Today's Q&A from back in the day

        The Emmy Award-winning documentary Ashes to Glory debuted to rave reviews in 2000. The film about the 1970 Marshall University plane crash inspired viewers. But for many people like MU alumna Angela Dodson, it would be years after the documentary’s release before they could muster up enough nerve to watch a film that  brought back so many painful memories. Dodson, a free-lance writer, editor and consultant, was a sophomore journalism major at the time of the tragedy.
        Q: What gave you "the nerve" to finally sit down and watch Ashes to Glory?

Angela Dodson

        A: I felt I needed to see it for background and context to write a story on you and November Ever After for Diverse: Issues in Higher Education (www.diverseeducation.com). By the time I watched it, I had already read your book, so those wounds had already been opened up. The documentary couldn’t hurt much. 
       Q: What were your thoughts after you finished watching it?
       A: I realized what a profound and shocking experience we had lived through. I always thought so, but time had dulled the senses and this helped bring it back. Your book reflects more of my own experience of the event.
      The documentary taught me more about other people’s particular experiences and circumstances and brought me up to date on some people I had wondered about, like the two cheerleaders whose parents were killed, leaving them to raise younger brothers and sisters. One of the cheerleaders was a journalism major with us, and I always wanted to know how the family coped.
     I enjoyed learning, for instance, about the family that owned Marco, the live baby buffalo mascot. (I was at the game the day he broke loose on the football field.) Partly because I was in the local media after college, I also saw news people I knew in the documentary commenting on the events, and I enjoyed that.
    To paraphrase what my roommate, Murrial Jarrett, said after reading your book, I was 19 again and the events were fresh. It was glad to see some of the players “alive” again on the screen, and I could remember some of them as if the last time I had seen them was yesterday. Others were guys I had kind of forgotten or didn’t know as well, and the documentary freshened my memories of them.