Tape opens with Lu Ann Jones and C. W. (Chip) Sullivan introducing themselves. Interview took place in Brewster B-202, Department of History, ECU. Sullivan is a professor in the English Department and a resident of Lakewood Pines neighborhood for 25 years.

Set of issues that inspired neighborhood oral history project.

"Chip" Sullivan:

What's happened in the neighborhood is that on the north end of our neighborhood, sort of at the corner of Evans Street and Arlington Boulevard, just across the Green Mill Run as you head toward Rose High, there are people who want to build a 500-bedroom apartment complex, which we feel would negatively impact the neighborhood, which would ruin what is supposed to be a protected wetlands, which would be totally out of place with the rest of its surroundings. So we have organized, we have made ourselves into a formal neighborhood organization. We have gone to the city to protest this particular plan. But in the process we've identified a number of other concerns, not the least of which is the situation involving the Green Mill Run as an entire tributary to the Tar River. Along the way we decided, McCabe Coolidge, who is the vice president of our neighborhood association, decided that maybe it would be a good thing to enlist some student help, if we could get some student help on any or all aspects of this situation. Whether it would be some student who was interested in urban planning or urban law or land use, or any of those kinds of things. Or, as it turns out, oral history.

I understand that you're interested in the DuPont history. Lakewood Pines neighborhood was developed as the first subdivision outside of Greenville—it was outside the city limits when it was first built in the early 1950s—and was built expressively for DuPont executives moving down here who choose to live in Greenville rather than live in Kinston. Lu Ann found out about this whole project and decided that maybe some of you would be interested in doing a history of the neighborhood as a neighborhood, because, if you haven't been over there, what you'll realize once you go in there quite quickly it is topographically different and different in other characters as well from any other neighborhood in Greenville. Everybody who goes through there says, "Oh, this looks more like Chapel Hill." It looks more like a Piedmont area rather than a eastern North Carolina flatlands area.

Lu Ann Jones:

Why don't you describe [it]? Last week one of the things that I did was I went into the Lakewood Pines neighborhood and just rode around in there, looking at the neighborhood. Maybe you could just kind of take us there today.

"Chip" Sullivan:

(Chuckle) Okay.

Lu Ann Jones:

If we left campus, how would be get there and what would we see from your vantage point when we arrived?

"Chip" Sullivan:

The easiest way to get there is to go west on Tenth Street, hang a left on Evans Street going south. You go across Arlington Boulevard and then on your right, you'll see an entrance with a brick pillar that says Lakewood Pines. If you go a little farther on Evans Street you'll see another entrance with brick pillars that say Lakewood Pines. If you go a little farther on Evans you'll see one more entrance but it's really to a place called Sherwood Acres, I think. It's sort of off the end of Lakewood Pines. You drive into Lakewood Pines and what you'll immediately realize is that there are a lot of old growth trees. When they built the houses, they didn't flatten the land, they didn't take down all the trees. They, in fact, put the houses in amongst the trees, some of them quite closely. Our house, for example, had an old oak tree that was at least this big around in front of the dining room window, not quite touching the edge of the roof, and another one on the other side of the house outside the living room window, not quite touching the roof. Those were taken down after [Hurricane] Floyd for, I think, obvious reasons. But that's another story.

The other thing you'll realize is that these houses were not built according to a one-out-of-every-four option usual suburban tract plan. Every house is different. Some of them are three-bedroom ranches, some of them are expanded ranches, there's an expanded Cape Cod, there are a couple of classical two stories, there are split-levels. I mean, really, it's quite an eclectic sort of neighborhood. Several of the houses have been extensively renovated by subsequent owners.

What you'd discover what you came in to either of those two access roads to Lakewood Pines is that you'll find yourself then coming onto an elongated oval. So you can go around in a circle—well, not a circle, but you can go around inside Lakewood Pines as if it were a small racetrack, which, of course, the kids on bicycles and skateboards really liked. The other thing that you'll discover is that you can't go through Lakewood Pines to get any place else. So we have no through traffic at all. In fact, most Greenvillians probably don't know that Lakewood Pines is back there. What's behind us is the railroad track. My wife and I live on the back side. There's the road, our yard, the house, then we own all the property all the way back to the railroad right of way. Which means we have a nice little swamp, too, which is non-productive unless you like mosquitoes.

