Activism undeterred

8-22-04

By Maria C. Johnson, Staff Writer
News & Record

From where he stands now, inside the wavy glass of an old window, he can see the field where he lost.

All's quiet there now. No dancing girls on the roof of the concession stand. No oversize Bat mascot inking caps, hands and shirts. No sweaty contestants putting their foreheads to the knob-end of a baseball bat, planting the other end on the ground and spinning around until someone tells them to run a straight line.

This morning, War Memorial Stadium is empty, peaceful.

David Hoggard is at peace, too. Or so he says, and you have to believe him, judging from how he answers the question of whether it bothers him to look at the fan-shaped battleground.

"Nah," he says quickly and casually, pulling a flat carpenter's pencil from his nest of sparrow-colored hair and returning to his miter saw.

No grudges hiding under the thatch that's just one missed haircut away from curls?

"Nah, no reason for that," he says. "Life's too short for that crap."

A year ago, Hoggard captained the drive for the renovation of the stadium, one of the country's oldest minor-league ballparks in the country. He and his neighbors in the Aycock Historic District wanted to fix the crumbling bowl and keep the Single-A Greensboro Bats running the bases there, on downtown's eastern shoulder.

There was one problem: The team didn't want to. More important, the outfit with the pull to fix the stadium -- Action Greensboro, a clutch of foundations looking to goose Greensboro -- didn't want to. It wanted to build a new ballpark downtown.

Hoggard and company kept clawing. Their last good chance was an October referendum on whether baseball stadiums could be built downtown. Voters said yes. Then they settled one more issue near Hoggard's heart: Could he serve on the Greensboro city council as an at-large representative? Their answer was as decisive as Hoggard's.

Nah.

Hoggard's name has faded from news stories since then, but the hum and pull of his activism grows. It's a gravity grown the old-fashioned way, by ear-bending and ear-lending, hand-pumping and dues-paying.

A couple of times a week, the 48-year-old Hoggard ventures out to community confabs. Some meetings are mandatory. He serves on the Greensboro Parks and Recreation Commission. He's vice president of his neighborhood association. He's active where his three kids -- 14-year-old Jackson, 13-year-old Josie and 10-year-old Jesse -- go to school.

But he also drops in on meetings where he's not required: school board meetings, county commissioner meetings, city council meetings, candidate forums, long-range transportation planning meetings. The fun stuff.

It's not unusual for him to arrive straight from work in cut-offs and a sweat-seasoned T-shirt. Even if he has time for a shower, the shadows of Gorilla Glue, a constant companion in his window-repair business, never quite come off his hands. The better to grip his pen.

Much of what he gleans, he posts on his Web log, a running commentary known as Hogg's Blog. He created the site when he filed for the city council seat; he maintains it to keep his name out in the community.

There, in the blogosphere, he brings his handyman mentality to bear on local issues and life in general: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it is broke, don't create another problem with a jackleg fix.

Case in point: The move to shore up discipline at Aycock Middle School by having students wear uniforms this year. That's rot, says Hoggard, who lives a block from the school. The school had a dress code, he says, and when the old principal enforced it, everything was fine.

Then up popped a new principal, and down slid the pants, says Hoggard, who believes the school system is chickening out by not confronting the slack-pant offenders.

He hopes no one takes this criticism personally. He calls the Aycock principal a "great guy" and generally praises the school board. He understands that people might take umbrage at being flogged by blog, but he thinks that's, well, tough.

"You can get angry with me for being plain-spoken, but I've been dealing with that for years," he says.

If anyone thinks baseball knocked David Hoggard out of the game, they'd better think again. He's just getting warmed up.

"The rest of us are tired," says Hoggard's wife, Jinni, who joined him in the baseball fight. "But David is like the little engine that could. He just keeps on going. He doesn't take things personally. He doesn't get offended if the end result is not exactly what he wants."

What David Hoggard wants, long-term, is to see his neighborhood's renewal plan come true. Upgrade the area around War Memorial Stadium. Make Summit Avenue a tree-lined boulevard. Erase the Murrow Boulevard cloverleaf to make room for homes and businesses. The city has approved and funded a study of Summit Avenue.

In the shorter term, Hoggard wants another crack at a city council seat. It's not chiseled in stone that he'll run when the nonpartisan council seats are up for grabs again in 2005, but let's put it this way: If Hoggard were an old house and he were leaning this much, he'd be condemned.

