asked for Baaba Maal, an African musical artist,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have any Baaba Maal but we know who you’re talking about.’ So, he was looking around and then the mail came. And so we opened up the mail and there was a promo package in it and it was Baaba Maal. So we said to Carlos Santana, ‘Well, I guess this belongs to you,’ and we gave it to him.”

“What’s really interesting is how Jimmy started working at Charlemagne,” recalls Gary Bourgeois. “He had been working at some big mall store. I think they had closed and he was living right up the hill from Charlemagne. So he just started coming in, and he was helping us do this and do that. People started knowing who Jimmy was. After a while, we might be short-handed and Jimmy happened to be there, because, you know, Jimmy ain’t going to be happy unless he’s working in a record store. Next thing you know, Jimmy’s ringing up customers and we put him on payroll. Soon Jimmy was coming in everyday and helping us. Then you realize, ‘Wow, this guy’s really good, he really knows his stuff.’ You don’t even have to look this stuff up, he already knows what artist, what song title someone was looking for. Before you know it, Jimmy’s like an everyday fixture.”

“It was a gradual thing. I was working at an OZ franchise,” recalls Jimmy. “I was helping Gary at Apple Books and he said, ‘Well, come over and help some at Charlemagne, too.’ So I would spend afternoons going from one to the other, just working my way into the organization. I think at first I was working for record credit. But these were the days of post–hippie, post–peace, and post–whiskey, if you know what I mean,” Griffin says, laughing.

As a child, Griffin had an uncle who would bring over 45 rpm records. “We had a Louis Prima 45. And I would buy classical and Broadway; like I had Camelot. I didn’t get serious—and this is almost embarrassing—but I bought hootenanny (records). So I also bought Peter, Paul, and Mary, and New Christy Minstrels records,” he says. “And when the Beatles came out I bought a Beatles record, like everybody else. But at the same time, I bought the Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads the year it came out. And once I got the Rolling Stones record I didn’t buy any more Beatles records. And then I got Dylan records, and me and my buddy across the street, that’s all we did was find Dylan and Stones records and play ‘em. The Stones were coming from the blues base and the R&B base. So from listening to the Stones and Dylan, I dove off into blues and jazz.”

“I’ve always felt that Jimmy had a big impact on me,” says Brad Quinn, former singer and bassist in the band Carnival Season, who currently lives in Japan when not playing bass with underground pop hero Tommy Keene. “Back in the late ’70s, when I was about 14 years old, I used to hang out and talk music with Jimmy at a record shop in the Riverchase Galleria. I was listening to jazz—or at least I thought I was—but Jimmy quickly expanded my horizons from Bob James and Weather Report by sending me home with Coon Bid’ness by avant-jazz alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill. As I recall, it was a pretty free-blowing album and probably a bit beyond my scope. But I also really liked that Jimmy had treated me like an adult by trying to turn me on to such heavy sounds.”

Quinn also recalls getting a lesson from Griffin about the relevance of singer Freddy Fender. “I remember making some crack about Freddy Fender, who to my mind was just some kitschy cowboy singer who sold records on TV,” he says. “I knew Jimmy as a guy who was deep into jazz and blues, so I was really surprised when he came to Freddy’s defense. It was a small thing, but it made me realize that I maybe didn’t know quite as much about things as I thought I did. It also revealed how open-minded and big-hearted Jimmy was about music. I later went on to spend 13 years or so toiling away in record shops in Birmingham and Atlanta. So I suppose you could say that Jimmy was a bit of a role model. He certainly is a role model for how people should think about and listen to music.”

Tommy Stevenson, a columnist and blogger who has worked at the Tuscaloosa News for 35 years, claims he introduced Griffin to the local community. “I discovered him,” says Stevenson, laughing. “It was at a party that we crashed . . . There was this little skinny guy sitting there strumming on a guitar. I said to myself, ‘This is going to be one of my friends for the rest of my life.’ Allen Ginsberg was in town for a speaking engagement at Birmingham-Southern in 1968 and showed up at the party. Everybody was trying to impress the famous poet, playing ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’ or whatever. Jimmy picked up the guitar and started doing old Hank Williams songs and Ginsberg shot across the room and sat down beside him and made Jimmy play song after song, and Ginsberg sang along with him.”