Lakewood Pines is currently—most of the DuPont people have left. Some of them have gone to places like Brook Valley as they move up the scale of Greenville living. Others have just gone elsewhere, and some, of course, have passed away. The people who've moved in are by and large professionals. A couple of doctors, a couple of university people, the minister of the large church that's out on Firetower Road, the big new one out there on Firetower Road. I can't remember the denomination.

Lu Ann Jones:

Covenant Methodist?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Could be. The house that McCabe is in, his wife is a minister, also. I'm trying to think of what other people do. But a lot of them are what you would call professional. And then there are some of the smaller houses have been occupied by people who are probably not what we university elitist types would think of as

professional folks but as much more ordinary, maybe even blue collar instead of white collar workers.

The Green Mill Run runs across the north end of the neighborhood, and it's on the other side of the Green Mill Run that this apartment building would be built. In addition, there are smaller tributaries. One that runs behind our house that makes the swamp, and another one that comes down from behind the University Plaza where Barnes and Noble is and is quite an active stream when it rains. Is that the sort of description of the neighborhood that you were looking for?

Lu Ann Jones:

Yeah.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Oh, and lots of azaleas. It used to be that people would just drive through in the spring around Easter to look at the azaleas because there are just banks and banks of them in our neighborhood.

Lu Ann Jones:

I was thinking last week of just talking to people of different generations there about the landscaping, because it is a. very striking neighborhood. Also tall pines that filter light in kind of distinctive ways. So there's lots just about the landscape itself

One of the things I was interested in, I think for this project we're really doing an oral history of a community and the individuals who make up that community and how it's changed over time. So one of the things I'm interested in is just where you grew up and what you had been doing before you arrived in Greenville some 25 years ago and how the place you had grown up differed from the landscape that you found here? So some basic biographical information would be great.

"Chip" Sullivan:

I grew up in a tiny little town in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. I went to a centralized school, all twelve grades in one building and my graduating class was 24 people. I grew up at the foot of a ski slope and on the edge of the Hudson River and all the rest of that sort of stuff Did my undergraduate and MA work in Albany, New York, and taught at the state university there for three years and then spent six years in Oregon working on a PhD and doing other stuff and then came here.

So moving into Lakewood Pines was in part a kind of defense move so that I wouldn't have to see that I was living in flat lands, because I had always lived in mountains or within sight of mountains. And living in Lakewood Pines, you're kind of deluded into thinking that you're still living in pretty mountainous, pretty rural country, even though it's just three miles from right here. So I think that one of the big reasons that we moved into that neighborhood—my wife had grown up in the Catskill Mountains of New York State—so I think that one of the reasons we moved into that neighborhood was that it was kind of like home in some ways that made us feel comfortable there that perhaps we wouldn't have felt so comfortable in other neighborhoods in Greenville. We had been sort of university and graduate student hermit crabs until then. We'd never owned a house, and we bought this one figuring it was big enough for the kids to grow up in and small enough for us to live in after the kids were gone. Have since changed our

minds only in that it probably wasn't quite as big as the kids would have liked, but they survived and we're very happy with the size of the house right now.

Lu Ann Jones:

How did you find that house? That was the only house you've lived in since you moved to Greenville?

"Chip" Sullivan:

No, we rented in Greenville for the first eight months. What happened was my younger son was invited to a birthday party in that neighborhood. My wife drove him to the birthday party and said, "Boy, this would be a really nice neighborhood to live in but we probably can't afford it." Then the next spring the house that we're in came up for sale and we dickered and dickered with the people who were selling it, who were also university people, and finally got to a price that was lower than they wanted and higher than we wanted but it was in the middle. So we bought the place. It was just good timing. Houses then were not turning over very fast in that neighborhood. I mean, they just weren't coming available. Of course now it runs somewhat in waves. You'll get a few, they'll be bought up and then you won't see any for a while. Generally speaking, houses go pretty quickly in that neighborhood.

