happy birthday, Alice Dunnigan
Alice Allison (later Dunnigan) as a teenager.
“Born to Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So, a baby girl.”
As a 13-year-old writer for the Owensboro Enterprise, Alice Allison wrote one-sentences stories “about the happenings of our little city” to be published in the paper under the heading “Home Town News.” Remembering this job decades later, she gave examples of what she might have written for a birth announcement (as quoted above) or a Sunday service: “Rev. Holier Than Thou filled the pulpit at the First Baptist Church Sunday.”
I doubt, though I can’t be sure, that Alice’s birth made the paper. But, on this day in 1906, the paper could have published, “Born to Mr. Willie and Mrs. Lena Allison, a baby girl.”
Alice was born in a three-room whitewashed cottage in Logan County, Kentucky, two miles away from the nearest town, Russellville—where, since 2019, a bronze sculpture in her likeness has stood.
Her father worked as a tenant farmer and her mother as a washerwoman. Though not wealthy, the family never lacked for food since they grew so much themselves—asparagus, peanuts, green beans, tomatoes, beets, apple trees, strawberries.
I’m a city, or at least a town, girl myself, so when I read about Alice’s early years, I think of my great-grandparents, who lived for most of my childhood in Nortonville, Kentucky. I remembering standing among the towering bean plants in Papa’s backyard garden, then going inside to help snap off the green beans’ ends. And when Alice writes, “My mother was a stickler for cleanliness and comfort,” I remember what Mamarie frequently said about her own childhood: “We were poor, but we were never dirty.”
Unlike my great-grandparents and despite little encouragement for Black children to stay in school rather than go to work, Alice loved attending school (and graduated from the two-year Knob City High School, the only option for Black students at the time).
Alice was especially interested in writing and drama, and her eighth-grade teacher “recognized my writing ability and encouraged me to develop it,” Alice wrote in her autobiography. Here is something I do have in common with Alice—from Mrs. Pearson in fifth grade to Gurney Norman in college, I have been greatly influenced by the writing teachers who encouraged me.
“This was especially gratifying,” Alice wrote of the encouragement, “because, since I was very little, I had wanted to be a newspaper reporter.”
She didn’t remember why she wanted to be a newspaper reporter, and it’s almost a wonder that she even knew it was an option—since she had no access to Black newspapers and knew no Black reporters.
It was after sharing her dreams with her cousin, who taught in Owensboro, that she got her one-sentence stories job with the Owensboro Enterprise. After two years in this role, Alice wrote, she was becoming known around the state as “a prospective newspaperwoman.”
More than a century later, we know the kind of newspaperwoman she became—a pioneer, an inspiration, an icon. Please join me today in celebrating a woman who, in her words, “seemed to have printer’s ink in my veins.” And how lucky for us that she did.
Happy 119th birthday, Alice.