For Alison. Andy Parker
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sealed the deal:
“Having that ability to laugh at myself will benefit me. Who would have thought that a cockroach crawling up my dress in kindergarten earned me the 4-H Public Speaking trophy in my living room? Because I did not let my embarrassment overwhelm me, I was able to accomplish my goal. More importantly, learning to appreciate instances like this has helped me find humor in even the most unusual circumstances.”
Later in Alison’s high school career, she attended one of the best-kept secrets in Martinsville/Henry County: the Piedmont Governor’s School for Mathematics, Science, and Technology. Rising high school juniors must apply to be accepted into the program, and if they’re chosen, they begin the school day an hour before their peers. When Alison was in the program from 2007 through 2009, it was held in an old elementary school building in town. Before returning to their regularly scheduled high school programming at noon, she and her Governor’s School classmates spent their mornings challenged with a college-level curriculum that helped turn them into creative thinkers.
Alison loved the demands placed on her, the inventive projects she completed, the teamwork the program fostered. Like many of the other successful students in the program, she graduated from high school with an associate’s degree from our local community college without actually attending classes on the campus. It worked out to roughly sixty hours of transferable hours to James Madison University. She made good use of those hours, too. When she told me the courses she was taking her first year at JMU, most of which sounded like Underwater Basket Weaving 101, I asked her why she was bothering to take all that fluff. I’d placed out of some courses back when I went to college at the University of Texas, but I still had to bust my hump taking tough freshman classes.
“Scooter,” I asked her, “aren’t you supposed to be taking a serious course load?”
“Dad, I got all that stuff out of the way at Governor’s School. I have to get through my GMAD [General Education Media Arts] classes and be accepted to SMAD [School of Media Arts and Design] and then I can’t take the other courses until I’m a junior.”
“Uh, okay.” She knew what she was doing, even if dear old dad did not.
During her entire first year of college, she mostly took electives. One of those electives was calculus. Most students wouldn’t volunteer to take calculus even under penalty of torture, particularly if it wasn’t their major, but Alison loved math, and she had already become an old hand at calculus during her stint at Governor’s School. She aced every test.
One day, her professor took her aside and asked her, “Why are you in this class?” Alison told him she simply liked math and thought it would be a fun elective.
The following semester, the professor hired her as a tutor.
Governor’s School is where Alison caught the journalism bug, which is the reason she chose JMU. Being on the Governor’s School yearbook staff planted that seed, but a high school band trip to Atlanta (she played trumpet and French horn) made it sprout and grow.
During the band trip, Alison and her classmates had the opportunity to tour CNN. She was in awe. She had enjoyed the band trip to Disney World the previous year, but in her eyes, Disney had nothing on CNN. She saw her future in those halls. There is a picture of her beaming in front of the giant CNN block logo, arms outstretched over her head, palms out in a display that suggested, “This is where I’ll be one day.”
And she did appear on CNN, just a few years later. We’ll return to that soon enough.
Once she knew that journalism was her calling, it was simply a matter of choosing a college. Barbara and I limited the search to Virginia schools to take advantage of in-state tuition, so there were only two schools that she ever really considered: James Madison University and the University of Virginia. When she discovered that UVA didn’t have a journalism department, she didn’t even bother to apply.
Alison sailed through her first two years at JMU before diving headfirst into her journalism courses. She honed her skills as a storyteller and soon became the news editor for the Breeze, JMU’s award-winning student paper. She enjoyed mentoring her fellow students, and she liked writing so much that she nearly decided that was her calling. But that was before she took any on-air courses.
When she started in video production, it became clear to her professors that she had “it.” Her beloved Professor Ryan Parkhurst, a trusted mentor even after she graduated, said, “I’ve never had a student with the talent, drive, and gift that Alison possessed.”
I only saw one video of her from JMU. She was in the field, and got the “toss” from her student anchors. It was decent, but it wasn’t prime time material. Hey, it was her first time, and she was still in school. Even in that brief clip, she did do something that was purely Alison; right before the live shot, a truck pulled up in the background, and she sprinted over to it in high heels to ask the driver to move out of the way, sprinting back just in time for the shot.
The next time I saw her on television, it was the real deal. It was the summer before her final semester at JMU, and she had an internship at WDBJ, a CBS-affiliated station in Roanoke.
“Scooter, are they going to let you go on-air?” I’d asked her.
“Oh Dad, they’re probably just gonna make me go get coffee.”
Clearly, she had no expectations. But the station did. They saw “it.” She called me after she’d been there about ten days, bursting with excitement.
“Dad, I’m doing a package!” she said. “It’s going to be on at the six! I just finished, and I think it’s going to be really good!”
“What’s a package?” I asked. “And what’s the six? Does that mean you’re going to be on TV?”
Indeed she was. In the months to come, she would playfully admonish me for confusing a “package” with a “stand up.” (In broadcasting vernacular, a “package” is a report in which the correspondent narrates around video and interview excerpts, while a “stand up” is when a correspondent stands at a news location and talks directly to camera, live or taped.)
Barbara and I watched WDBJ that evening, breathless. There was Alison, doing a story about a camp for diabetic kids. She looked great, professional, like a veteran correspondent. Our hearts were bursting with pride. Barbara and I couldn’t stop smiling, and we gave each other high-fives until our palms stung.
Proud Dad posted that clip on Facebook, and looking back, I think it was my all-time favorite. Watching our daughter take the first confident, practiced steps toward her dream was an experience like no other. I would give anything to relive it.
Alison went on to do five more packages until one of the reporters complained that an intern was doing all their work. I will always wonder if the complainer was the one who ended up killing her.
On her last day as an intern, we took a picture of her sitting at the anchor desk. Like the photo in front of CNN, it was another prescient “I’ll be here one day” moment.
As her final semester at JMU wound down, Alison used the video from WDBJ for an audition reel to send to prospective employers in the TV news field. She graduated in December, a semester early, with genuine professional experience and an impressive list of accomplishments, but she had sent out her audition reel in November. She had a few criteria: The station had to be a top 100 market, it couldn’t be anyplace cold, and it would preferably be close to home and/or family. She sent out just six packages. A couple of stations didn’t reply, a couple said they needed someone with more experience, and two wanted to talk.
One was a station in College Station, Texas. It was farther away from me and Barbara, but close enough to the rest of the family in Texas. She had a phone interview with the news director who promised a follow-up in a week or two.
The other that wanted to talk was WCTI in New Bern, North Carolina. It was a top 100 station, reasonably close, and in a great area. The news director, Scott Nichols, received Alison’s reel on a Tuesday and called her Friday. The interview went well. He asked her for references and said he’d