Rose takes helm of alumni association board

September 5-11, 2016

By Jay Edwards

Holly Rose, the incoming president for UALR’s Alumni Association, is familiar with the inner workings of the board she will be leading, having served a term before.

“I was chair of the membership and communication committees previously, and the last two years have served on the scholarship committee,” she said from the boardroom at the Bailey Center on the campus of UALR. She has also served on the board of the Ronald McDonald House.

Rose’s hometown is Bradford, Arkansas in White County, where she was in a senior class of 37 at Bradford High. “The Eagles,” she says. From there it was off to Little Rock and UALR. “I thought I wanted to be a reporter.”

But then she said she took a sales and marketing class, taught by Bob Denman, who recently retired from his full time duties as vice-chancellor of development of the university.

“The class Bob taught was at night and it was awesome,” Rose said. “He was the one who got me fired up about going into sales.”

After one class Denman asked her what she was going to do after graduation and she enthusiastically told him about her plans for television. “I said, I’m going to get my demo tape together and…but he cut me off, saying, ‘You will waste away in the news department.’”

“I remember thinking, What! How rude!”

But Denman was convincing and persistent and the two would later work together at Channel 4 in Little Rock, where Denman was general sales manager and hired Rose as a sales assistant.

Her time at KARK lasted nine years. “Thank God, because it was a wonderful experience,” she says.

From sales assistant she moved to research director to local sales to national sales and finally general sales manager. The station was sold to Nexstar Broadcasting Group. “But our philosophies were different,” she said. She soon got a call from the GM at Fox, who offered her a job and she spent ten years there until Nexstar came in again and purchased that station. She decided to give it a try but finally decided it wasn’t for her. So she took that summer off, to spend time with her kids. Then she got a call from Joe Neal, who owns Neal and Associates Advertising. He asked her what she was going to do and she said she would think about it when summer ended. He told her not to do anything until talking with him. She listened and has been with Neal three years and says she loves it.

Rose commutes every day from Mayflower to Little Rock. Her husband Darren has an insurance agency in Conway. When they married they each had young boys, one four and one five. The boys are both out of high school now. Zack is in school at Fayetteville and Garrett at UCA. Another boy came along later, John, who will be a first grader this fall.

When some think of Mayflower, bad weather comes to mind and Rose says she and her family were definitely affected by the last tornado in April of 2014.

“It came right over our house, right over the room we were in. We didn’t have a safe room so we all huddled next to an interior wall. We put a mattress over ourselves, and a bike helmet on John. I remember I had made taco salad for dinner. You remember things vividly from something like that.”

Garrett was at home working on a school project with his girlfriend Anna. Darren was home as well. The only one not there was Zack, who was at Fayetteville.

Darren looked outside and said, “It’s bad. You guys get ready.”

Then Zack called and told his mom they needed to get their shoes on.

“We were all under the mattress waiting, except for Darren, who was still watching from the back porch, like all good men do.”

“You could see it coming. Darren jumped under the mattress and we all started praying hard.”

She said she had been home all day cleaning. “I had scrubbed our pool house from top to bottom. It looked so good. Later, all that was left of it was the toilet.”

The tornado seemed to last forever. She remembers thinking, ‘Is it never going to stop?’ The windows all blew in. It took most of the roof and columns off the front and back.

“Darren and Garrett walked out first and I heard both of them say ‘Oh my God!’ Which made me wonder if another tornado was coming. But their reaction was to the damage.”

“Everything was gone. All the homes around us were gone. We were in shock. But we also knew we were very lucky. I think what helped was that we were right in the eye, which is not as violent as the outer edges, that, and a lot of prayer.”