“Although I’ve gone by Tom since I left high school, almost everyone I knew from Bishop Dunne knows me as Tommy,” says 2014 Hall of Fame honoree Tom Parma.
Voted “Most Handsome” by his classmates, he earned a Golden Falcon for Outstanding Graduate and Salutatorian of his senior class. He also set several state records in track, one in a relay race with a sophomore named Tennell Atkins – now the Mayor Pro Tem of Dallas. He was a member of the track team that won two state championships in ’71 and ’72, and the baseball team that won three, in ’69, ’71 and ’72, narrowly losing a fourth in 1970.
After graduating in 1972, Mr. Parma attended UCLA on a full baseball scholarship and graduated in 1976. He returned to Texas and attended graduate school at UT Austin, receiving an MBA in 1978.
“After graduate school, I accepted a job in Washington State with IBM. I was with IBM for 15 years. I thought I’d be moved around a lot, but I was hired into the Olympia office and stayed there,” he explains. He met his wife, Laura, at work, and said, “Later, she had to fly to Dallas for training. She met my parents and realized how much my family meant to me, so she figured I must be OK,” he recalled with a smile.
Mr. Parma left IBM in 1994 and has been working for the Washington State government since then and is currently the Deputy Director for Information Technology at the Washington State Department of Transportation.
Mr. Parma admits he’s a happy family man. He shares, “I met the love of my life, Laura, at work in 1982. We’ve have been married since 1985 and have two gorgeous children. My daughter, Kristina, is 27. She graduated from Arizona State University and was married last year to my great son-in-law, John Linehan. They met at work as my wife and I did. They both work for a software company in Washington. And my son, Jackson, is 23 and in his final year of engineering at the University of Washington (UW) and member of the UW 2014 collegiate national champion rowing team.”
In his spare time he was a professional tennis official for 12 years and worked the Davis Cup in Hawaii and Canada as well as many events in Florida, Arizona, California, and at the U.S. Open in New York. He remembers, “I wanted to be a football official, but was sort of laughed at when I applied. I was told that it’s very hard to get accepted into the local officials’ association. But one day I saw a notice on a bulletin board that USTA tennis officials were needed. I didn’t think I had a chance, because I really didn’t play much tennis, but I was accepted into the program, became a certified official and the next thing you know I’m making line calls at major events. I eventually became a chair umpire at many of them as well.”
At one point underground sensors were introduced into the game, “to modernize the line calls, to take the ‘human mistake’ element out of the game,” Parma recalls, explaining, “The problem was the system was so sensitive, if a ball even got near a line the sensor would go off – and stop play. The pros were really upset with the new technology and after about the fifth time the sensor went off, the head referee asked my opinion. I told him to turn the thing off – and he did – and the match went on.”
He retired from his USTA officiating when he realized he was using up his vacation days to travel to major tournaments, and he wanted more time at home with his family.
Now that his kids are grown, he and his wife enjoy traveling, and have been to Europe several times and Asia. They also spend many weekends at the Washington shore and Hawaii when they can get away.
“I value the close friendships I made at Bishop Dunne,” he says, “and I still get together with several of my classmates. They have been there to help my family on more than one occasion, even from far away. He adds, “When my daughter went to college at Arizona State, a former Falcon lived in Phoenix and reached out to her, and she became good friends with him and his family.”
This Falcon will fly back to Bishop Dunne for Homecoming weekend, and looks forward to seeing his former classmates and friends.
If you’d like to wish Tom Parma congratulations on his Hall of Fame designation, you can contact him at: tgparma@gmail.com.
Elizabeth Corley, Hall of Fame Inductee - Class of 1974
Elizabeth “E.C.” Corley admits that she is ‘kind of a geek’ but explains, “The business term is ‘technologist’ - at least that’s what we tell ourselves,” she says with a laugh.
