East Lake Together

Published on December 14, 2018

https://www.samford.edu/departments/oral-history/projects/samwav/east-lake-together.mp3

". . . So my mom, and I really credit her for this, my mom introduced us, particularly me, because I was the youngest, to the changing face of our community. And that was the best gift she ever gave me. "

Chapters

Introduction: East Lake and Howard College

Michelle Little and Claire Davis introduce the East Lake Together project, and Samford alumnus Earl Tew recalls East Lake's impact on his college experience

Play Segment

East Lake Park

Nanci Scarpulla talks about her memories of the amusement park at East Lake Park.

Play Segment

Segregation and Integration in East Lake

Nanci Scarpulla and Eunice Rogers share memories of segregation and integration in the East Lake community.

Play Segment

Transcript

[HARWELL GOODWIN DAVIS: He stated that he had been appointed to suggest a
president for Howard College.

EUNICE ROGERS: And so there was a lot of industry in Bessemer when I grew up, a
lot of progressiveness. However, it was still a typical, small, Southern town.

OLIVER BARREAU: To be perfectly honest with you, um, I didn't know what Alabama
was until I set foot in Alabama.

ELIZABETH SLOAN RAGLAND: I was not greeted by hecklers. I was greeted by Martha
Ann Cox.]

NANCI SCARPULA: As we move forward, it's so important that you're doing things
like this because this is what's rebuilding. Oral history is...it's, it's
his-story, it's her-story, it's our stories and ironically, when you tell a
story, what you find out the basis of the foundation is, we have so many more
similarities than we do differences and when we realize that, then the next
generation comes together even more and the next generation.

MICHELLE LITTLE: Welcome back to Sam.wav. We are your hosts, Michelle Little,

CLAIRE DAVIS: and Claire Davis,

MICHELE LITTLE: and we come to you today with a brief glimpse of the history of
East Lake, Alabama. Two years ago, STORI met with Amber Tolbert, owner of East
59 Vintage & Cafe. Amber herself is a Samford alumna, and her decision to open a
cafÃ© and vintage shop in the heart of East Lake came directly from a passion
to involve herself more in the community. With her invaluable help, STORI worked
with Cornerstone Schools of Alabama to host a pop-up interview day in the shop.
As regulars and locals came by for their customary caffeine fix, two classes of
Cornerstone high school students invited them to record an oral history
interview about their lives in East Lake. With their help, we collected eleven
interviews in seven hours, compiling a vivid and vibrant version of the
community's past, part of which we're sharing with you today.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Officially incorporated in 1910, East Lake is a Birmingham
community roughly twelve miles from Samford's campus in Homewood. In 1886, East
Lake experienced a boom in population when the East Lake Land Company developed
housing for laborers and workmen. The town was also marketed as a resort
location. The addition of a railroad and street car line in 1887 popularized the
area as well.

MICHELLE LITTLE: Also in 1887, our university, Samford, which at that time was
named Howard College, relocated to East Lake, Alabama from Marion. We stayed in
East Lake for 70 years, which is longer than we've been on any other campus.
Earl Tew, Samford alumnus and East Lake resident, recounts the day he came to
East Lake and found his way to campus.

EARL TEW: I came here to go to Howard College in nineteen hundred and
forty-eight. [pause] Oh, and uh, anyway, I uh, I remember, I, I, I, I had been
through here once before but I had never seen Birmingham and I came in on the
bus. I came two, three weeks before school started. Uh, I had a friend that was
pastor of the Ninth Avenue Baptist Church, right over by the airport from here.
And he was an older friend. In fact, his father was my pastor in my little, my
rural church. And, and that church was a quarter time church, it just had
preaching once a month. So, you know, I, I respected brother Cozart and his son
was a pastor over at, uh, he was a student at Howard and the pastor over at
Ninth Avenue Baptist Church. So, I came here to go to college and I came in on
the bus. Uh, and I remember very distinctly when I got off the bus on sixth
avenue north, uh, I thought, well, you know, I'm just going to ninth avenue
north, so I, I can walk up three, three blocks. (laughter) And I started walking
and asking and I, I realized that I, hey, I got to get, I got to go another way.
So, I came back and caught a street car. They had street cars then running up
through here. Uh, one that came right up in front of Howard College and made the
turn up the way and came back down First Avenue. So, that's, uh, how I
discovered this East Lake area.

CLAIRE DAVIS: His adventures finding his way around East Lake weren't over,
however, and he still had a few surprises left to discover upon arrival.