Bart Grooms, a local writer, singer, and host of a jazz radio show on Samford University’s campus radio station WVSU-FM 91.1, gushes at the mention of Jimmy. “My initial impression—which I still have—is that he’s just one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever met. Friendly to everybody who comes in and seems to know an enormous number of people who come in,” says Grooms. “He’s incredibly musically literate. He seems to have an amazing memory for what is in the store, what he can access, what needs to be special ordered, and also stuff that he likes and can recommend. He’s never pushy about that but has often been able to say, ‘I really enjoy such and such,’ and I think is really helpful to a lot of people coming into the store. Jimmy’s been a real blessing in a lot of people’s lives and that means a lot to me and it’s meant a lot to a lot people. And I count him a friend.”

“I’ve always thought of Jimmy as a gentleman,” says Boutwell Studios co-owner Mark Harrelson. “Not only does he have an encyclopedic knowledge of his inventory, he also remembers what his customer’s individual areas of interest are.” Musician Don Tinsley worked at Charlemagne for a couple of years in the late 1980s. “When it comes to music, Jimmy Griffin seems to remember it all, I’ve never stumped him with any question as to who, what, when, or where,” says Tinsley. “I’ve heard some people refer to him as Saint Jimmy because he NEVER loses his patience or blows up at Charlemagne even when trying to help the most hard to please customers who are asking the most impossible questions. He genuinely tries to help people get the music they want, and he seems to make extremely astute observations and suggestions to aid them in finding what they are searching for and also to help broaden their musical palette.” Tinsley has played in bands with Griffin and has always been impressed with his talents as a singer and player. “He’s sings true and means it, and is a serious roots-style threat on bass drum and maracas. I played a couple of gigs with Jimmy and John McKay on harp as the Drape Vulcan Boys,” he recalls. “I couldn’t make the practice so we ran some songs by telephone and then played what I remember as a very cool and successful gig.”

Besides his day job working at Charlemagne, Jimmy Griffin played for several years with one of the greatest bands to ever come out of Birmingham, the bluesy, roots-based Trains ‘N’ Trouble. He’s modest about his fabulous, distinctive vocal talents but admits that he never lacked confidence singing for an audience. “No, I wasn’t self conscious. Like with Trains ‘N’ Trouble, playing with LaDonna Smith, Davey Williams, and John McKay, I was like sort of an amateur with three very professional people,” he says. “Plus the fact that with the improvisational aspect, we would rehearse a song but that wouldn’t necessarily be the way it would go when we played it. I was not on the level of creating new music; I was trying to be true to the nuance of the singers I admired, like Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. When I was young just playing the guitar, I loved Woody Guthrie.”

Jimmy has memories of famous performers dropping by Charlemagne. “Gene Simmons came in. He was looking for British Invasion CDs, but he had everything we could find,” he recalls. “But he ended up buying Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and Greatest Hits by Bobby Darin. Chris Robinson, formerly of the Black Crowes, came in and a customer asked him if he should buy Robinson’s new record and he said, ‘No, don’t get that, man.’” Griffin doesn’t hesitate when asked who his favorite musician is. “Sun Ra is my favorite because he does so many things. He invented a whole new language of music. I call it ‘the lope,” it’s got a loping sound. It’s like swinging or it could be totally abstract.”

Sun Ra may have invented a new musical language but Jimmy Griffin coined a new phrase for the retail record business. “We call the store business ‘psycho retail,’ because you never know what people are going to ask you in person or on the phone,” he says. “I’ve developed this thing of taking everything literally until I find out otherwise. Because you never know exactly where the customers are coming from. Psycho retail means the insanity of the different ways that people communicate or don’t communicate. And we also have the circular reasoning. There’ll be three thoughts and they’re rotated. They ask you question A. As you answer question A, they don’t respond, they ask question B. As you answer question B, they don’t really respond or make a decision, but ask question C. And as you answer question C, they go back to question A. And you could be on the phone maybe 15 minutes trying to nail down which of these three points is pertinent to the call, and what exactly we can do for them. Some of our customers, we already know who they are as soon as they say hello, and we know it’s going to take a minute.”

