By Doug Martinson

Editor’s note: Huntsville columnist Doug Martinson and I recently sat down for lunch in Birmingham. Our conversation reminded me how much Birmingham and Huntsville have to learn about each other. Doug later wrote this column about our meeting, the origins of our two columns, and his family’s long tradition of civic involvement:

I recently had a meeting in Auburn for the Alabama State Bar and since I was going to be passing through Birmingham, I decided to email David Sher who publishes Comeback Town in Birmingham. I am so glad that I did as we had a nice lunch and a great discussion and it was good to get to know him. David’s column is the reason that the View From the Top column on Huntsville came into being.

David has been writing Comeback Town for 14 years and when I ask him how he began publishing it, he said that he was sitting at his table and Rotary and his fellow Rotarians were saying how proud of their children they were and talking about all of the great jobs that they had. Yet none of them lived in Birmingham. David thought that Birmingham needed to have more to offer to bring young people back.

So, David decided to do a blog and 14 years later, he is still going! As a longtime member of the Huntsville Rotary Club, I was glad to hear that Rotary played such a big part in the creation of Comeback Town.

My column got its genesis in 2021, there was an article published in Comeback Town that talked about how Huntsville was going to become the biggest city in Alabama, but the Birmingham residents shouldn’t “clutch their pearls” and how Birmingham was so much better than Huntsville because they had a bigger baseball stadium, arena and so much more. The article compared Huntsville to the Mississippi Delta without the blues soundtrack. I and a lot of my Huntsvillians took umbrage with this.

The Opinion piece completely ignored the multi billions of dollars that were being invested in Huntsville for the SLS, Amazon, Mazda Toyota motors, Hudson Alpha, and so many other things Huntsville had going on. And to look back over those five years and see how many more billions of dollars invested with Eli Lilly, Blue Origin, SpaceX, the FBI, and so much more shows the lack of insight and knowledge a lot of people in Birmingham have into Huntsville.

After seeing the article, I posted a few comments on Facebook mentioning these various companies and how Huntsville was growing and had a lot of economic development due to the fact that our elected officials take a regional and collaborative approach in going after economic development projects, while Birmingham does not. David then asked me to write a response, which I did. That was sort of the first View from the Top, just before it was official and had a name.

At our lunch, David and I talked about the fact that most people in Birmingham have very little understanding of Huntsville and David admitted that he did not know a lot about Huntsville either. I remember going on a trip with the Birmingham Rotary Club to Prague and how most of the people on the trip had never been to Huntsville or if so, very few times.

David also asked me why I got involved in so many civic organizations in Huntsville and I told him that my father, grandfather and great grandfather were all very active in the Huntsville community. My great grandfather, Claude Barnes, was an active member of the Masonic Lodge, and ran for sheriff in 1919. At the time, he ran a very progressive campaign, promising to appoint women deputies, not carry a gun and serve the papers on time. He lost that race and I suspect he mainly ran to get name recognition for his General Store which was on Andrew Jackson Way where Hill Lawnmower and Chain Saw is located now.

My grandfather was also very active in the Masons and the Lions Club. One project the Lions Club did was to have rural electrification to bring electricity to small rural towns across America. They later did the same for telephone service. So, my grandfather was the first lawyer for the New Hope Telephone Co-Op. After his death, my father took over and had represented them for 50 years and my brother continues to represent them to this day. My grandfather was elected in 1948 as an Inferior court Judge (which has now thankfully been changed to the District Court and the formally known Superior Court is now known as Circuit Court). He later ran unsuccessfully for the probate judge in 1952. After that, he was appointed to the Huntsville City School Board, where I also later served.

My father was active in the Masonic Lodge, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, the Alabama trial lawyers, and served as President of the Huntsville Madison County Bar Association.

All of that brings me back to my involvement with the Rotary Club and looking back at our history of what all we, along with the many other civic clubs, have done for Huntsville. About two years ago, John Allen wrote an article about all of the civic organizations in Huntsville and how many of them had faded. He talked about the Lions Club, the Jaycee’s, Kiwanis Club, Sertoma, Club Optimist Club to name a few.

All of these clubs and Civic organizations have lost membership. He also cited a book, bowling alone, which I had read in which he chronicles the nationwide fall in the civic organizations.

As a Rotarian, it was good to hear that David’s Comeback Town was birthed at his Rotary Club, and so, in a roundabout way, Rotary help spawned my column about Huntsville. Our Rotary Club is starting to spotlight what our Club has done over our 109 your history and it’s pretty remarkable. Our Club was involved in everything from bringing the Arsenal and space program here to Highway 431, World War II bonds, to the desegregation of Huntsville.

Today, our club is involved in a mentoring and scholarship program for students who don’t have the best grades and have a need for friendship and mentorship to help them gain job skills and become productive citizens. We also support a pediatric oncology hospital in Guatemala City and provide school supplies for students here in the Huntsville City Schools.

And the Huntsville Rotary Club is not the only club in Huntsville doing great things. I hope that people will still get involved in the civic organizations and helping others and also this community.

I hope that more people will get involved with Civic Organizations and volunteer at there is a lot we can do and typically the volunteers get just as much, if not more, that the people we are volunteering to help.

Doug Martinson is an attorney at Martinson and Beason , which was founded by his grandfather in 1937 and is a fourth generation Huntsvillian. He has served as President of the Huntsville City School Board, the Huntsville Rotary Club, the Huntsville Madison County Bar Association, Chair of the Huntsville Madison County Public Library Board, is a Commissioner of the Alabama State Bar,  and numerous non-profit boards. He also was an NCAA Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Official until 2016.

David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown.  He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).

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Invite David to speak for free to your group about how we can have a more prosperous metro Birmingham. dsher@comebacktown.com