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My thanks to David Hoggard for his welcome aboard the blogging boat. I've known David several years, and I've never encountered anyone who who can soak up the who, what, when, why and where of a city better than him. And he's not even a Greensboro native. He's from Kentucky.

I once walked the Charles B. Aycock Historic District neighborhood with him. Residents were standing on porches, getting into cars and walking along the sidewalks. David knew them all by name, and they know him. Aycock is a big neighborhood, too, but David seems to always be out and about in it.

Yeah, I know, politicians learn to know names. But this was long before David decided to run, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for City Council two years ago. Knowing people just comes naturally to him, and there's hardly a community meeting in the city he doesn't attend. He was at the Truth and Reconcilation Commission hearings this past weekend.

When not making the rounds of the neighborhood or city, he renovates old houses in Aycock and in other older neighborhoods.

And he's a musician. One day when I was waiting in the living room of his Cypress Street home for him to come home to be interviewed, someone starting playing the piano. It turned out to be the family cat walking across the keyboard. I figured the piano was an antique decoration in a house full of them.

But later when I attended a Preservation Greensboro Inc. reception at Blandwood Carriage House, snappy piano music could be heard coming from across the crowded room.

It was David, sitting there stroking the keys. For the most part, he played with both hands, but ever so often he'd free one to reach for a beer atop the upright piano.

He said he paid his way through college playing piano in bars.
Many years ago, I remember asking the late Greensboro civil rights leader Dr. George Simkins who he calls when he wants to find out what's going on in Greensboro. Without a pause, he declared, "Jim Melvin, and he always returns my calls."

David might not like this comparison - he and Melvin clashed over whether to renovate War Memorial Stadium in the Aycock neighborhood or build a new stadium downtown - but Hoggard reminds me of a poor man's Jim Melvin. He doesn't have the capital to build stadiums or downtown parks, but he's someone you can call when you want to know what's going on in Greensboro.

And he'll return your calls.