A very good student in math, science, and English, she admits she did try to do poorly in one course: typing. “When I was in high school, typing was a business class. I intentionally tried to fare poorly in this, because I didn’t want to end up being a secretary,” she laughs, adding, “just shows how much times have changed!”
Corley grew up in Oak Cliff and still has family here. A graduate of St. Elizabeth’s, attending Bishop Dunne was a natural progression for her.
While at Dunne she was in the Drama Club all four years, was on the Drill Team for three, and managed two teams - basketball and volleyball. She was also a member of the National Thespian Society, the National Honor Society, and on the Mitre yearbook staff.
“After gaining a great foundational education at Bishop Dunne, I earned a BBA in marketing from the University of Texas at Arlington,” she reports, then she went on to complete post-graduate courses in executive education at the University of Dallas; then INSEAD, The European Institute of Business Administration in Fontainebleau, France; and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Management in Durham, North Carolina.
Elizabeth began her career in high-tech sales and marketing in Texas. She went on to a successful sales, marketing, and communications career in New Jersey, Italy, and Belgium, before moving to Ohio, where she now lives. She works for Teradata, a global software company which is focused on helping other companies get value from their data, and is responsible for investor and internal corporate communications.
In communications and marketing, she has developed corporate brands, built customer affinity programs, and managed direct marketing, events, and media and influencer relations. Now, she guides a team that is focused on building employee advocacy and engagement through effective internal communications and communicating to investors.
“What all that means is, I take our new product information and new technology and help make it understandable to the average employee or investor. I spend a lot of time with deeply technical, brilliant people. So I go back to the skills I learned in school – engineering, math, back to the basics – I take the high-tech information and use my English skills to make it understandable to the average person. If we can’t explain how a really great piece of computer code is a useful and needed tool for business, it’ll never get sold – or used,” she explains.
Working in Europe for AT&T and Olivetti helped deepen her knowledge of international business. “Global responsibilities at NCR and Teradata have afforded me the opportunity to travel to many countries around the world,” she says, and these experiences helped fuel her appreciation for different cultures.
“That’s also what I really appreciated about Bishop Dunne,” she says, “and what is really special about Bishop Dunne. I loved being in a much more integrated school. It is so much more like the real world! I really enjoyed it – now I have all kinds of friends who are great people, from different religions, different races, and different countries.”
Elizabeth credits her favorite teacher, Ms. Crissey, for helping her to do so well in college and her career. “She was truly a great math teacher. I also fondly recall Ms. Taylor, who taught Physical Ed. She founded Bishop Dunne’s drill team as well—she had such enthusiasm for her craft. And, I received the Golden Falcon for Theology, so some of our great brothers’ instruction must have stuck with me,” she laughs.
Elizabeth has so many wonderful memories of Bishop Dunne that she couldn’t pick just one, but focused on her performances with the “Eyalettes,” the predecessor to the current Falconettes drill team. She adds, “I was the absolute shortest on the drill team, so always had to be on one end. I became a lieutenant in my senior year, so that I could move from the ‘the end of the line.’”
English and history were her favorite courses, but says she realized later – in college – that business courses would help her to make more money in her career. She dropped history and focused on her business classes and the rest, as they say, is history.
She has kept in touch with many of her high school friends through attending class reunions whenever she can. “There was a group that hung around together in high school, but they now live all across the US. For those of us who don’t live in Dallas, these reunions keep us connected,” she explains.
EC hopes to catch up with this group of friends at the Homecoming game on October 24, 2014, as she has a business function the night before, so will be flying in that morning.
A lifetime of flying from city to city, country to country, and now back to Oak Cliff’s Bishop Dunne, this former Eyalette has grown to be a successful Falcon, and a Hall of Fame honoree of whom we can all be proud.
Homecoming festivities begin at 6:30. The Hall of Fame induction is at 7:00 p.m. at Earl Hayes Stadium, on the Falcon Football field located at 3900 Rugged Drive, Dallas. Kick off for the undefeated Falcons is at 7:30 p.m.
Information provided by Judy Porter.