The friend knew a little about her and the type of person she was.
The only child of Anna Earley, a successful Dunbar High School coach for decades, Alicia — who is known as Poochie to her family and Dayton friends — had been around sports her entire life. She was at the track meets, the basketball games and all the practices of her mom’s teams, going back to her toddler days.
Later she became a speedy, quick-thinking, All-City guard on the Dunbar girls basketball team and a state qualifier in the high jump.
At Ohio State she turned down an offer to join the basketball team as a walk-on because she’d answered a casting call and was chosen by Nike to appear in an advertising series the shoe company hoped would strike a chord with teenage girl athletes.
The idea — sort of Hoosiers with a different set of hormones — was to produce 10 vignettes about a fictional team as it went through a championship season.
Advertisements were featured in magazines like Seventeen and YM and the sketches played on ESPN, BET, MTV and standard networks, appearing during commercial breaks on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Moesha and Party of Five.
If NIL deals had been allowed back then, Alicia could have been paid and still played for the Buckeyes. Instead, she cashed her checks — she also got free sneakers for two years — and helped her single-parent mom pay for her college.
“Poochie has always been a go getter,” Anna said.
And maybe that’s what the friend saw.
“When they talk about air traffic controllers, they say they have A-type personalities” Alicia said. “They’re not afraid to speak up.
“And when I heard how much air traffic controllers could make, I said, ‘How do I train for it?’
“She told me, ‘Well, I’d go to the military and learn.’
“And that’s just what I did.”
Much to her mother’s initial disapproval, she quit her TV job, joined the U.S. Air Force, and was sent to San Antonio for basic training.
As she recounted the barbecue story, Alicia started to laugh: “And here we are 23 years later…”
She’s 45 now. She spent six years in the Air Force, became an air traffic controller and received many awards, none more noteworthy than the commendation she got when she drew on that old basketball trait – the quick thinking – and helped avert a tragedy when a large flock of geese headed straight at a lumbering Lockheed C-5 Galaxy with 70 people on board as it was landing at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
For that, she was awarded the Air Force Achievement Medal in 2007.
Today, Alicia Brooks — she married fellow airman Brian Brooks ― is an air traffic controller at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which, for the past 25 years, has been the busiest airport, passenger-wise, in the world.
Brian is out of the service as well and works also as an air traffic controller. The couple has a 40-acre farm — with cows, pigs, chickens, and goats — that abuts a large lake.
They have two children — 7-year-old Brian and 4-year-old Bailey — both of whom will be coming to Dayton in a few days with their mom, who is being enshrined on the Dunbar High School Wall of Fame on Friday night after a gala celebration at the Presidential Banquet Center in Kettering.
This year, along with Alicia, the Wall will add Morton Branham Jr., a 1978 Dunbar grad who is being honored for his community activism, work with youth and for launching the Citizens for Greencastle, which has cleaned up the old, previously overgrown cemetery; Margaret Booze, a retired Montgomery County child support officer and 1968 Wolverines grad who is the president of the Dunbar High Alumni Association, started the booster club and has done extensive research on Dunbar grads long past; and Alesia (Capers) Gillison, a 1982 grad who is the assistant principal and chief academic officer of the Pickerington Local School District and was a former teacher, assistant track coach and track star at Dunbar.
“This means a lot to me,” Alicia said. “I went to preschool at Dunbar when they had a preschool there. I grew up around the school and its teams, thanks to my mom, and I graduated from there.
“To be recognized all these years later is a great honor.” Anna agreed: She told me, ‘Mama, of all the awards I’ve gotten over the years, this means so much to me.’ She’s been a Dunbar Wolverine since the days she was crawling around over there. She’s really deserving of this.”
“One of best decisions I ever made’
Anna Earley grew up poor on Perry Street. Her dad had epilepsy and could not work, so her mom, Cornelia, who’d come to Dayton from Little Rock, Arkansas, carried the burden of supporting the family.
After graduating from Roosevelt High School in 1964, Anna said she headed off to Central State with her belongings in a “paper bag.”
“I didn’t have anything, so I used to get hotdogs and cook them in my dorm at night and then sell them to other students,” she said.
Coming out of CSU at age 20 with a teaching degree, she was offered a job in the Virgin Islands, but turned it down to help her family at home. Her first teaching job was at Emerson Elementary
“I was the only black,” she said. “I remember when Edison burned down, they were going to bring the black students over and they sent me to ride with them on the bus.
“But when we got off the bus, it looked like there were hundreds of angry people on the other side of the street. We were all alone, so I told the kids to just stand there and not move and I called Art Thomas and said, ‘I’m afraid they’re gonna try to kill us!’
“He sent a bus to get us and we were out of school two or three days after that.
“But you know what happened?
“I got in there and started working with all the kids and they made me Teacher of the Year.”
Years later she would be named one of Dayton’s Top Ten Women and be honored by Ohio Governor George Voinovich. She taught at Stivers and Roosevelt and spent 37 of her 50 years in Dayton Public Schools at Dunbar
She is best known as a coach, leading the Dunbar tennis and cross-country teams and especially girls basketball and track.