Lu Ann Jones:

What were you looking for? I mean, you said it reminded you of home? Did the fact that you had, I assume, young children? How old were your children at that time? What were you looking for in addition to just visual appeal or whatever-in a neighborhood?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Well, we were looking for a neighborhood, and we had looked at houses down here in the university area at that time. At that time there really wasn't anything down here--I mean, where would the kids go when they went outside? Over there, it was a nice, controlled spot. You had, as I said, that "raceway" around and the woods to play in and the railroad tracks to play on. There's a railroad trestle that goes across the Green Mill Run and things like that. I could make up rules like, you are never to go out on Evans Street and you shouldn't go down on the railroad trestle, which of course gave them a place they weren't supposed to go that they could go and play and feel adventurous. It also struck us because we already knew a couple of people in that neighborhood, it struck us that it was very much a neighborhood that was both friend and accepting but also not oppressive in the sense that everybody wanted to be in your face all the time and everybody doing everything together all the time. It was the sort of place where you could exist but you would know pretty much everybody in the neighborhood. Even with the population shifts in there, it has stayed that way. It has stayed a very comfortable neighborhood. And again, the terrain and the flora and the fauna and all of that reminded us of places we'd grown up or near where we'd grown up.

Lu Ann Jones:

I was interested in what the surrounding area of Greenville looked like at that time. I think it's hard for us to realize how 25 years can make a big difference. Maybe I should just ask what it did look like? My sense is that Lakewood Pines is something of an oasis even till this day. What did the area look like around it?

"Chip" Sullivan:

It was an oasis then. Inside Greenville Boulevard was built up pretty much the way it is right now in terms of housing areas. In terms of businesses, it's grown tremendously. Evans Street was two lanes. Arlington Boulevard stopped at Evans Street. It did go across the tracks. There was no new Rose High over there. None of that was built up yet. When you went beyond, if you kept on going out Evans Street and went beyond Lynndale, it was all tobacco fields. All of those apartment buildings that are out on Evans Street Extension as you head toward—what's out there?

Lu Ann Jones:

Toward Firetower?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Yeah, toward Firetower Road, toward Ayden-Grifton. All that was tobacco fields. There were no apartment complexes out there whatsoever. There were no businesses, really, out there, except an occasional gas station and of course the Plant and See [nursery] and whatever the other one is beside Plant and See. But I always get sent to Plant and See.

Greenville was about 25,000 or 30,000 people then. There was no Carolina East Mall then. And what's now Colonial Mall was a strip mall; it wasn't enclosed at all. And the only Krispy Kreme was the one out at Colonial Mall. You could stand outside it and watch the doughnuts go down the roller and into the goop, if you wanted to. Greenville Boulevard was the size it is now--it was four lanes then--but less sparsely populated with businesses. Of course, the whole University Plaza with Barnes and Noble wasn't there at all. That was a DuPont battery plant.

Lu Ann Jones:

Or was it Union Carbide?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Sorry, Union Carbide.

Lu Ann Jones:

I'm very interested in that plant being located there. Can you just describe what that looked like? I think it's hard for us to envision heavy industry there.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Well, it didn't look like heavy industry. It really looked like any one-story high school or junior high school would look like, except that there were trucks in the parking lot instead of cars. And there was a lot of landscaping; they had lots of grass around it, a lot of trees. And if you went on the other side of it, between the Union Carbide and the railroad track, there were also a lot of undeveloped fields and things like that. The kids used to go up there and play and the watchman used to chase them off. There was a real environmental problem because they were washing their trucks out and just letting the stuff seep into the ground. So they had to do a lot of environmental clean up before the mall could be built. We all hope they did it. We don't know.

Lu Ann Jones:

When did that plant close?

"Chip" Sullivan:

I don't remember. Nor do I remember exactly when the two lane became a five lane out Evans Street. But a while ago.

Lu Ann Jones:

That's something we can track down.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Yeah, you can get the dates on all of that.

Lu Ann Jones:

When you moved to Lakewood Pines did it still have the identity as a place that had been created by DuPont or the DuPont workers? Because that's about twenty years into its history, kind of how would it have identified itself at that point?

"Chip" Sullivan:

I think as a neighborhood in transition. Monty Hedges, who taught in the psychology department; Ernie Larkin, who is a pediatrician (I can't remember his exact title.); Dick Lang, who became dean of the Art School moved in a year or two after we did. I'm just trying to think. But, on the other side of us and across from us and diagonally across from us were still DuPont people or in one case the widow of a DuPont person. And down where other people have since moved in were DuPont people. So it still had a solid DuPont representation, but it was clearly in transition. It was clearly moving away from DuPont into something else. And it was what it is now, to some extent, that is a neighborhood of professionals.

