FEBRUARY/MARCH 2001
THESE CHEERLEADERS ARE STILL A TEAM
The love story of FSU grads Jon (pronounced
Yon) and Barbra Crum-packer starts with cheering.
"A fraternity brother dragged me out of bed one morning,"
Jon remembers. "He said, 'There are some DGs (Delta Gamma
sorority members) trying out for the cheerleading squad.' I thought
it was a good way to meet girls."
The pair dropped by the early practice, and Jon put his high-school gymnastic skills to use doing aerial stunts. His flying and flipping caught the attention of Barbra Atwood, a freshman from Lake City.
Jon said they clicked right away.
The pair became a team, and Jon reluctantly agreed to try out
for the squad. They made it and moved up to varsity in 1986.
Barbra ended up with more than a husband from her cheerleading
experience. She also found a career.
A dietitian, Barbra said her interest in nutrition came from
the "insane weight limits."
"The girls did crazy - and unhealthy - things to lose weight," Barbra said. "I knew there was a right way to do it, and I wanted to know how."
Until recently becoming a stay-at-home mom after the birth of their third child, Barbra was assistant director of Nutrition Services at Archbold Memorial Hospital in Thomasville, Ga..
For the last several years, she has appeared weekly on Tallahassee CBS affiliate WCTV presenting a cooking segment sponsored by Archbold.
Jon Crumpacker began his career developing compact disc interactive (CD-I) titles at Philips Electronics. It was there that he met three like-minded young men who joined him in forming Illuminactive Multimedia .
"We had done a lot of Web work and had a good client base that included Disney, MediaOne, Darden Restaurants - Olive Garden, Red Lobster - and state and federal government agencies. " But in 1999, they channeled the technology into a specific niche delivering training over the Internet for professional associations - and became LearnSome-thing.com in December 1999.
"It has been a wild ride with lots of ups and downs and ups especially as a dotcom in this economy," said Jon, CEO of the company, which recently won a number of new clients, including the American Medical Association.
"We've grown from 17 to 70 employees in the last year."
Jon and Barbra said their cheering days helped prepare them for what was ahead.
"For success, both partners have to be involved,"
Jon said. "It's a good prelude to marriage. It doesn't matter
how well one does if the other does not. It's a team. That's
the cool part of it."
- Dave Fiore
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