Professional Journey Winding Down for "Walking Code Book"
By Nick Reiher
Michigan's Lauderdale looks back on 32 years as a building official.

Like many kids, Sheldon Lauderdale wanted to be a policeman growing up, specifically, a state trooper in his native Michigan. “I thought they were cool,” he said. “Their cars were blue and they had a red light on top.”

But Lauderdale would become a different type of authority. The affable 69-year-old will retire later this year after nearly 32 years as Building Official for the Charter Township of Comstock, Michigan, where he became known as “The Walking Code Book,” or, more simply, “The Legend.”

“Do you know why they called me ‘The Walking Code Book,’” Lauderdale asked recently in a recent interview. “Because every time we got a new code book, I read it until I knew everything in it, chapter and verse: electrical, building, mechanical. If anyone wanted to know something, they would call me and say, ‘How would you look at this?’”

Until the International Code Council consolidation came along, Lauderdale was seeing double, or more, when it came to local codes. “We had one building code in Comstock, and across the street, they could be using BOCA,” he said.

Lauderdale made pilgrimages to ICC code hearings for several years until Michigan’s five building codes became one. And, as only the second Building Inspector in the township’s history, he had a lot of official and unofficial titles during these 32 years.

“Building official…zoning administrator…commissioner of noxious weeds.”

What?

“It was a code the township passed in 1957,” Lauderdale said chuckling. “There were 12 species of weeds you either had to mow or cut down before they go to seed. I have a business card with that on it. It’s been fun.”

Probably not all of it. Matt Watts of Watts Homes Contractors in Kalamazoo said Comstock has changed for the better since Lauderdale became Building Official.

“This is a lower-income area, and we used to have a lot of abandoned buildings,” Watts said. “Sheldon got rid of those, and told others to clean up their properties. He always was the one enforcing … and Comstock is a better place because he did.”

Lauderdale is licensed by the State of Michigan as a Building Official, Building Inspector, Plan Reviewer, Mechanical Inspector, and Electrical Inspector. He has held memberships for many years in the Michigan chapter of International Conference of Building Officials, Mechanical Inspectors Association of Michigan and International Association of Electrical Inspectors.

But his life has taken a few twists and turns since he graduated from Manton High School, the only one of his siblings to do so. While working in a bicycle shop, he was drafted in January 1964. Lauderdale was an Army military police officer stationed in the states, but he had a couple close calls of being shipped to Vietnam.

One intoxicated GI he was bringing back to base took a swing at him, “so I put him through the wall back at the base. He cut my orders for Vietnam, but I complained to my captain, telling him I was a short-timer, and it was reversed.”

But shortly before he was discharged in January 1966, he was transferred to a front-line MP company. Just after he was discharged, they were shipped overseas. “I guess I lucked out,” he said.

Finally, Lauderdale got his chance to go to state police training. But his life ambition was derailed only a few months in. “It was worse than the Army,” he said. “So I quit.”

He drove truck for a while and then went to work for a homebuilder. Then he worked for another who paid him more. Finally, he was hired as Building Inspector in Comstock on November 1, 1979.

“I didn’t have a formal education,” he said. “But I pounded nails and built houses.”

That on-the-job training, as well as a wealth of certification classes, served him well when Comstock went through a building boom in the early to mid-1980s. During his career, Lauderdale had some interesting parameters with which to work.

For one, few probably know Comstock, the charter township of Kalamazoo County, is the bedding plant capital of the world, being the home of the largest bedding plant cooperative in the United States. That sounds like it would be a lot of work, but Lauderdale said since Michigan exempts greenhouses from building codes, not so much.

Comstock Township also is home of Bell's Brewery production facility. The brewery expanded its facility to nearly 100,000 square feet this year.

The area suffered a big blow in 1998 when General Motors Fisher Body Plant closed. But a mix of public and private partners bought the land and transformed it into a 2.2 “million-square-foot business park” called Midlink.

Lauderdale said the business park has been a great boost to the local economy, with more than 13 businesses, including a hotel. Until recently, he has done it all, from final inspections all the way back to the initial phone calls. The most challenging people he’s had to work with?

“Not the builders,” he said. “Not the contractors. It’s the homeowners. They want to do it their way. I tell them, building codes are the bottom line, not the top. They are for everybody.”

Codes were king for Lauderdale, and he didn’t put himself above them, said Don Watts, Matt’s father and owner of Watts Homes. “That was the way for some building officials, but not him,” he said.

To illustrate Don Watts said that in the early 1990s, there was a code specifying how egress windows were to be installed. “I thought one way, and he thought the other,” Don Watts said. “Well, he finally tracked down the guy who wrote the code in California and asked him how he interpreted the code.

“It turns out Sheldon was more stringent, so he told me I was right. A lot of Building Officials wouldn’t go to those lengths.”

Kevin Cardiff, who also retired this year after three decades as Kalamazoo Township Building Official, said Lauderdale was straightforward and fair. “Homebuilders respected him,” Cardiff said. “They knew where he was coming from. But you always would get people who say, ‘Are going to make me do that?’ And he would say, ‘No, I’m not going to make you do that. The codes are going to make you do that.’

“We called him ‘The Legend,’ jokingly, because he knows the codes so well. He took it pretty well.”

Although he has loved his job, Lauderdale said it’s time to go. Officials are planning to combine the Building Official duties for Comstock, Kalamazoo and possibly two other townships, Cardiff said.

That’s more than enough excuse for Lauderdale to choose one of his four boats and several lakes he likes to explore with his stepson and grandkids. “We catch anything we can,” he said. “Or at least we drown some worms.”

And he has his sights set on some larger water. His son recently was transferred to Hawaii after two tours in Baghdad. “We’ll probably head over there around Christmastime,” he said.

As he creates new memories, he has a wealth of them to draw on from 32 years as “The Walking Code Book.” “I’ve seen literally thousands of buildings go up during my time,” he said. “It really has been fun.”