Lu Ann Jones:

Were there a lot of kids there when you all moved in? Or kind of the age mix of the neighborhood would be interesting.

"Chip" Sullivan:

It came in cycles. When my two sons were there, there were one, two, three or four other boys in the neighborhood and a couple of girls. Then there was a period when there weren't a lot of kids. Then there was a period when there were again. Now we're in a very few children stage of things. I think that if there are young homeowners in the neighborhood, they are by and large what I would call, because I don't know them very well, more blue-collar people. Although the one curious exception is Hutton Cobb, who grew up in the neighborhood, went away to school, got married, came back and bought his mother's house and is now living in it. And she's moved out of the neighborhood. His mother and father have divorced. His father has remarried and moved back into the neighborhood, buying a different house than he lived in, of course, because Hutton has that one.

Lu Ann Jones:

You know Bill Cobb teaches in the department. So I think we're going probably do a two-generation interview with Bill Cobb and Hutton Cobb and get that generational perspective on the neighborhood, so that will be very interesting.

I thought that your characterization of the neighborhood as a place that could be friendly but not oppressively friendly was interesting. Have there been certain rituals or gatherings that the neighborhood does as a neighborhood, or how does the neighborhood create itself as a neighborhood?

"Chip" Sullivan:

I think probably our most consistent one has been a pre-Christmas party which is an evening potluck with heavy hors d'oeuvres and desserts and beer and wine and that sort of thing. It tends to be seven to eleven. It used to be held in the house next to us but those people sold and the people who are in there didn't pick up the tradition, but it

was picked up by somebody else in the neighborhood. And it's very nice because the kids come, who are no longer kids, they're in college or they've graduated from college. But anybody who's home [comes]. Or the high school students who are in there now will come to that party and there's kind of a nice mix. We all get to see each other. And then all these kids get to reassociate. My own sons, who are now in their thirties, if they're home will come to that and will be seeing people, both adults and people their own age, that they know. That's the only consistent one. There have been only a couple of summer parties in the 25 years I've been there and there hasn't been one in a long time.

Lu Ann Jones:

One of the sources we're going to use in addition to oral history is going back to the city directories and looking at who was there. I actually went back to the city directory in the early '80s when you, I guess, had just moved into the neighborhood. You wife's name is Ann, is. that correct?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Yes.

Lu Ann Jones:

And she was a librarian. Am I correct about that?

"Chip" Sullivan:

She was a public school librarian until '94 and now she works for Shepherd Memorial.

Lu Ann Jones:

When you all moved here, did she start working in the public schools?

"Chip" Sullivan:

The first year she substituted down at D. H. Conley High School. Then the next year she got a librarian's job, which was what she wanted, out at Stokes, and worked at Stokes for several years until the principal at Sadie Salter stole her away. That was when the city and county systems were separate. Then when they merged she stayed at Sadie Salter until '94 and left because she needed to at that point. Fortunately, the job at the public library opened up and she's been working out of the children's library there ever since.

Lu Ann Jones:

Do you think that men and women experienced that neighborhood differently, say, in the '80s? Any sense of how the perspectives might have differed?

"Chip" Sullivan:

I remember speaking to a women's book club that was largely neighborhood women, and I think amongst the DuPont people certainly the men got in cars and went down to Kinston and the women stayed home. Maybe they're the end of an era as people who did that sort of thing. I think more of the people who've moved in have been two-career families, or women who stayed at home maybe when their kids were very small and then went to work. One of our neighbors did that. So I think if you talk to the DuPont people you'd find a real difference between the way men and women experienced the neighborhood. If you talk to people who are there now, I think there would be somewhat less of a difference. I think given the way that two-income families have changed both male and female roles you'd find quite a difference.