Jimmy has devised his own method for remaining calm under fire when business is jumping at Charlemagne. “Well, I do get rattled and I think it comes with age. I used to say that my mind is on ‘erase’ and I would kind of go from one point to the next,” he explains. “Or maybe it’s kind of like a game not to get rattled because maybe you can do a better job. I used to have a motto: ‘People didn’t realize it but I live in fear.’ The other thing is, now that I’ve been in counseling for a while, I realize how much co-dependence I’ve had since I was a young child,” he admits with laughter. “So in a way, I’m in the worst possible job for someone who’s co-dependent with the world. Passivity and co-dependence are like good traits for a retailer, but you might never get well. I have a theory about retail, that it should be democratic. Because one of my jokes is, in the Bill of Rights they have to now include the right to shop. People feel very strongly about their right to shop. That’s why you have yard sales; that’s why you have people with no money actually looking at discarded things on the side of the road, because that’s a form of shopping. So, to me, somebody buying a dollar cassette is just as important as someone buying a $200 box set. Because they might be a regular customer and they may buy 200 one-dollar cassettes over a couple of years but you may never see the box set person again. We’re trying to match people with their musical needs but the customer kind of has to run the show.”

Griffin has a personal philosophy for why people are drawn to certain genres of music while rejecting other styles. “It’s like a music festival. If you don’t like an event, you just change stages. I’ve developed this theory that started years ago at a chain store while I was running the cash register and playing Professor Longhair. And I’m all exuberant and I said, ‘Isn’t this great!’ And my customer said, ‘Not particularly.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, Professor Longhair’s not great.’ The thing about music is that it’s sound waves. When somebody’s receiving their pleasant sound waves, it’s a physiological and environmental and memory, all combined. So, deriving pleasure from music is something everybody can do and you can’t say that one pleasure source is any superior to another. But you can say that certain musicians are more skilled at making new statements.”

Gary Bourgeois told me that if I wanted to drive Jimmy crazy, I should lock him in a room with the first seven Moody Blues albums. Griffin responded: “Well what happened with the Moody Blues is that when I lived in Boston I had a roommate and he lost his girlfriend. He played this Moody Blues song over and over about a quiet day in the park and being sad. It’s just too lush for me. I can see they’re good musicians. It’s taken me years to get over the fact, for example, that Jim Morrison’s approach to a song is more dramatic than Mick Jagger’s. Or David Bowie’s approach is more dramatic. There’s something in Morrison’s voice tone to where I prefer Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And also, I prefer great non-singers. When people tell me Bob Dylan can’t sing, I say, ‘I guess you’re right but he’s so musical. So it’s not necessarily if you can hit the note, it’s how you approach the note. When I brought Dylan’s Nashville Skyline home, my Dad said, ‘Oh, you mean that fellow finally decided to start singing?’”

The final word on Jimmy Griffin comes from the second greatest musical icon in Birmingham’s storied history. Spike, former singer of punk legend GNP, believes that Jimmy Griffin just might have clairvoyant powers: “I never bought much punk stuff from Charlemagne. There are just too many other cool genres of music to choose from there. It was mostly Grateful Dead-related stuff, or reggae, or ska. It seems like every time I walked up those stairs and Jimmy was there, he would say, ‘Hey, I got this new Dead thing . . .’ or he would have some obscure ska compilation to show me. It was like he knew I was about to walk in the store. I’m pretty sure he’s that way with everyone. He must be psychic. I love that guy.” &

Vincent Oliver has been cutting hair in downtown Woodlawn for 44 years. Oliver attended kindergarten, elementary, and high school in Woodlawn but left after graduation to attend barber college in Jacksonville, Florida.

“There was no barber college in Alabama when I got out of high school,” he explains. Degree in hand, he eventually returned to his childhood neighborhood and in 1966 opened Vincent Oliver’s Hippodrome Barber Shop. Oliver is one of the few white residents to have resisted relocating due to the urban blight that has gripped Woodlawn for nearly three decades beginning in the late 1970s.