She was the Wolverines head hoops coach for several years and then, in 1982, became Tom Montgomery’s assistant. Nine years later, they led Dunbar to the state title.
Back in 1978, when she was pregnant with her daughter, Anna stayed on the job until school brass forced her to take a leave.
“They were afraid I was going to have my baby right out there on the track,” she laughed. “I stepped away around May 1st and Poochie was born soon after that.”
Anna said she was back to work in time to guide the team to the state meet in Columbus: “Poochie was out there at the state meet when she was a month old.”
As for that nickname it started when she first tried to speak.
“When she was a baby, all she’d say was ‘poo…poo, poo,’” Anna laughed. “And I’d say, ‘No, that’s a dog!’ and she’d go ‘poo?’…Finally, I said, ‘OK, you say everything is poo, then you’re Poochie.’ And it stuck.”
Although she went to the Dunbar Child Care Center, Alicia went to grade school at Dayton Christian.
But after school, on weekends and throughout the summers, she was around Dunbar and her mom’s teams.
“Dunbar used to have a trampoline right in the floor as you walked in the weight room,” Anna remembered. “Poochie had a little friend, Gail, and they’d be in there jumping on it when I had practice and then they’d run to the cafeteria and around the school. She’d have a great time.”
Her daughter was showing athletic prowess at Dayton Christian, so when it came time for high school, she had a choice to make.
She could stay at Dayton Christian or go to Wayne High School since she and her mom lived in Huber Heights. Chaminade Julienne also wanted her and then there was Dunbar if she wanted to go to school with her mom.
“When I asked, she said, ‘I know you didn’t just ask me that,’” Anna recalled. “She said, ‘I’m going with you. I want to go to Dunbar!’ She loved the place. The school was her life.”
Alicia reflected on that decision a few days ago when we spoke:
“I knew the school. I knew they had good teachers. If you didn’t go there, you might have a different take, but when you actually went there, you knew. Going to Dunbar was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.”
Pressure-packed job
As Anna sat in the dining room of her home a couple of afternoons ago, she was under the watchful eye of a woman whose portrait hung on the wall behind her.
“That’s my mama,” she said quietly. “She’s the key to all of this.”
In a back bedroom, several of Poochie’s gleaming trophies were lined up in a corner.
“I try to get her to take a few home each time she comes in,” Anna said with a grin.
On the table in front of her, she had spread out a display — in photos, plaques and proclamations — that told of her daughter’s success over the years.
She pointed to the nursery school diploma dated June 3, 1983: “This is Poochie’s story — from nursery school to the wall of fame.”
She beamed when she held up the photos of each of her grandchildren. She recounted how Bailey rides the bike she got her “without training wheels” and how Poochie told her that Brian “gets 100 percent on all his papers.”
“I think she’s too hard on him,” Anna said “I say, ‘He’s only seven Pooch. He’s only seven years old!’
“And she says ‘Mama, I’m raisin’ a black man in America!’”
There were three plaques her daughter was awarded when she graduated from Airman Leadership School. One was the Distinguished Graduate Award, another was the Academic Achievement Award and the other was the Leadership Award.
Anna motioned to a photo of the 112-member graduating class and smiled: “They only gave out four awards and Poochie got three.”
For her daughter, those traits for which she was lauded have come to use in her daily work as an air traffic controller.
“Air Traffic has three different parts to it,” Alicia said. “There’s the tower at Hartsfield. There’s radar, which I’m a part of in Peachtree City, Georgia, and then there’s the center in Hampton. We (oversee) Atlanta, all of Georgia and half of Alabama.
“The tower switches planes to me and I climb them up, making sure they don’t hit anybody. I get them on their way and at about 15,000 feet, I turn them over to the center and they work them up into their flight level at 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 feet.
“We also line up the planes to land and then give them back to the tower.
“It’s one of the most stressful jobs in the world. That’s why they make us retire at 56. And you can’t even start this job if you’re over 31. There’s a lot of pressure.”
As Anna talked about her daughter’s job, she reached for a sheet that contained her resume and after a few seconds of study, pointed to the bottom line which read “Obtained Secret Service Clearance.”
“You know how they always say they don’t know if the President is on this plane or that one? Well, Poochie knows exactly. She has the codes, and she has to guide them in,” Anna said.
“And a while back, when Trump was coming in, she had a Secret Service man in with her. He was leaning in, right over her shoulder, and finally she had to sit him down. She said, ‘Sir, there’s a seat right there. Please take it.’
“She had to work and couldn’t be distracted.
“Like she’s told me, ‘Mom, if you make a mistake in your job, you can go back and correct it. If I make a mistake, somebody dies.’
“That’s why they retire them early. They’re under stress every day.
“When Poochie hits retirement age, I don’t know what she’ll do next. She believes in working hard, so it will be something. I don’t know what she has planned. She’s somebody who overnight just goes and does something all out once she gets the idea.”
That’s how all this started so many years ago when she went to a barbecue and got a taste of something besides chicken and potato salad.
About the Author