Written by Tiane Davis // Graphic by Ben Evans
The usual parking violation at Harding is $25. Receiving and paying parking tickets is a common complaint among students, and most would like to avoid paying them at all. For alumna Ellen Brumley, however, the story was different.
A little over two weeks ago, Brumley said she was looking through old yearbooks with a friend when a slip of paper fell out of one of them. The slip of paper was a Harding traffic violation ticket from December, 1971.
“I said, ‘I guess I need to pay that because I sure want to go to heaven,’” Brumley said with a laugh. “I don’t know how I got by without paying that, unless I really paid it and just kept the ticket.”
Brumley said her first concern was that Harding sometimes held transcripts and degrees if someone had an unpaid violation. She also said she wanted to “have a good time” with it and make sure all her debts were paid. When she brought it to the business office, the workers asked if she had received the ticket recently.
“I told them, ‘Look at the date,’” Brumley said. “One of the girls in the business office said, ‘Oh my goodness, this ticket is older than me.’”
Dean of intercultural education David Collins, who works in the same office as Brumley’s daughter, Mary Ellen, witnessed the interaction and decided to take the $1 payment to the International Programs office to be kept there. Mary Ellen Brumley said she was not surprised her mother tried to pay the ticket when she heard about it.
“My mom is a very honest person, and she doesn’t like things hanging over her head,” Mary Ellen Brumley said. “She’s always been like that since I can remember.”
Alumnus and former Executive Vice President Jim Carr said he and Brumley were close friends when they were students at Harding. He said she is “a person of impeccable integrity.”
“She would not want to leave anything undone that could be repaired or fixed,” Carr said. “I’m surprised she had an unpaid parking ticket, and I bet she paid it twice.”
Senior Alyssa Dodson, who said she paid a parking ticket last semester, said she felt it was her responsibility to follow the rules and pay it but that she was surprised to hear someone had made sure to pay a parking violation over 50 years old.
“If parking tickets were $1 today, I would also probably intentionally break the rule,” Dodson said. “I knew what I was signing up for when I parked in a faculty parking spot, but that didn’t make it more fun to hit submit on the payment.”