He knows what happened last time: He was sunk by a rule of physics -- a politician at rest on a municipal board tends to stay there, barring screw-ups. Three at-large seats were up last time. The three incumbents won. Hoggard finished fourth among six candidates. He's banking on a vacancy next year.

He'd probably push the same ideas he did last time: Full disclosure of council members' business interests, term limits and a city-backed program that would help renters buy homes. He'd also call for closer scrutiny of city-suckled programs such as Project Homestead, a nonprofit home builder that crashed after the financial dealings of its founder, the late Rev. Michael King, were questioned.

Hoggard says council members failed to oversee the group.

"I think they were asleep at the wheel," he says. "I think Michael King had such sway with the Underground Railroad (a political network) that if you wanted to get elected and you wanted to get the black vote, you had to keep Rev. King happy. So when he said, 'Jump,' people said, 'How high?' "

To listen to Hoggard describe himself politically is to listen to a work in progress. He left his hometown in LaRue County, Ky., as a Democrat, switched to unaffiliated six years ago, then registered as a Republican four years ago.

"It seemed like a better place to come down," he says. "I'm a small-government guy."

So, he's Republican. But not a Rush Limbaugh Republican. He voted for "W" last time, but he might not this time. He's a fiscal conservative, but taxes that put more cops on the street are OK by him. He's a social liberal who sends his youngest kid to a Spanish immersion school, attends the spectacular N.C. A&T homecoming parade every year and gloats over the success of the all-black drum line at Aycock Middle School. But Hoggard also believes in self-determination and individual responsibility. So, brothers and others, hike up your pants in school. Oh, yes, and Hoggard supports some Democrats.

"People call you flip-flopper or waffler," he says. "You can call me whatever you want to. I just don't prescribe to any party dogma. There's good on the other side. I come down more on the right. But not far. I just wish there was a viable middle party."

He knows the peril of living in the middle, where many Americans camp out, lonely at election time. In a society that confuses extremism with clarity, the Hoggards of the world risk being outflanked by someone more adamant. But if they can get over that hump -- by winning, say, a nonpartisan city council race -- they have a chance of becoming someone who finds common ground, Hoggard says.

"A true politician, I think, is someone who's good at compromise," he says.

He's sitting at his kitchen table after work. His beer is Bud. His smokes are Basic. Suppertime is coming, the house is filling up with children, the noise level is rising, and in this light David Hoggard looks a heck of a lot like Everyman.

His name was Norman Lewis. He was a former Navy pilot, and he owned the music store where David Hoggard worked during college. He also taught Hoggard the power of one, especially when that person is willing to lead others.

"He knew that if you could get a few people together, moving on the same track, and get them loud enough, you could get something done," says Hoggard, who watched as his mentor rallied people to save an old theater and start a downtown merchants' association.

Hoggard already had a taste for local politics. He was elected president of his freshman, sophomore and junior classes in high school. He didn't run for president his senior year because, he says, he didn't want to give the commencement address.

Hoggard's father, a band director and school principal, dabbled in politics, too. He served two terms on the city council in Hodgenville, Ky., before running for mayor and losing.

"He wasn't a good old boy," Hoggard says. "He wasn't part of the network that, like in Greensboro, has always run things."

Young Hoggard figured politics lay in his future. By day, he studied political science and English at Western Kentucky University, taking the lightest class load possible. By night, he fed his wallet playing bass guitar and keyboards at local bars.

After seven years on the vampire plan, Hoggard quit short of a degree to take a job selling musical instruments to shops like Norman's. He was getting married.

The couple moved to Greensboro, the middle of his sales territory. They bought their first home and parked it at Oakwood Forrest, a mobile home park off U.S. 29.

Three years later, in 1987, the Hoggards drove through Aycock, a neighborhood that had suffered a long decline but was on the upswing, thanks to a core of residents who had won historic district designation in 1984.

The Hoggards didn't know this. All they knew was that they loved the bluish-gray bungalow on Cypress Street that was for sale by owner. The couple renovated the home and got to know their neighbors. Nail by nail, wire by wire, wave by wave, conversation by conversation, Aycock became home.

