Alison M. Weber -- Personal History
I began work at age
11, taking a bus into Washington,
D.C. from the suburbs, aattaching
test tubes to sterile jars for the American Red Cross during the summer. At 14,
I handled “complaint calls” for a large appliance retailer, which was my first
paying job. Summers, during high school and college in the 1960s, I worked as a
“typist” for various government installations, including the USAFGC, Pentagon, in
Washington, D.C. I ran out of funds for college after
two years and went to work at Walter Reed General Hospital, at first as the
secretary to the Chief of the Pathology, and then as Chief of the Blood Drawing
Unit, which put me in charge of OJT for young MSC lieutenants to learn proper venipuncture
techniques in addition to my secretarial duties, which included dictaphone
transcription and a knowledge of medical terminology. I met and married an Army sergeant and after
he left the military, we moved and I took a job with the Army Map Service as a
head secretary where I mastered their first word processing unit that took up
an entire, though small, room. After
another move, I continued in a Civil Service position as Secretary to the Chief
of the Special Mapping Agency, US Geological Survey, in Reston, VA. I was reassigned as the lead administrative
support person to a committee of the Office of Management and Budget that was
assessing all of the mapping capabilities within the Armed Services. In this capacity, I supported a team of civilian
and military personnel from many government agencies and saw the work through
to the formation of the Defense Mapping Agency.
At this point, I became a young widow following the unexpected death of
my husband.
I returned to
Frostburg State College (MD) where I had been from 1964-1966 and completed my
degree (Political Science) in 1976. I
was remarried in 1978 and look forward to my 33rd anniversary this November. During the mid-70s, starting with a college
internship, I was employed by WCBC Radio, Cumberland,
MD, as a broadcast journalist,
covering local and state news. In the
early 1980s, I stopped working and hoped to begin a family. We adopted an infant from Korea in 1984
and again in 1985, and I planned to be a fulltime mother. My husband began an industrial sales
distributorship south of Pittsburgh,
however, and my services became essential.
I acted as Vice President and oversaw all the administrative processes
of the business which were many and varied, and learned computer accounting,
mostly by trial and error. I began home-educating
my children in 1988 while continuing to handle the accounting functions of our
business and did this until 1992. At
that time, a surprise event took place in my life, adding a third child to the
family. With her birth, I went completely off-payroll and continued
home-schooling for 20 years. During this period, I started a homeschool support
group in Greene County that I chaired for the first year
before moving to Armstrong 17 years ago.
I’ve led a variety of homeschooling events, field trips, classes, and
clubs. When my youngest was in 4th grade, we experimented with a
cyber-charter school. The next year, although not enrolling my child, I worked
for the school which is no longer in existence. During that year, in which the
school was failing, I started off assisting the school nurse with paperwork;
other teachers with grading, and calling on delinquent students’ families, but
ended teaching three upper elementary English classes. Today, I my oldest daughter, Alexa, and her
husband work in San Francisco
and are young entreprneurs, introducing Foodspotting.com around the world. My
youngest daughter, Samantha, just graduated from Freeport
Area High
School, summa cum laude, and will attend Grove City College
in the fall. Our son, Zach, died 3 years ago while serving in the Air Force at
Aviano AFB, Italy. My husband sells optimization equipment for
gas wells for Weatherford, Inc., for the eastern portion of the US. We
attend North Park Evangelical Presbyterian Church. In the past, at former churches, I was active leading VBS and teaching Children’s
Sunday School .
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