I know that a woman who was staying home with her daughter called us to talk about our son and her daughter playing house. What happened was, they were playing

house. They had the breakfast and then Angela left for work and my son stayed there at the house. The reason that was happening was because my wife was working out at Stokes and that meant she had to get early and leave early. So she left the house first, and I made sure the kids got breakfast and got their lunches and all this stuff and got them on the bus and then I came down here. I had my class schedule arranged so I could then be home when they came home on the bus. Then their mother came home. So even though they knew I worked down here, they'd been to my office and they'd gone to classes when they had holidays off from school and had colds and couldn't go to school, even though they knew empirically that I worked down here, what they saw was, Mom leaves, we leave, Dad's there. Dad's there, we come home, Mom comes home. So, in a sense, I suppose I experienced Lakewood Pines differently from perhaps the traditional female roles because I was doing more of the home care stuff because my schedule allowed it.

Lu Ann Jones:

Even neighborhoods that have a lot of cohesion can also points of disagreement. What's your sense of what issues might have divided people over the years in Lakewood Pines?

"Chip" Sullivan:

I don't really think there's been much of anything, to tell you the truth. The only time that there was a certain amount of acrimony was that land behind our house and all the houses on that street was originally owned by David Evans. And it was a triangle, getting wider out toward Barnes and Noble and getting very narrower down toward my end of things. For a long time all of us wanted to buy it from Evans and he didn't want to sell it. Then something in his life changed —I have no idea what it was—and he came in and demanded that we buy it right away or he was going to turn it into something ugly and disgusting. There was a sort of working out of how much each parcel would cost; but the fact is that the people who got the southern end where the triangle was largest got usable land and I paid $1500 for a piece of swamp. I mean, that's all it is; it's all it's ever going to be good for. But, it does mean that nobody can do anything back behind me. Not that they could have in that little bit anyway. But the whole buying of it was a very good thing for the neighborhood, but the difference between the people who paid, say, $2500, for some usable land and those of us who paid $1500 for stuff we couldn't use was it caused a certain amount of acrimony. And I think it should have. I think, you know, they added to the value of their property much more substantially than I added to the value of mine.

Lu Ann Jones:

I know when I moved into my neighborhood on East Sixth Street that there was a subtle process of socialization about this is who we are as a neighborhood and our standards of doing things. They're pretty laid-back. I was just wondering, if I moved into Lakewood Pines today would there be some kind of socialization of—this is how we keep our yards, or these are the kinds of things we put in our yards? Or is it pretty live and let live?

"Chip" Sullivan:

It's pretty live and let live. It really is. I'm sometimes tempted to say, too much, but that's just me. Our garbage is picked up on Monday morning, for example, so I don't put mine out until Sunday night. There are people that pile stuff out several days beforehand and I think that that's a little, that that's probably less attractive.

Lu Ann Jones:

But otherwise it's a pretty .. .

"Chip" Sullivan:

Otherwise, it's a pretty homogeneous place.

Lu Ann Jones:

How long has the neighborhood association been an entity?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Actually, it's been an entity for a long time but it's only been on a very limited sort of basis. It was organized to take care of communal landscaping things, like taking care of the upkeep of the brick pillars and keeping lights in the pillars and putting flowers out there at specific times of the year and sort of thing. Otherwise, it didn't really exist, although there was from the origin of the neighborhood, there was a neighborhood covenant. Among other things it was designed to enforce certain amount conformity and it was specifically designed for racial conformity, sadly.

Lu Ann Jones:

That original covenant?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Yeah. I've never seen a copy of it. I just understand that it was a white neighborhood and was supposed to stay a white neighborhood.

Lu Ann Jones:

I was thinking about trying to get that from the register of deeds office, just as a document. And I would imagine that there were many neighborhoods founded in Greenville in the '50s when that was still legal to do that. So that's very interesting.

Maybe you could briefly tell us what you teach. And I should tell you [turning to students] that Professor Sullivan was just named—what is the award you just got?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Oh, it's I'm going to have to say Harriot College or the dean will be upset. It's the Harriot College Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.