EARL TEW: Well, uh, life in East Lake, uh, I, uh, when I came here. In fact, I
didn't know that I had to make, uh, reservation for housing. I thought when they
accepted me as a student, they accepted me, housing and all, but they didn't
have. We didn't have many, we didn't, we, we had very little housing for male
students at Howard College. There were about four old uh... dormitories. By
dormitories, they were, uh, barracks building that during the war, they had
trained some military people here and they built four of these buildings and
that's where we lived, in those, in those four buildings. Uh, but I didn't know
you had to make a reservation for that, so uh, uh, I, I went up uh, and found,
we found a room just off the campus, uh, up on eighth avenue out
Eightieth...about Eightieth Street, I believe. And, uh, I met my friend Charles
Whitson there. He, he had just rented a room and I, I rented a room that was
right beside his. There was only two rooms, this house, that these people lived
in. Uh, they had two rooms that they rent out. So, that's how uh, and you know
it was in walking distance. None of us had a car, uh, in those days. So, we, we walked.

MICHELLE LITTLE: While Earl Tew's first experience with East Lake was as a
college student, most people who participated in the project grew up in the area
and remembered it as a small, suburban community, complete with a lake and park
for entertainment. Nanci Scarpulla filled us in on what her family would do for
fun when she was younger.

NANCI SCARPULLA: East Lake Park, which y'all know it used to be an amusement
park, and it used to have the big roller coaster. Well, by the seventies and
eighties, it had become just what it is. And, for the longest, there was
cruising. And people would just cruise around the park and you'd get out and
walk um...I remember being there one morning with my mom, who's also passed away
now, and we had this poodle and it, my sister was with us and we were walking
around the park and the poodle, for no reason, which poodles are a little
neurotic anyway, but, for no reason, this poodle just takes off and just jumps
in the lake. My sister goes right after her and just jumps right in and my mom's
freaking out, screaming, "Snake, snakes! There's snakes in there." Of course,
you know, the chances of the snake really wanting to attack a poodle and a human
are pretty slim, but that was just kind of the fun. And then um, was just to, to
play... they had all kinds of different community events. Sometimes, they would
have the fishing tournament, or fishing things. Um, so that was one place where
we spent a lot of time. The other was the churches around here, especially ours.
We would have, um, a haunted house, yeah, right, and you don't hear of a lot of
churches having haunted houses, right? But, but our church um, it wasn't a big
church, but it would have a haunted house and um, we would participate in that.

CLAIRE DAVIS: However, all good things come to an end, and the lake was drained
to make space for more housing, which made for some interesting discoveries.

NANCI SCAPULLA: I can remember when they, they drained it or they attempted to
drain it one time. And that was when they were trying to rebuild it, and um, it
was just eerie. You would go by and it was just eerie because they were still
finding things leftover from the amusement park that used to be there from the
different pieces from the roller coaster they were finding. And they were
finding all kinds of stuff at the bottom of the lake.

MICHELLE LITTLE: While stories about the park and the streetcars cropped up
often, memories of segregation were also common across all of
our interviews from that day. Many of our interviewees grew up during the Civil
Rights era. Mrs. Scarpulla shares one story:

NANCI SCARPULA: When I was growing up, segregation had just really it, its, they
at that time they had started bussing African Americans into white schools and
there was this, all of this uproar. East Lake was changing and you went from the
generation that raised me, which was Middle American, white, prejudiced is a
fair term to use, racist, because they were very, they were a close community.
Now my mom was different in that she, her best friend was African American. And
even though she grew up with that, in that system, when your best friend, is,
quote, the other side, then you tend to get real protective and so my mom, and I
really credit her for this, my mom introduced us, particularly me, because I was
the youngest, to the changing face of our community. And that was the best gift
she ever gave me. Um, and I'll give you an example. I found papers from our
church from when it was established back in the early 1900s and on there, it has
a specific, uh, clause in in the founding things that says, "No..." and this is
how it's worded, because this is how they worded things, "No Negros allowed."
Right. And, and it was a white church, and I can remember one time a black
gentleman walking in, and this was when I was a little girl, so this would have
been the early seventies, I can remember a black gentlemen walking in who needed
help because something had, had, his car had broken down or something, and I
remember several of the men jumping up and running to stop him at the church door.

ERYN SMITH: Really?

NANCI SCARPULLA: That was who they were then. That was who they were. This was,
again, the early seventies, mid-seventies. What I, what I love about that, and,
and this is just so apropos to this, is that's now a black church, a primarily
African American church. They sold it years ago.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Even though she moved into East Lake in the late 1970s as an
adult, Eunice Roger's perspective as a black woman growing up in Bessemer,
another nearby community, also brought a valuable, personal history to the
project. Here, she describes her childhood in Bessemer.

EUNICE ROGERS: When I was born, I was born in the midst of segregation, and it
was quite a trying experience. There were times when I would want to go places
that I could not go. For instance, the fair park. At that time, black people
could not go. If you went to the movies you had to sit in the balcony. I
remember watching King Kong when it first came out, but I had to watch it in the
balcony. Also, the Ten Commandments, different movies. It was just a, it was a
segregated lifestyle but it was something you just kind of accepted and went
along with. There was the white and the colored fountains. There were places on
the bus. So, it was a little different, but everybody was in their own world and
you kind of just made yourself happy and you really did not ... I was so young I
didn't get involved in it as much as a young child.

