Alumni Spotlight: Ben Ellis

From the stage of graduation to the screen of the Bama Theatre, Ben Ellis is making his mark on Tuscaloosa. This retired air traffic controller returned to his childhood town of Tuscaloosa and is the sound engineer of the independent documentary The Strip: Tuscaloosa’s Most Colorful Quarter-Mile. He is also a 2013 graduate of The University of Alabama, but the path to his bachelor’s degree took a nontraditional route.

In 1976, Ben began a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at UA as a freshman. He admits he wasn’t the most “academically focused” student and dropped out during his junior year. “I think they call it a ‘gap year’ now,” he joked.

Ben’s “gap year” lasted about 35 years. In that time, he met and married his wife (Kristi Lamont Ellis, also a UA grad), and he spent 23 years as an air traffic controller. Though he had never graduated from college, Ben’s passion for learning continued, and over the course of his career he took computer training classes at a community college and some audio-based studio recording courses at UAB, helping him explore an interest he’s had since he was a young boy.

“I’ve always been interested in audio. My father was a psychology professor at UA, and for some of his research, there was a lot of audio/visual equipment, so he’d bring home tape recorders and things, and I was always asking him about it,” Ben recalled.

In 2012, Ben retired and moved back to Tuscaloosa, and that’s when he found New College LifeTrack (NCLT), an alternative route to completing a bachelor’s degree from UA.

“Somewhere around that time, I got it in my head that I needed to finish my degree. There are a lot of degrees in my family. My father, of course, had his PhD, and I have a sister and a brother who also have PhDs. My mom earned an MLIS, one of my sisters has two master’s degrees, and my other sister is a nurse, so she has a degree. I was always the only one who never had a degree, and I never felt any pressure from any of them, but internally, I wanted to finish my degree.”

NCLT offers adults the opportunity to transfer a limited amount of prior training and life experience as college credit toward a Bachelor of Arts or Science in Interdisciplinary Studies. Ben had heard about NCLT and knew that Joe Namath had returned to UA after many years to complete his bachelor’s, so Ben began to connect with the staff there. The credits he’d earned at UAB helped him restart his time at UA with a good portion of his hours already complete. In January 2013, he began taking classes online through NCLT to earn his Bachelor of Science, which he had completed by the following December.

“My wife would tell people, ‘He’s on the Joe Namath plan.’”

Ben’s senior project allowed him to put more time and research into audio, specifically audio forensics. Because of his work on this project, he even won the Colgan Bryan Award for excellence in the field of science, technology and culture, which he was presented with at a special ceremony the weekend of graduation, before he walked in Commencement along with his fellow UA graduates. And now, everyone in Ben’s family can proudly claim a college degree.

“There’s absolutely a sense of personal pride and accomplishment in it,” Ben said of earning his degree.

Since graduation, he’s been able to use his interest in audio on a special project. Earlier this fall, he and friends Rick Dowling and Taylor Watson (pictured together below) premiered a film they had been working on over the last several years – a documentary about Tuscaloosa’s Strip and the history surrounding the culture it adds to the city.

“It was Taylor’s idea. He works at the Bryant Museum and was looking at archives of The Crimson White and ran across a story about the bar wars on the Strip in the ‘80s, and the documentary tells the story of the Strip – how it came to be what it is today,” Ben said.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of the documentary is field interviews. Most of them are in fairly controlled environments, but some of them were outside, and all of them needed cleaning up.” The “cleaning up” was left to Ben as the project’s sound engineer.

Thanks to help from Ben’s resident marketing expert (his wife Kristi), the film premiered better than any of them expected. “There was one point when we thought we were going to have to turn people away because the box office was so backed up with people. We got everyone in to see it though,” Ben said.

The premiere of The Strip did so well that they’re running a second showing on November 19 at the Bama Theatre in Tuscaloosa. To purchase tickets to the showing, visit the event website.