Lu Ann Jones:

Tell us a little bit about the work you do and specialties you've developed over the years.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Well, it's curious being on the other side of the microphone because I started as a folklorist. So I've been the one who's gone out and done the interviewing and the collecting and the photographing, mostly traditional tobacco farming, which has been an on-going passion of mine, although I probably out to start thinking about doing something with the 400-and-some-odd photographs I've got. We'll see. In addition to teaching the folklore class, I also teach Northern European Mythology, which is basically Celtic and Scandinavian mythology, which will be offered in the spring should any of you be interested in that sort of thing. And then what graduate courses or undergraduate courses that I feel like teaching that come up on a regular or irregular basis. Right now I'm teaching English 2100, which is Major British Authors, and it's a course for non-English majors. I really enjoy bringing the word to the ignorant. (Smile) We have fun with the class. I have fun with it and I think they have fun with it, too. So I like teaching that. I sometimes teach the Modern Fantasy class and various seminars. I've taught

Modern Arthurian Literature in Film. I've taught a whole seminar on Shakespeare's "Macbeth." I do Folklore and Literature seminars, Medieval Literature seminars, things like that. Most of my university training was in Medieval literature, Old and Middle English.

Lu Ann Jones:

[Turning to students] I wonder if students have questions that you would like to ask that were prompted by questions I asked or maybe I didn't ask a good follow-up? Any questions you all might have? [No response]

"Chip" Sullivan:

What I should have done was count the houses, but do you remember how many houses are in that neighborhood?

Lu Ann Jones:

I don't. And that's one of the things, how big is it?

"Chip" Sullivan:

It's only forty or fifty houses at the most, I think. I'd have to go counting, but basically ifs quite a small neighborhood. Comparatively speaking, it's quite a small neighborhood, and that's one of the things we all like about it, I think.

Lu Ann Jones:

One of the questions is people to interview. And again —I actually have talked with Mr. [Robert] Van Veld and I hate to tell you all, folks, but he's really so valuable to my research on DuPont I'm going to grab him for myself [CWS and LAJ laugh.] I'm going to talk to him in a couple of weeks. But in doing a conversation with him it became clear that those days of being identified with DuPont were really long gone. In talking about doing an oral history of the neighborhood, in some ways that really releases us to really talk about the history of the neighborhood. I also talked with Dottie Pierce briefly and you gave me the name of George Hamilton. I haven't gotten up with him yet. We have Bill Cobb and Hutton Cobb and I think will be great sources for us. But just sort of thinking expansively about the neighborhood, are there others you might direct us to?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Well, Monnie Hedges, of course, who taught in the psychology department lived in the neighborhood. I think they moved into that neighborhood fairly early. He brought up two children there. I know that they were ten years older than our kids and had lived in Lakewood Pines most of the time. He and his wife would be a really good source. Fannie Crawley has been there forever, and she's a good friend of Dottie Pierce's. Her name is spelled just like it sounds. So you could talk to her.

Lu Ann Jones:

Is it F-r-a-n?

"Chip" Sullivan:

F-a-n-n-i-e. Crawley. C-r-a-w-l-e-y. I'm blanking on—if you go into the first pair of gates heading south on Evans, where the road splits, there's a big white house, and his name is George. He's a jeweler. He owns a jewelry store. His last name is just not coming into my head. Right beside him is Bill Morrison, again has been here longer than I have, is I believe a retired New York City policeman. I could be wrong about there. I've known Bill forever, but we've never [had] a "what did you do before you came to Lakewood Pines?" kind of conversation.

Lu Ann Jones:

Is George Lauteres? Lauteres Jewelers?

"Chip" Sullivan:

I don't know. I just don't know. But Bob and George and Dottie might be able to tell you where some of the people have moved to, out of the neighborhood but still in Greenville or in the larger Greenville area. I'm just trying to think of who else has been here a good while because most of the people I know have moved here after us. The people who lived beside Hedges, whose names are not coming into my head right now. He's also a psychologist. Nash Love. Do you know Nash? Nash Love, L-o-v-e, and his wife Marilyn, who has worked or taught in the city school systems, I believe, have been there longer than we have. So they're people who could tell you something about the history the neighborhood. But that pretty much does it for me.

Lu Ann Jones:

I think, again, Bill Cobb will be a good resource for us.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Sure, because they were living there when we moved in. They were in that house when we moved in.

Lu Ann Jones:

So he has an interesting relationship with the neighborhood.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Yeah.

Lu Ann Jones:

In sum, if I just asked you what is a "good neighborhood" in a generic sense, what would you say? And how does Lakewood Pines fit into that?