Running a one-barber operation, Vincent Oliver admits that Woodlawn has seen better days. “It was a real busy downtown district in the ’50s and ’60s. It had a Morgan Brothers Department Store. It had about four barber shops, had a Woodlawn bakery, had a shoe-repair shop, had restaurants, a hardware store,” he reminisces, perched in a barber chair after finishing with a customer. “It was a real, real busy hub right here.”

When asked if he has encountered any criminal element in the neighborhood, Oliver replies, “I’ve had no problems, it’s been real safe. People sometimes get the mis-idea about Woodlawn. When I tell people I work in Woodlawn, they say, ‘Oh ain’t you scared to go to Woodlawn?’ But it’s nice, it’s really nice.”

	“People from Birmingham fail to see some of the potential that’s right before them.” —Andrew Morrow

Not long ago Woodlawn was not “really nice” or “real safe.” Many will argue that it still isn’t. But thanks to an influx of private and public funding, a revitalization effort that began several years ago has pulled the community together, and Woodlawn appears to be gradually on the rebound.

In 2004 Main Street Birmingham (MSB), a nonprofit organization that contracts with the city of Birmingham to foster public-private partnerships designed to revitalize neighborhood commercial districts, moved to the area. Two years later, the Central YWCA established a presence in Woodlawn when it came to the financial rescue of the Interfaith Hospitality House—a shelter for homeless families. Other nonprofit organizations followed: The Church of the Highlands partnered with Christ Health Center to open a medical clinic; Desert Island Supply Company has established itself as a writing lab for children living in Woodlawn; Cornerstone School is a charter school that has contributed to Woodlawn’s rebirth.

At the center of this revitalization is YWCA Central’s $11 million project to build state-of-the-art shelters for homeless families. Funded by a partnership between the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city of Birmingham’s Community Development Department, and private donors, the complex includes four apartment buildings with 58 units of affordable housing (both transitional and permanent), as well as a new facility for an Interfaith Hospitality House that can shelter six homeless families. The house allows intact families to remain together.

“We started out with a small vision just to build a replacement shelter and opportunities and funding kept coming our way,” explains YWCA Central Alabama CEO Suzanne Durham. “We’ve run housing for over a hundred years, we are not new to housing . . . We’re the only shelter in the state that takes homeless dads with kids. We’re one of very few that takes women with teenaged boys in the state, and we’re one of very few in the state that takes two-parent families.”

To take advantage of the Y’s transitional and permanent housing opportunities, occupants must be employed or on retirement or social security income. Criminal background checks are also required.

The YWCA’s project also includes a Family Resource Center. Purchasing the property, which was formerly a convenience store where illegal activities were allegedly taking place, was the catalyst in helping change Woodlawn’s shoddy reputation, Durham says.

“What was once a former convenience store—and I mean ‘convenience’ where a lot of unhealthy activities took place, activities that made folks often afraid to stop at the traffic light—has been transformed into a wonderful activities center for the residents of our apartment complexes, as well as community residents,” Durham said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony in May christening the completion of the current phase of the YWCA complex. “We knew if we didn’t acquire the property, our work for transforming the neighborhood would be for naught.”

Main Street Birmingham, meanwhile, is close to opening an arts incubator in Woodlawn. In March, the Birmingham City Council voted to give $50,000 to 55th Place Arts, a $250,000 project located next door to Main Street Birmingham, which will lease the space to tenants.

“We’ve occupied this building since 2005, [it] has our office, as well as some space in it that we maintain and is basically to incubate small business or nonprofits at an affordable rate,” says David Fleming, executive director of Main Street Birmingham. “A year ago we acquired the properties next door to us going to the end of the block, which is a total of six different storefronts that were all about only 40 percent occupied. Construction is under way now on renovating those buildings and filling up the vacant spaces with arts business incubation, or what we call ‘creative professionals.’ So it could be somebody involved in some sort of artistic endeavor as their business; it could be a dance studio or maybe a graphic design person.” Fleming said the arts incubator is likely to open in September.

Main Street Birmingham is also partnering with City Meats, located directly across the street from the Hippodrome barber shop. Samuel Crawford, director of business growth for MSB, explains: “The City Meats effort is just one of the overall initiatives. We’re working with individuals, community organizations, and neighborhoods to establish a series of public markets, the target being those communities that are considered by the United States Department of Agriculture, and our study that we had done of Birmingham, that are considered ‘food deserts.’ Those are communities that either lack access to healthy food sources, or access is limited. The overall effort is, how do you get more fresh produce offerings in these communities?”

