she was reading [a story about] Marshmallow the bunny, I was in the front listening attentively to my favorite story. Suddenly, complete chaos invaded this peaceful story time, and everyone was shrieking and running around the room! Confused, I approached my friend Victoria and shouted, ‘What’s going on?’ She exclaimed frantically, ‘There’s a cockroach on the floor!’ At that very moment, I felt tiny little legs crawling up my arm and into my dress. I scrambled to find Mrs. Enmond, who was just as frenzied as the rest of us. ‘Mrs. Enmond! I think there is a cockroach in my dress!’ I screamed. She took one look at me, leaped onto her desk, and waved her arms in the air, screeching, ‘I can’t help you!’ Because all of my classmates realized that the cockroach was not chasing them, but rather crawling on me, they all giggled while I just stood there. Finally, the teacher’s aide grabbed me and shook my dress vigorously until the cockroach fell onto the floor. Calmly, she retrieved the fly swatter and flattened the bug.”
Alison was embarrassed by the cockroach story, but as she demonstrated through her developing skills, a story like this could be helpful in learning how to find humor in situations. It could connect with an audience.
The cockroach story resurfaced five years later at a 4-H speech competition when Alison was in fifth grade. By that time, we had moved to Martinsville where I had a new job with Tultex Corporation. We didn’t know it then, but Southside Virginia would become our permanent home.
The same confidence Alison had shown in her endeavors since the age of two was apparent in her speech competitions. She won the local competition and advanced to the district level. Some years later, she wrote about her 4-H experience:
“As embarrassing as the [cockroach] story may sound, I learned something from this and have been able to use it to my advantage. For example, I competed in the 4-H Public Speaking Competition. My classmates decided to write about cliché topics like ‘the most influential person they know,’ or ‘what integrity meant to them.’ This was the time for me to test the usefulness of this embarrassment. When I stood before my first audience and delivered this speech, people had puzzled looks on their faces. No audience member had ever heard something so ‘unique.’ I received my scorecard and had advanced to the next level! Finally, after a series of competitions, I reached the state level competition. I was extremely nervous because all of the other competitors had very intelligent speeches about the economy, social issues, and other serious matters that were over my head. Standing at the podium I took a deep breath and gave my speech. I won.”
She wasn’t through with the cockroach story. When Alison applied for early decision to James Madison University, she decided to use that story in her personal statement. The last paragraph 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