When the family needed more space, they bought a home up the street. It was a wreck. Working on weekends, with three children underfoot, the Hoggards spent nearly a year gutting the house. They shored up floors, ripped off walls, replumbed, rewired and cleaned up years' worth of roach droppings.

"When the exterminator pulled up, he said he could smell them," Jinni Hoggard remembers. "He said, 'I guarantee you got over a million.' "

Others owners might have scurried off, but the Hoggards stuck to their monumental task.

"If you look at it as a total project, you could get overwhelmed, yes," Hoggard says. "But if you say, 'Today, I'm going to do this. One day at a time, sweet Jesus.' It's a series of projects. You get to those intermediate goals, and if you hit enough of those, it gets done over time."

Hoggard has no use for people who flee instead of fix, an outlook that pushed him into his first real piece of community activism.

In 1998, the Guilford County school system was redrawing attendance zones. One plan threatened to leave nearby white neighborhoods out of the Aycock Middle School district. Hoggard and other parents fought back, saying schools should reflect the surrounding neighborhoods. In the end, the school board voted to include the neighborhoods. The experience convinced Hoggard that he knew just as much about local issues as the officials.

Hoggard's friends urged him to run for the school board, but he shrugged them off. He was still traveling Monday through Thursday, pulling in $100,000-plus a year.

That changed two years later, when the road-weary Hoggard quit the job he had held for 16 years. He worked for another music company until that business folded, then he took a part-time job pushing fund-raising campaigns to schools (Ding dong. Would you like to buy gift wrap? Cookie dough? Vidalia onions?).

He also kept his hammer swinging. He and his wife had fixed and flipped five houses in Aycock since they moved in, so no one was surprised when Hoggard's pastime grew into a full-time business. It's called Double Hung, ostensibly for the weighted windows found in old houses. But Hoggard concedes there's a joke in there somewhere.

"I get probably more than my share of calls from housewives," he says, laughing.

The business gave him a steady income and something else the leaders of Action Greensboro would come to regret: time.

The funny thing is, Hoggard doesn't really like baseball.

To sip a cold beer, to watch the parade of people, to gab with a few of them -- that's what he likes most about going to games at War Memorial.

He swears he had no objection to a plan to build a new stadium on the southern edge of downtown, near Lee and South Elm streets.

"It was the right place," Hoggard says. "That area needs development."

But that proposal fell through, and Action Greensboro latched onto the Bellemeade district for the new stadium, stirring opposition from the Fisher Park neighborhood.

That's when Heather Seifert, then the executive director of Preservation Greensboro, called Hoggard to see if Aycock would consider adding the renovation of War Memorial Stadium to its upcoming master plan.

Seifert, who now works for Preservation Oklahoma, ended up on Hoggard's front porch, a deep shelf that recently held lacrosse sticks, beach towels, candles, bug spray, ashtrays, bicycles, an Oriental-style rug, empty cans and bottles and -- somewhere in there -- places to sit.

Hoggard liked Seifert's idea. He marshaled the neighbors and dived into the job of creating and selling the plan.

"He was an eight-day-a-week, 25-hour-a-day person," Seifert says. "We all were, but David above all. This is a 'roll up your sleeves and let's get done what we need to get done' guy. He's not a 'tell me when you're done' or 'let me know when you want me to give the speech' guy. David is a worker, and he has a passion to be involved in the entire process."

Hoggard lobbied local politicians to support the Aycock plan. He thought too many of them acted as though their minds were made up. His long-simmering attraction to politics boiled over.

"The stadium gave me the notoriety to do what I wanted to do anyway," he says. He filed for the at-large council race.

Hoggard pledged that, if elected, he would honor whatever the voters decided about the stadium. He thought they would believe him. He also thought they would like his group's plan for the old stadium.

He was wrong. He accepted the verdicts with aplomb. Around the house, he joked that he was next in the line to succeed at-large council members.

"He was walking around like a little peacock, going, 'I'm the city council at-large candidate pro-tem,' " Jinni Hoggard says.

Hoggard also called Jim Melvin, the Action Greensboro leader who spearheaded the drive for the new stadium. He congratulated Melvin on his victory, then asked for his support in preserving and upgrading War Memorial, which will be used for amateur baseball games next season. Melvin agreed, without making specific promises.