"Chip" Sullivan:

Well, I think I'd define it by Lakewood Pines. I mean, I like a neighborhood where most of the people are more or less the same level of education and interests and all of that and, perhaps, income although that's less important. Because then there are people to talk to and get together with if you want to. You know, McCabe and Karen [Coolidge] have only been in there a year or so and this conflict has gotten us in close proximity, and we've discovered we enjoy each other's company a lot and wind up at dinner at each other's house once every couple or three weeks or so, depending on who's in town and who's out of town. But beyond that, the kind of neighborhood that is compact enough that people sort of know what's going on but also are not keeping track of you all the time. And I certainly wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood where we had to have Friday afternoon parties every week and that sort of regulated sense of community.

Lu Ann Jones:

So it's a more organic sense of community experience and interactions? Are there things I haven't asked about that you think are important that one, I should have asked, or two, that we should be thinking about in terms of when we begin this project.

"Chip" Sullivan:

No. I'll be interested to see what your study turns up in the occupations of the people who are in there right now, because I don't know as many of the people as I did because of turnover and in spite of getting older, I've gotten busier instead of less

busy. I can't figure that out. I'm supposed to be getting less busy now. But what should you have asked besides the number of houses? I can't really think of anything.

It wasn't just the apartment building that sort of galvanized us. It was the fact that if that apartment was built there, there'll be more flooding in the neighborhood. The north end of the neighborhood, the low end of the neighborhood, has been having problems. Floyd was a real benchmark. There were one, two, three, four—at least five houses that had some damage by flooding. And it was mostly during Floyd—when Greenville flooded after Floyd, we were fine because the water was gone. It was gone elsewhere. But it was right during Floyd when we were getting everything coming down the Green Mill Run and everything coming these little tributaries and it was all coming together right there behind our neighborhood. So it really fills up there fast and it can't get out. As you may know, Evans Street has been flooded twice this fall already. Once during Isabel and once about three of four weeks before that when we had all that rain a week or so. So the flooding is really the important thing for us. I mean, the apartment building is also, and the ecosystem.

Lu Ann Jones:

I think Green Mill Run is pretty invisible to most of us, unless you happen to live close by.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Right. One of the things we've gotten the city to agree to is to put up signs on all the bridges through town under which the Green Mill Run passes, so people who don't know now will know where the Green Mill Run is. I lived in Eugene, Oregon, for six years and there's a stream called the Mill Race that goes by the university and goes through the center of town. And you can go down to the university and rent canoes and paddle up the Mill Race and go under bridges and half-way through the city of Eugene that way. It would be nice if the Green Mill Run got at least cleaned up. I know the Greenway effort, the Green Mill Run is designated as part of the Greenway effort, so maybe it'll happen.

Lu Ann Jones:

I should have asked, if you don't mind. How old are you?

"Chip" Sullivan:

(Laughter) Excuse me!

Lu Ann Jones:

I need to place you in time as well as place. When were you born?

"Chip" Sullivan:

I turned 59 this last summer.

Lu Ann Jones:

Well, happy birthday. (Laughter)

"Chip" Sullivan:

You're supposed to say, "You don't look it." Come on; hold up your part of this.

Lu Ann Jones:

You don't look it. I'm very sincere. Thank you very much. I should have asked at the very beginning if it was okay if I tape record the interview.

"Chip" Sullivan:

As a folklorist, I have to grant equal rights to other historians.

Lu Ann Jones:

And now I'm going to ask you to sign our release form because we're going to put these in the archives. You can either fill the whole thing out or I can fill out the donor form.

"Chip" Sullivan:

We do this for our folklore students, too.

Lu Ann Jones:

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. This has been terrific for you to come and help us like this.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Still no questions? Everybody's cool?

Lu Ann Jones:

I've got a group of shy students.

"Chip" Sullivan:

They're going to tear me up when I leave. That's what you're trying to tell me.

Lu Ann Jones:

They're going to tear me up. This is their opportunity to critique me, not you. I was the one on the hot seat there. Thank you so much for coming.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Sure, glad to do it. And if I can help, if you guys decide to come out to Lakewood Pines, if we can do anything, just let me know. If there's anybody you need to be put in touch with or get lost out there: If you want to go down and play on the railroad trestle, I'll show you how to get down there.

Lu Ann Jones:

(Laughter) Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

"Chip" Sullivan:

Keep me posted.

Lu Ann Jones:

I will.

[End of Interview]