A Gift of Rocket Power

Christy Frederic

Christy Frederic places much value on the education she earned at Loyola University New Orleans. It served her well in life and in her career, and she hopes her story and her continued financial support will help demonstrate the value of her education and the promise of that value for others. Her interest is in Loyola's continued delivery of whole persons capable of critical thinking.

Christy never backs away from hard work. She graduated from Loyola in communications in January 1978. She was told by admissions that she had the thickest financial aid file on campus. To her, it always seemed like a miracle she was able to study at Loyola and complete her degree. She financed her own education, with as much help from her parents as they could afford. She was the oldest of seven children—and the only one who completed college.

She remembers touring the television studios during orientation and asking a fellow who was operating the video switcher if he could synchronize the video pattern with the music. He did, to her amazement. She knew right away that she was going to have a great time at Loyola.

For Christy, the Loyola experience was a crash course in being a whole, thinking and responsible human being. She warns that Loyola is not for those seeking job training. "The stuff that makes Loyola worth the time, energy and investment is much bigger than a trade or job skill."

She admits she was pretty shy at the time, but the television production labs had Christy and her classmates rotating through all the various broadcast television positions, such as: guest, host, camera, audio and director. Her turn as guest and host helped her gain experience and confidence.

In particular, she learned the power of really listening, a skill that would make all the difference in the world in her career dealing with angry, fearful and frustrated customers, employees and executives. Learning that the vast majority of information is communicated nonverbally—and how powerful really listening can be—influenced everything in her career.

She worked multiple jobs, on and off campus, including her final campus job working for Father Neil Hurley, SJ. Every semester, she thought about quitting because managing both work and school was so difficult. And she knew it was really hard on her parents, who did without to help her through.

Her only regret was her decision to forgo the additional expenses of graduation, which would have required returning to New Orleans the following May after finishing in January. She realized far too late how much it would have meant to her family.

After graduating from Loyola, she continued to work hard. She had student loans to pay back, but chose graduate school at Louisiana State University, where she gained experience working nights and weekends at a Baton Rouge television station. Interestingly, she had to enter the graduate program in speech, because they could not add anything to the radio, television, film and journalism work she had completed already at Loyola.

It meant teaching 7:30 a.m. classes, completing her graduate class load and working nights and weekends at the TV station. In 1979, the WBRZ-TV was a premier production house. They produced all the spots for the four gubernatorial candidates and both runoff winners. Production continued from 2:30 p.m. when her shift started until the morning crew arrived at 5:30 a.m. Many days she left WBRZ at 5:30 a.m. after working all night and headed to LSU to teach classes at 7:30 a.m.

Ultimately, Christy chose not to finish her graduate studies. Her father was diagnosed with advanced cancer during this time, which caused her to seriously evaluate every hour of her life. She quit the graduate program after three semesters and never regretted it. She saw her father through eight months of chemotherapy, taking him to weekly treatments and keeping him company when not working nights and weekends at WBRZ. Her mother had to keep working. Christy's time at Loyola did not seem so tough anymore.

She is grateful for the time she spent with her father. During a time she had every reason to fear would be depressing and hopeless, she and her father explored all kinds of topics. She learned more from him in those months than she had in two decades as his daughter. He taught her the reality and power of eternal love. Her father died at 51, leaving her 44-year-old mother with four children still in high school.

When Christy began looking for a position with more normal hours, she realized that throughout her radio, television and film work, she had not actually been paid to write. So she took a job as a magazine editor and photographer, supplementing that work by taking on the advertising sales responsibilities, as well as the editorial, for two glossy statewide trade association magazines, a monthly newsletter for a statewide travel association and ​This Week​ in Baton Rouge, a glossy weekly distributed to all the hotels, attractions and visitor centers. She worked all the time, covering the advertising sales calls during the day and the editorial at night—so much for normal hours.

After a stint with the magazines, Christy was recruited by Cleco Corporation, one of the Louisiana investor-owned electric companies that advertised in a statewide publication she edited. Despite requiring a move to their headquarters in Pineville, they made her an offer she could not refuse. She was able to use all of her media and writing background, as well as grow a wealth of business skills.

Other than serving as the company's communications specialist, her greatest successes stemmed from recruiting and developing other leaders and preventing bad things from happening. Though it's hard to put a value on these tremendous skill sets, she learned to demonstrate their value with pointed examples of what could have been, such as the crazy "power lines causing childhood cancer" era in the late 1980s, and lessons on how to communicate storm preparation and response in order to avoid some of the negative press coverage borne by neighboring utilities. She handled hundreds of genuinely fearful inquiries and quite a few angry folk, but Cleco had not a single lawsuit, big protest or power line relocation so common for others.

Company leaders began to accept the reality that she and her team painted of a complex "community of customers," an audience that was not simply comprised of investors and regulators. They accepted findings of rigorous market research on the views of that entire "community" and supported fact-based decisions on how to move the needle. She helped them understand that the most important (and yet scary) need is to feed employees' growing hunger for business news in a changing environment; that leaders had to model desired behaviors and not simply talk about them; and that making good decisions in complex situations requires delicate balance and extreme listening.

"But, it was the listening and the telling of compelling stories of those behaviors and decisions in the context of that community of customers that gave employees rocket power," Christy recalls. "Loyola studies were ringing in my ears every day!"

After two decades of this rewarding but very difficult work, including major organizational shifts and layoffs, office closings, the "hostile" takeover of a cooperative; leading an unwilling management team through the birth and growth of the Internet; changing the name and rebranding the company; and managing millions of dollars in advertising each year, she realized that the managers she had developed and the protégés she had hired could carry on without her. It was time for something completely different!

After leaving Cleco, Christy served as a consultant and project manager to businesses, municipalities and nonprofit agencies that sought out her extensive experience in public affairs, emergency planning and crisis management. Christy served as the program officer for a community foundation, was then appointed as a city zoning commissioner, and now serves on the city council. She serves on the boards of the Rapides Area Planning Commission and United Way, and is a co-founder of Community HealthWoRx, which provides free services and medications to the working uninsured. She was the first woman to serve as president of a Rotary Club in Louisiana and was recognized many times as Rotarian of the Year. To this day, she remains very busy and very much involved in her community.

Christy looks back and one thing remains very clear. Every month for close to 10 years, she wrote a check to repay her student loans. Each time, she reflected on the very different kind of currency she had earned from her time at Loyola. It was an amazing investment then and a great investment now.

Christy has named Loyola a beneficiary of a retirement account. "Investing in Loyola this way is a painless and unique opportunity to help sustain development of whole human beings," she says. "Such beings are much more capable of grasping the power of listening and the power of compelling stories; the power of decisions and behaviors in the context of a community of customers. This is rocket power."

Like Christy, you can pay forward your Loyola experience with a gift in your will or estate plan. To learn more, please contact Kevin Maney at 504-861-5442 or kmaney@loyno.edu.