Many of her individual athletes went on to memorable careers, none more so than her own daughter Alicia, who was her only child and is still known around here – even though she’s now 46, married with two kids, lives in Milner, Ga. and works as an air traffic controller in Atlanta – as Poochie.
She won All-City basketball honors four years straight at Dunbar, qualified for the state track meet in the high jump and two years ago was enshrined in Dunbar’s Wall of Fame.
But it’s not Earley’s 50-year career as a successful and celebrated coach that her family and friends have been focusing on the past couple of days, it’s the impact she made beyond the playing fields, cheering crowds and the spotlight.
Earley died Monday evening in hospice care at her Huber Heights home from complications of heart issues that had plagued her during her life and worsened in the past couple of months. She was 79.
Since then, everyone from her daughter to Montgomery and especially her longtime, best friend Alicia Moore have been remembering the other side of Anna Earley.
“Besides being in education and coaching, she was really a humanitarian,” said Moore, who, alongside Earley, has been one herself.
Moore retired earlier this month after working 57 years as a medical technologist at the Dayton Veterans Administration.
During much of that time she assisted Earley in her good deeds, whether it was providing students in need with food and clothing; helping struggling families in the Dunbar community; or showing kindness to complete strangers, from single parent moms, like Anna had been, to senior citizens and to the homeless.
Poochie witnessed much of this in her life: “I was her only child, but she was like a parent to a lot of kids.”
Montgomery echoed that thought: “She’d give you the shirt off her back. If kids needed something, she found a way to get it for them. She was just a very loving person.
“She had a food pantry and clothes in a big old closet in the back of a room at school and it was filled with stuff for kids and their families.”
No one assisted her more in her Good Samaritan deeds than Moore – especially around Thanksgiving:
“Years ago, she called me and said several people had reached out to her wondering if she could help them get a Thanksgiving dinner because they had none.
“We started choosing five families and doing what we could for them. That’s when Kroger had Thanksgiving dinners that already were mostly cooked. We’d get them, put them in the oven to finish the cooking and then we got bags of additional canned goods so they could stretch a meal beyond just Thanksgiving Day.
“And I’ll tell you, when we delivered those meals, it just broke your heart to see how appreciative the people were. They’d just cry.
“I was the driver, but after a while I had to stop going in with her. It was just too emotional for me.”
Getting a chance
Earley’s caring and empathetic ways go back to her own upbringing.
“She grew up very, very poor,” Poochie said.
A couple of years ago I visited Earley at her home and she talked about her childhood. She grew up on Perry Street across from the old Coca Cola bottling plant and not far from Wonder Bread outlet.
Her dad had epilepsy and couldn’t work.
Her mom, Cornelia, had come to Dayton from Little Rock, Arkansas and worked to support Anna and her five brothers and sisters. For a while she did day work for $2 a day and car fare.
“Sometimes all we had to eat was corn meal and milk,” Earley said.
After she graduated from Roosevelt High in 1964, she went to Central State, the first in her family to go to college.
“I left for school with all my stuff in a paper bag,” she said.
After a couple of years at CSU, she met Moore who was two years younger and had come from North Carolina.
“Anna was very busy at school,” Moore said. “She was very outgoing and in several organizations. None of us really had anything, but she found a way.
“There was this pizza man who would bring pizzas. She’d go through the dorm and get everyone’s order. She was like the point person. And once she gave him all those orders, he gave her an extra pizza. That’s how she got extra money. She could sell it and get things for herself they didn’t serve at the cafeteria.
Earley told me she also cooked hotdogs in her room and then sold them to the other students.
After her graduation from CSU, she turned down an offer to teach and coach in the Virgin Islands and instead returned to Dayton to help her family. She took a job at Emerson Elementary, where she taught physical education and science from 1968 to 1975.
At first, she said she was the only black teacher.
When Edison burned down she said they were going to bus the black students over and sent her to ride along with them as an escort.
She said when they got off the bus, an angry mob of people waited on the other side of the street.
“I was afraid they were going to try to kill us,” she once explained. Eventually she helped defuse the situation.
“I got in and started to work with all the kids, black and white, and you know what? They ended up naming me the Teacher of the Year.”
Over the years Ohio Governor George Voinovich saluted her for her good deeds in the community, and she was named one of Dayton’s Top Ten Women for her humanitarian work.
“She wanted to make sure her athletes got a chance at college, so she would take them all over trying to get them in schools,” Moore said. “We’d gas up my car and I’d give her some extra money for food for the kids and we went everywhere from Findlay to Nashville to the University of Cincinnati.
“She wanted her kids to get a chance just like she once had gotten.”
Along for the ride
When she was pregnant with Poochie, she kept coaching right up to almost the day she delivered.
Dunbar officials finally convinced her to go home and have her child, but a month after Poochie was born, mother and child were back on the Wolverines’ sidelines.
“My whole life I was there for all of it – the games, the trips, the championships. I was along for the ride,” Poochie said.
Her mother’s athletes became her sideline babysitters, her sports heroes and her role models.
After Poochie graduated, she went to Ohio State but had to forgo an offer to walk on to the Buckeyes basketball team because she was chosen to be part of a Nike promotion that introduced shoes in 10 short-film vignettes about a fictitious team winning a Hoosiers-like championship.
Had it been now – in the era of NIL money – she could have done both.
After college Poochie joined the U.S. Air Force, won some prestigious honors in the service and later got the air traffic control job at the ultra-busy Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
She married Brian Brooks and they have two children: son Brian who’s about to be 10 and daughter Bailey who is six.
Anna was proud of her grandkids and the day I visited her she talked about them and the way they excelled in school.
Every summer Poochie brought the two kids here to Dayton and said: “Mom would take them somewhere every day. She loved those kids.”
When she wasn’t doing that, she was looking out for someone else.
“She and Mont (Montgomery) were road dogs,” Poochie said with a laugh. “When he had some health issues, Mom would come get him out of the house and take him up to Roosevelt so he could walk around the track and talk to people.”
Last November Moore said she and Earley went down to Georgia to visit Poochie and her family.
“We were there for grandparents’ day at the school and it was great.”
The pair visited again in April, but once back home, Anna’s health began to fail.
As of Tuesday morning, funeral arrangements were still pending, though her daughter said they likely would be held here in Dayton sometime early next week.
“I’m just really going to miss her,” Moore said. “And I know a lot of those families she helped will too.
“She was just a wonderful, wonderful woman.”
About the Author