Woman Of The Year(book)
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By Drew Babb
ust before fall of 1981, Martha Akers packed up her hot yellow Pontiac Grand Am. She’d just graduated from Bridgewater College in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. She raced up I-81 to Purcellville to teach English at Loudoun Valley High School. You can’t fast forward 41 years. But test drive the metaphor, anyway. This spring, she emptied her desk at Valley after serving four decades as advisor to LVHS’s “Saga” yearbook. Repeat: 41 years. Of the 41 “Sagas” she guided, traffic-copped and cajoled from her teenage staffs, 36 won gruelingly competitive prizes from the Virginia High School League. If this were athletics, we’d be talking New England Patriots/UCLA men’s basketball/Tennessee women’s basketball. And to this day, she still wears a gold ring from Kansas State’s Journalism Education Association that named her 2005 Yearbook Advisor of the Year. The Akers Era spans four Valley principals and the onslaught of printing/photography and communications “advances” she’s navigated as skillfully as Ferdinand Magellan. For her first two decades Akers taught English and advised the yearbook as an extracurricular activity. For the last 21 years, she taught journalism and photojournalism. (Fun fact: In 1981 the “Saga” cost $20,000 to
produce and cost the students $25. In 2021 the production cost $80,000 and the cost to LVHS Vikings was in the $65 range.) Her students have gone on to gigs at ESPN, Netflix, Blue State Digital, faculty slots at Rutgers and the University of New Orleans, an Air Force fighter pilot, playwrights, film producers, film editors and a U.S. House of Representative member from Texas, to name a few. Akers also has become a mainstay at national workshops for other high school yearbook advisors. Which makes her an Advisor to Advisors, Super Advisor, take your pick. In wrapping up this all-too-short valedictory to Martha Akers, know these three truths: One, she presided over the monumental shift from LVHS yearbook as a club activity to a legitimate credit course. Two, in 2021, she had a chance to not publish a Covid Year “Saga.” That wasn’t going to happen. Her quote: “Nonsense. This is history. We will publish.” Three, she’s not slinking into That Good Night. She’ll prowl the country spreading her brand of motivation and “traffic-copping.” Her wonderful work produces winning yearbooks, and more importantly, winning citizens. Along with the awards and kudos, here’s her take on her legacy. “My hope is staff members and students realize any staff can excel. Hard work produces a level of knowledge and achievement that’s not easy to obtain,
Photo by Sarah Huntington
The Sagas of Martha Akers. but always is worthwhile.” Author James Hilton, in Good-Bye, Mr. Chips, has one character say––“Brookfield will never forget his lovableness.” To paraphrase–– “Loudoun Valley will never forget her lovableness, her guidance and her grace.”
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Country ZEST & Style | Fall 2021
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