I grew up at The Birmingham Country Club in The Tiny Kingdom aka Mt. Brook, Alabama

I woke from dreams this May 5, 2023 morning, thinking maybe The Powers That Be had nudged me to start a new blog set in and about Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born and grew up.

Yesterday, I was invited by a fellow close to my age to join him at The Birmingham Country Club, where he was headed to hit practice balls on the driving range. 

I grew up at the Birmingham Country Club, and played thousands of rounds of golf on its East Course, then called "the ladies's course", and on its West Course", then called "the men's course", because it was far more challenging than the East Course. Women were allowed to play one week day on the West Course. The Summer of my 16th year, I won the club's junior boys golf tournament on the East Course, where that tournament was played. Later, the annual junior tournament was played on the West Course. 

When i started practicing law in Birmingham, in 1973, I seldom played golf and didn't use the country club much. After some mental and emotional going back and forth, I mailed a resignation letter to the club's board of directors, stating why I was resigning and offering my membership slot to someone who wanted to be a member. It was not easy to become a member. I was one, because my father and his father were members.

The Birmingham Country Club was a white only club, and it looked white only on the driving range yesterday. The club is in Mountain Brook, which for many decades was an all-white upscale Birmingham suburb that eventually got nicknamed, "The Tiny Kingdom". 

The only blacks in Mountain Brook were live-in servants and day servants, who came "over the mountain" from Birmingham on city transit buses to work during the day time, and then rode back over the mountain on city busses. The country club had a caddy house below the golf course, where a number of black caddies hung out, hoping to get work that day for very little pay. There were two black workers in the part of the golf shop where the members stored their golf clubs. 

My family had a black live-in maid/cook/nanny named Charlotte Washington, who came to our home looking for work on the day I was born at Hillman Hospital in Birmingham. Her parents had been south Alabama plantation slaves. I called her "Cha", pronounced "Sha", which everybody called her. She loved and raised me as her own child.

Cha is the second person memorialized in a little book that fell out of me in August 2004, when I was spending the summer in Helen, Georgia, in the home of good friends. I eventually put A FEW REMARKABLE ALABAMA PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN onto afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com, where it can be read for free. https://afewremarkablealabamapeople.blogspot.com/

The first person memorialized in the book is the Birmingham federal judge for whom I clerked after graduating from the University of Alabama School of law, who lost both of his legs when he was 15, as he hopped off a freight train he was riding and slipped and fell under the box car. The judge created the national debtors court and ran the Democratic party in Alabama from behind the scenes.

The third person is my father's older brother, Leo, the greatest fisherman, in the world, whom I sometimes wished In my youth was my father, and the greatest pediatrician, who called a spade a spade.

The fourth person is my father's grandfather Leopold, an East European Jew, who immigrated to America in the 1880s, and ended up in Troy, Alabama. Leopold married the daughter of a Southern Baptist Confederate officer, and was trusted by the people of Troy to settle their disputes, instead of using lawyers. On Leopold's gravestone is "An honest man is God's noblest creation." 

The fifth person my mother's Episcopal minister, who stood down his vestrymen after they voted to not let blacks worship in the Mountain Brook church he had started from scratch and built up.

The sixth person is my father's crusty, shrewd lawyer, who never went to law school, but was smarter than any lawyer I ever knew, and who told me I would never be happy until I found God.  

My first child was born at Hillman hospital, and seven weeks later he died of sudden infant death syndrome, which was called "crib death" back then. His death so disturbed and disrupted me, that no matter how hard I tried, I was not able to fit, squeeze or force myself into any of the square and round holes my parents and their parents and I had envisioned were mine to fill.

After many attempts to fit myself into those holes, I went off and had maybe a dozen different lives, which I could not have anticipated, and which made me into the family prodigal, the black sheep, the keeper of the family skeletons, and a heretic. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com