MICHELLE LITTLE: When Mrs. Rogers entered high school, she was offered the
chance to break some of the barriers she experienced as a child. She faced
opposition with determination

EUNICE ROGERS: I went to, I started out going to school at J. S. Abrams in the
traditional black schools. Then when I became a sophomore, I was one of the
first, among the first to integrate the, uh, high school in Bessemer and it was
quite a different experience because people did not know what to expect but I
went in with a determination. I became the first black student to make the
National Honors Society, uh, I won a scholarship to Vanderbilt for my college
education, and I just did a lot of firsts, but it was really kind of, it was a
mixed blessing in that we actually had to be escorted to school, escorted home.
I could not just get up and walk to school, I couldn't just take the bus for
safety reasons.. . . But after I went to a school and, and I, I went to
chemistry class and the person that was assigned to be my lab partner refused to
be my lab partner because of my race, and so I got another one, and ironically
about fifteen, ten years ago I ran into that same person who is now an attorney.
They were passing out their cards. They said, "Didn't you go to Bessemer?" I
said, "Yes, I did." And I and I had to stop myself from saying, "You did not
want to have anything to do--" "But I'm a lawyer now, if you ever need any
service, give me a call." So God, yeah, yeah but the whole time I just kept my
cool. And, and I think that makes a difference.

CLARE DAVIS: While she openly admits the difficulties she faced as one of the
first to integrate her school system, Mrs. Rogers shared with the students how
she coped with frustration and anger through her religion. Perhaps the most
important thing she shared, though, transcends circumstance and drives at the
heart of what makes a community whole: a generous heart.

JAYDE JACKSON: How do you think being the oldest of three and growing up in a
time that you did sculpted you into the woman that you are today and just to
help the way that you're helping the community today?

EUNICE ROGERS: When I was little, we lived with, I lived with my grandmother. My
mother taught school, but her first job was out of the, out of the city. So, she
would leave, she would leave either late Sunday night or early Monday morning on
the Trailways Bus and go to her job and she wouldn't come home until the
evening. But I remember what my grandmother who, she was a widow, but she was
always taught, teaching me to give. I can remember her on Sunday evenings, we
would go around and visit all the older people in the neighborhood, the sick
people, and, and she would take food, she would, she would take her sheets that
we, that I had ironed (laughter) for my bed, but she would do good things and
she was always giving and I think she passed it down to my mom, my sister, my
brother, and all of us and my daddy was a big giver. I mean, he, although he, he
owned a funeral home, but he would, he would, he was always invited to a church
program or something and he never went without taking at least twenty dollars to
put in to the to the offering. So, I came from a family of givers and I think, I
hope I have set a good example for my brother and my sister along the way and I
try to give back and, uh, being that I, I guess what stirred me to come down
here, I wanted to see what was going on and I wanted to share my story because a
lot of time I'm not one to be the big drum major, but I do think it's important
that we give back. None of us would be successful if all of us fell.

[musical interlude]

MICHELLE LITTLE: Mrs. Rogers' statement about the importance of engaging in
community summarizes the point of our project. This was our attempt to engage
with the East Lake community, because Samford was part of that community for 70
years. And just as during our years on the Marion campus, when community member
helped in times of need, the East Lake community fed into the college as well.
Ruhama Baptist Church in East Lake hosted many a Howard College graduation
ceremony, and residents near campus often offered room and board to students. It
is only fitting for us to engage with and learn about East Lake's history
because it helped shape who we are as a university. As we mentioned earlier,
Samford alum's Amber Tolbert's enthusiasm for this project was a large part of
what made the event successful, and her love for her community is a model to
look to.

CLAIRE DAVIS: As, usual, the podcast will take a short hiatus in January before
returning in February. Until then--

BOTH: Make waves!

CLAIRE DAVIS: Our theme was written and produced by Samford student Kerry
Joiner. The background music was also produced by Kerry Joiner. The interviews
with Earl Tew, Nanci Scarpulla, and Eunice Rogers were conducted by Cornerstone
students. This project could not have been done without the work of Amber
Tolbert at East 59 Vintage and Cafe. We also thank Emily Woodhouse, who
worked with Cornerstone schools and transcribed these interviews for us. This
episode was written and produced by Michelle Little and Claire Davis. This is a
Samford Traditions and Oral History Recording Initiative Production. For more
information on our program, you can find our page on the Samford website or
follow us on social media at Facebook and Instagram at Samford_STORI and on
Twitter at SU_STORI.

[typewriter ding]

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Accession	SIHist/STORI/012