and a makeup allowance. Alison had won the lottery again.
Barbara and I got up at the crack of dawn, quite literally, to watch Alison’s first “spot.” It featured a climbing wall, and as would regularly happen, Alison was an active participant in the story. She was hooked up to the safety rope as she climbed the wall, a bundle of energy and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm manifested itself in lots of wild arm gestures. In a Facebook comment on the segment, one viewer wondered aloud if she had some kind of neurological affliction.
Alison called me in tears.
“Dad, what am I going to do?” she sobbed. “This is terrible. They might fire me. What if I can’t stop waving my arms?”
“Scooter, it’s just one day,” I said, marshaling all of my fatherly comfort. “You’ll be fine. You did great.”
That one Facebook comment was all it took. That’s when she really became a pro. She didn’t wave her arms anymore, and Alison and Adam became the Roanoke area’s favorite news duo. She always had great story ideas and she often made Adam her foil, a role he cheerfully played.
Over time, she became a regular noontime fill-in anchor on WDBJ, and she was still working toward that anchor position. In the meantime, she became a celebrity in the New River Valley, and those viewers who watched her every morning fell in love. They knew she was electric. They knew she had “it.”
I can tell you that Alison was smart, that she was naturally talented, that she was humble, but if there’s only one trait about her that you want to commit to memory, make it this: she was, above all, kind.
So many parents these days want to be friends with their children, and as a result, their kids grow up with no boundaries, no manners, and a sense of entitlement. Alison was our friend, and we were hers—Drew is the same way—but we also raised them both with expectations. We held them to standards of achievement. The only thing we were going to force them to do was be good human beings, and we tried to teach them how to make the best possible choices in life.
I believe Barbara and I were pretty damn good at parenting. Alison never got into trouble. The only time I really yelled at her was when she was about ten. We were horsing around on our boat when she hit me in the ear. It obviously wasn’t intentional, but that didn’t make it hurt any less; I felt like my eardrum had ruptured. I screamed at her, saying to never do that again. She went to the bow of the boat, curled up in a ball, and started to cry. I apologized instantly, but the incident haunts me still. I suppose it always will.
Like all fathers, I was the smartest guy in the world until my daughter got into her teens, but even when she noticed my IQ had dropped substantially, we didn’t butt heads all that often. She would, however, get ticked off at me for my wanting to fix things every time she had a problem, instead of just providing a listening ear and letting her solve it like an adult. That was the dad part in me coming out. I always wanted to fix her problems, to fight whatever injustices she encountered. She wasn’t shy about being irritated by this; she inherited a great deal of my personality and could be just as stubborn and willful as I am.
But all kids are stubborn at some point; when she was, she was still able to listen. She was always polite, and she had an otherworldly kindness. It was easy being Alison’s dad.
There was so much of me in Alison. Her fierce competitiveness and desire to win everything came from me. As an adult this desire bled into her career and that, plus her natural talent, allowed her to excel in journalism, just as she had excelled in athletics and academics. Alison always wanted to break the story, and the majority of the time she did. She was young for a TV news reporter, so very young, and already destined for an anchor’s chair in her mid-twenties. There is no telling where she could have ended up. But while Alison was determined to be the best, she didn’t step on other people in the process. She had a genuine grace and kindness.
They say that the light that burns brightest burns briefest, and there was always a part of me that feared, perhaps irrationally, that her light would burn so bright that it would flame out long before her time.
In the aftermath of her death, I’ve heard countless stories from her friends, teachers, coworkers, and perfect strangers about things she did for others, things I never would have known about had people not volunteered to share their Alison stories.
A typical example came from her time at WDBJ. It was just before Christmas and Alison, part of the skeleton crew still in the building, picked up the call. A desperate grandmother was on the other end of the line and spoke of a family with a struggling dad, a mom not in the picture, and children who were about to go without presents. All of the Christmas-assistance deadlines had passed and calls like these can sometimes be bogus—and bogus or not, they are generally met with a response of “I wish we could do something, but . . .”
Maybe Alison could tell the call was genuine, or maybe she was just willing to roll the dice, but she took a leap of faith. She made several calls and finally got in touch with an organization willing to help. Three children ended up with presents from Santa they wouldn’t have received otherwise.
There were so many little acts of kindness that only she and the recipients knew about, so many stories she never shared with me. I’m so thankful her coworker Heather Butterworth shared that one.
Throughout her short life, Alison developed relationships and trust. There is no better example than the mutual trust she shared with the court clerks, judges, and law enforcement in Jacksonville, Onslow County, and the state police attached to the area. While they had to share appropriate press releases with all local media, Alison was clearly a favorite. Once while visiting her, she took Barbara and me to meet the previous Onslow County sheriff. He sang her praises and invited us to join him and his wife “for suppuh.” I thought it quite unusual, but it clearly showed that Alison had left an impression on him. You don’t invite someone over for suppuh unless you’re fond of them.
She did once get “scooped” while she was working in New Bern, when she got an early tip from one of her police contacts that they were working on an active investigation. She was asked, however, not to break the story too early—the police wanted the media to keep it quiet until they wrapped up their investigation. The contact said this was because of its “sensitive nature.” Alison was ethical and complied, but when her competition found out, they were not. They broke the story. Afterward, there were some people in her news department that criticized her for not reporting it. I remember her telling me how much that stung, but she never second-guessed her decision. She knew she had done the right thing, and she stood up for her ethics in subsequent staff meetings. Ultimately, prematurely breaking the story backfired on the other station and Alison was hailed by upper management at hers. The respect she already had was multiplied.
The immediate benefit came in the form of getting more news tips. When law enforcement had information to feed the press, they would send out a release to all media outlets at the same time. They often seemed to make a mistake, though, and Alison would get the releases an hour or two before anyone else. Funny how that happened.
All of this leads to my favorite story about Alison’s news career. She was tipped off that there was going to be a major meth lab bust in the county. State as well as local police were involved, and the lead investigator assured Alison that they would be working long through the night at the crime scene. She requested the only live truck the station had for the entire area so she could lead the ten o’clock news with a live report. Before long, Alison and her crew were on the scene, raring to go.
At 9:45 p.m., the lead investigator called out to his team: “OK guys, that’s it. Let’s wrap it up.”
Alison panicked. Her story was tanking before her eyes.