As for the charge that Hoggard has leveled on his blog -- that he has seen very few minority construction workers at the new stadium, despite the fact that Action Greensboro used minority hiring as a selling point -- Melvin says:

"Thirteen percent of total construction contracts were awarded to minority contractors. Who's on the ground doing the work is who wants to."

"That's not the way I understood it," says Hoggard, adding that he wasn't alone in believing black youths would get masonry apprenticeships.

Hoggard calls his continued needling on the stadium "just holding some feet to the fire." As he says this, he wears a gray T-shirt stamped with Action Greensboro's slogan, "Greensboro Connects." He got it at an Action Greensboro launch party.

"It was one of the freebies, along with the beer and wine, so I took it," Hoggard says.

His ability to smack and embrace with the same hand has served him well, so far. For example, Hoggard spoke out against a county-approved deal that cinched the new stadium. Democratic county commissioner Mike Barber voted for the deal because the county netted a new human services building, but he later helped Hoggard and company get county money for their neighborhood plan. Recently, he asked Hoggard to help him build a blog.

"He does an excellent job of staying focused on the issue and not allowing a political issue and or a community issue become personal," Barber says. "That's the way compromise occurs, and that's the way a community is supposed to work."

But Hoggard's gear-shifting irks some.

"It's like when he talks to people, he basically agrees with whatever they're saying," says Chuck Newell, a longtime Aycock resident and former president of the neighborhood association. "Like if I was complaining to him about the (Aycock Middle) school over here, which is off again and on again as far as complying with (historical guidelines), he would agree with me on that, maybe, and say he was going to do something about it, but there might be more people who would do it differently than me, so he might side with them."

Still, Newell says, he backs Hoggard when he goes to bat for the underdog neighborhood.

"It's constantly a battle," Newell says. "There's not a lot of time to be divided on issues. You have to support whoever's leading your neighborhood at the time."

David Hoggard is not Everyman.

Everyman does not keep a medieval catapult, capable of heaving melons 50 yards, in his back yard (his older son's idea, inspired by a computer game).

He does not baby-sit a pig named Clover until a friend can find her a new home.

He does not have Kentucky Derby parties where 150 people gather to drink mint juleps that spray from a rented champagne fountain.

He does not drive a hand-painted, tomato-soup red 1977 International Scout without wearing a lap belt ("It doesn't do any good," Hoggard says. "It's this I'm worried about," he says, whipping his head over the steering wheel as he drives.)

Everyman does not own a Rottweiler and a poofy Pekingese.

No, David Hoggard is not a typical guy, and he's not a typical politico, either.

"I'm not a Chamber kind of guy. I'm not a Jaycee. It's nothing negative, it's just not me," Hoggard says. "I like to question authority, not go along with it."

That's why he likes Mary Rakestraw, the county commissioner who was ousted in the July 20 primary.

"She's an independent thinker," Hoggard says. "And that's why she gets in trouble with the Republican party: She's not Republican enough."

Hoggard spent most of primary day working in the shade of a giant oak at First Lutheran Church. As voters trickled into the polling place, he handed them a flier for Rakestraw.

As they walked out, he handed them a flier for Pricey Harrison, a Democrat who will be on the November ballot for a state House seat.

"I told you I was a centrist," Hoggard said.

At dusk, he went to the old county courthouse to watch the election returns. Precinct by precinct, Rakestraw fell behind her challenger, an outcome that Hoggard blamed on her angering Republican sheriff BJ Barnes and his political pals.

Two hours into the returns, Rakestraw was cooked, but Hoggard stayed, intrigued by several races, including the one for a school board seat in District 9.

When the final precinct reported, Amos Quick had beaten challenger Loretta Jennings by one vote: 1,166 to 1,165.

"My word! Isn't that wild!" Hoggard exclaimed. "I told you the difference one person can make."

Then it dawned on him that the race wasn't final. Quick and Jennings, the top vote-getters, would face off in the fall.

"But still," Hoggard said, glowing at the possibility. What if it had been a November race? What if one person, some little guy, had made all the difference?

For the second time in less than a year, Hoggard left the county courthouse defeated. This time he was grinning.

To visit David Hoggard's Hogg Blog, go to: http://radio.weblogs.com/0128341/

Contact Maria Johnson at 373-7009 or mjohnson@news-record.com