MSB was also instrumental in the opening of Woodrow Hall, a top-tier events venue, in Woodlawn. “We were involved with Woodrow Hall in that when the new owners came around looking for opportunities, we encouraged them and helped them with the transaction for them to purchase that,” says Fleming. “That’s one of the things we do; If we find people that we can encourage to buy and invest in the area, we will do that and try to help provide incentives for them to do it. They didn’t need any financial incentive; they just needed to see the opportunity and we directed them to that. They’ve done a great job with that building.”

The three-story Woodrow Hall, at 5500 First Avenue North, is a former Masonic Lodge that was built in 1914. Andrew Morrow and his business partners purchased the building, which is currently used as a venue for weddings, parties, and other special events. Morrow has a landscaping and construction business, and has been involved in building lofts in downtown Birmingham.

“People from Birmingham fail to see some of the potential that’s right before them,” Morrow explains, “So I learned how to renovate stuff and I saw the value in taking something that’s old and how you can change it and make it new.” Morrow says that the adage that stipulates “build it and they will come” applies to his reason for opening Woodrow Hall. “You’ve got Crestwood right there [near Woodlawn] with houses that sell for maybe $200,000. But on the other side of this building [Woodrow Hall] a stone’s throw away [from Crestwood], you can buy a lot for 2,000 bucks or a house that needs a ton of work for $15,000. That’s a huge disparity.” Morrow adds that, because of the location, hosting an event at Woodrow Hall is much cheaper than at similar event facilities in the Birmingham area.

Travis Morgan, president of local record label Skybucket Records, says he was not aware that Woodrow Hall existed until he attended a yoga class there recently with his wife. He decided that the facility would be the ideal setting for local band Delicate Cutters to hold their record-release party.

“It wasn’t just another show, so we wanted to kind of up the ante a little bit,” Morgan says. “It’s real elegant; they dress [Woodrow Hall] up.” Morgan admits that it was somewhat risky to have a show in Woodlawn. “I grew up in the suburbs, and Woodlawn, to me, was an area of town that I didn’t go in very often,” he says. “It really is a beautiful area of town. As it slowly becomes revitalized, I’m sure there are some other jewels in Woodlawn that I’m completely unaware of. [So] if I didn’t know about Woodrow Hall, I’m sure there are other buildings and other sights to see.”

Smiles for Keeps is a dental practice next to Vincent Oliver’s barber shop opened by Mountain Brook dentist Roger Smith and business partner Mary McSpadden in 2006. Their clientele is primarily children on Medicaid, though other insurance is also accepted.

“We did a demographic study of where the greatest need was, and we found that the Woodlawn area had a huge number of children that were having to travel some distance to get dental care,” explains McSpadden.

McSpadden says the clinic also offers care at reduced rates for those without Medicaid. “Even if somebody doesn’t have insurance or if they have insurance and maybe their copays are higher or whatever, our rates are such that it is much more affordable because of the area that we’re in,” she says. McSpadden admits that she and Dr. Smith took a gamble on opening the operation where they did.

“When we came, it was before Woodlawn was cool. Main Street Birmingham was here but really there wasn’t a lot going on,” she says. “Thirty percent of our children are non-Medicaid, 70 percent are Medicaid. And we find that they come from all different zip codes throughout this city.”

The clinic also treats adults whose children are serviced at Smiles for Keeps. McSpadden points out that the clinic is a for-profit venture.

“A lot of businesses that you see that have come into Woodlawn have been not-for-profits. We do believe that it’s helping the city to a large degree by us paying taxes, whereas your not-for-profits don’t.”

Nancy Tran, a real estate broker for Beautiful South Real Estate, says she is excited about what’s happening in the area. “Things are progressing. There’s a lot of activity going on with new businesses and the non-profit groups,” Tran says. She says she believes that the affordable prices for houses in the adjacent Crestwood neighborhood will be a catalyst prompting others to invest in Woodlawn. “As Crestwood continues to grow, that will pull Woodlawn up, too.” &