5 Years on the Bureau Beat

Today, April 5th, marks 5 years since I became the station's Sand Mountain reporter. The first story I did was about the ceiling at Plainview School falling in because of heavy rain. In many ways it doesn't seem like five years. When I started we were working out of a small office, not much bigger than a bathroom, in Guntersville. We didn't have internet, nor did we even have a TV in the office. We just had a little laptop computer we could dial into the system in Huntsville and that was it. We also did not have microwave capabilities. That meant we couldn't send our stories to Huntsville. We would have to drive to the station everyday and drive back. That made for some long days.

In these five years, I've covered plenty of meth labs, murders, three Hurricanes, September 11th, the death of one soldier, several others who were hurt, the shooting death of a police chief, was live on the air as a tornado passed right over the bureau, a presidential election, a visit by the vice president, a governor's race(soon to be two), the innauguration of Governor Riley, more high school football games than I can count, a year long court battle over who would be the mayor of Guntersville, five Poke Salat festivals and I've read to about 50 different classes of kids, some of which are now in high school.