For Alison. Andy Parker
offering her a job as a reporter for the Greenville, North Carolina, viewing area. She would be working alongside another reporter, although that situation would change a week after she arrived.
After getting the news, she called me, breathless.
“Dad, he offered me the job! He even said I’d be making $24,000 a year!”
She had won the lottery.
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“I said, ‘Don’t you need to see me in person?’ He said, ‘No, I see everything I need to see from your reel and your résumé. You don’t have to decide right away, you can think about it for a few days, but we really want you.’ I was so stunned I just said, ‘OK, let me think about it.’”
“How do you feel about it?” I asked.
“I like it,” she said.
“Then, Scooter, call him back and accept the job. It sounds like the perfect start for you.”
And so she did. Alison had a job in television two weeks before she got her diploma. She graduated on December 15, 2012, started with WCTI the day after Christmas, and was immediately thrown into trial by fire, doing a stand up her very first day. I’ve heard from pros in the business that what she pulled off rarely happens, if ever. But Scott Nichols saw “it.”
Scott wanted her to spend a month in New Bern learning the ropes at the station before heading to Greenville. The problem was, there was little to no temporary housing that she (or I) could really afford. I called around for her before finding a unique arrangement: she spent January in an assisted living community. She had a pretty nice apartment, and of course it was quiet. I joked with her that she should join the residents for dinner and enjoy those cooked-to-death green beans. She drew the line at that, but was grateful for a nice cheap place to live for a while.
Two weeks later, after several packages and stand ups, Scott said he wanted to meet with her.
“My original plan was to have you working alongside a reporter in Greenville,” he told her, “and you can still do that if you want. But after watching your work, I’ve got another opportunity I’d like you to consider. Our bureau reporter in Jacksonville is leaving. How would you like to run your own show there?”
Alison jumped at the chance. Now she was a twenty-two-year-old bureau chief with her own veteran cameraman working for the number one station in the market. She covered hard news, but in Jacksonville it generally revolved around these kinds of stories:
“Marine Comes Home to Hero’s Welcome,” or
“Marine Shakes Baby to Death,” or
“Big Meth Lab Bust.”
A year in, recognizing her ability, Scott gave her an opportunity to be the fill-in anchor. Barbara and I watched the first episode at home, watched her sitting at an anchor desk for the first time. We were giddy with joy, and it marked the moment that Alison knew she wanted to be a full-time anchor.
When the noon anchor position became available, Alison lobbied hard, but the job went to another deserving candidate. She was disappointed, and she knew her options were limited. The other anchors at the station had been there for a long time and had established roots in the community. They weren’t going anywhere. It was time to move up and move on.
As she was preparing her reel, Tim Saunders, a reporter from WDBJ, gave her a call. He said they had a couple of interesting prospects in the works and that Kelly Zuber, the news director, wanted to talk to her. Kelly told her they wanted to create a regional reporting position that was based in Martinsville. As always, Alison asked me what I thought.
“I could live at home and save a lot of money,” she said.
“Yeah, Scooter, you could. But as much as we’d love to have you back home, and even if they paid you more money, this would be a step back for you.”
Alison agreed. She thanked Kelly and declined the offer.
Kelly called her back a day later.
Melissa Gaona, the “Mornin’” reporter, had been promoted to anchor. Would Alison be interested in taking her old position? The job was mostly fluff reporting and spanned the station’s entire viewing radius. She would work five days a week alongside a cameraman named Adam Ward, and she would get a $9,000 a year raise, a wardrobe, 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.