Long-time Ruckersville resident Tom Dulaney Slonaker has had a plethora of successful careers, including sports broadcaster, financial engineer, stockbroker, and as an insurance agent he had an office in Charlottesville.
Then he really had some fun – when he started the entertainment company SuperFun Attractions more than 20 years ago.
“I did not want to pick up the roots that the family had made,” he said in a telephone interview. “That is what you have to do as a broadcaster, and I did not want to do that.”
He held some of his jobs concurrently during 25 years in sports broadcasting.
“It was my way of providing roots for my family rather than pursuing a sports career that would move around,” noted Slonaker, who called games for JMU, North Carolina and Virginia as well as independent games for ESPN, MASN, HTS Jefferson Pilot and Raycom.
For eight years, he hosted the Virginia coaches show, which included Terry Holland (basketball) and George Welsh, the former football coach.
SuperFun Attractions, with an arena in Ruckersville, provides services to about 500 customers a year.
The operations manager is Chuck Crenshaw, while the field manager is Lionel Bradford and the administrator is Nick Yates. SuperFun has eight full-time employees and also uses seasonal help. Crenshaw grew up in Charlottesville has an extensive background in music as he began playing drums in seventh grade.
“Yates joined the SuperFun Team after retiring from a 40-year career as a pediatrician in New York and Georgia,” according to the company website. “A graduate of the University of Virginia, Nick has written articles and lectured regarding the safety and well-being of our youth. Wanting to continue his lifetime commitment to the health and safety of our young, and to help bring active and engaging events to our community, Nick joined SuperFun in the spring 2021 after seeing a TV news story about the SuperFun Purpose.”
The company was busy on the July 4 weekend with events in several locales, including Luray, Sperryville, Fluvanna, Louisa, Crozet, Greene County and Charlottesville.
Getting started
One of Slonaker’s motivation to begin SuperFun was pretty basic.
“I owned some Arby’s restaurants, and I was getting killed by the McDonald’s playground for kids,” he said. “I was sponsoring Little League baseball teams, and they were wearing their Arby’s jerseys to McDonald’s. That led me to start SuperFun in 2004.”
Slonaker, even after moving from Harrisonburg to the Charlottesville area in the 1980s, saw all three of his children attend JMU: Chris was a captain of the baseball team, Anne was part of a nationally-ranked lacrosse program, and Kathryn was part of the emerging softball program when it was a club.
Chris, who played baseball at Western Albemarle, was a senior on the 1993 JMU team that included future Major League pitchers Mike Venafro, Scott Forster, Rich Croushore and Brian McNichol – as well as infielder Rob Mummau, a long-time scout for the Seattle Mariners. The JMU head coach was the late Brad Babcock, and the pitching coach was former Turner Ashby and Bridgewater College coach Ray Heatwole – both are in the Virginia Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
“Those were years that gave birth to my idea to start my company SuperFun,” Slonaker recalled of when his children were in college.
Slonaker was a captain of his basketball team at Howard High in Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. He was then a walk-on at Wake Forest in 1966.
That 1966-1967 Wake team was led in scoring by Paul Long (22.3 points per game), a guard who had transferred from Virginia Tech.
Long was drafted in 1966 as the 15th pick overall by the St. Louis Hawks, but stayed in school, then was taken in the fifth round by the Detroit Pistons in 1967. Long played pro ball for Detroit, Kentucky and Buffalo through 1971.
“Quickly learned no future for a 6-foot-3 center in the ACC and joined the debate team. Won first varsity debate as a freshman and knew career path would involve public speaking,” Slonaker noted of his arc.
He married his wife, Lynne, who is from the Baltimore area and went to college at Loyola, in 1970, and he worked for a station in Fredericksburg before they moved to Harrisonburg when Slonaker landed at WSVA.
“In December of 1975 I was hired as the new sports director at WSVA radio and TV, which became WHSV,” he said. “Soon after, Rich Murray hired me as the voice of the Dukes to broadcast all football and basketball games on the fledgling Madison Radio Sports Network.”
JMU and UVA ties
Murray, a 1971 graduate of Washington & Lee University, was the sports information director at JMU before leaving to take the same job at Virginia. Murray retired in 2011 after 11 years at JMU and 29 at Virginia. He is in the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame.
Murray, in an email to the AFP, said of Slonaker: “He was personable, knowledgeable and professional. More recently we have gotten together to attend occasional luncheons in Harrisonburg of folks with JMU connections. The luncheons are currently held three times a year. We drove together to one last month and have done that on other occasions. I enjoy the opportunity to visit and reminisce with him. I have the impression he enjoys his current work with SuperFun Attractions.”
The early 1980s were a heady time for the Dukes in men’s basketball under the late coach Lou Campanelli, as JMU upset three bigger schools three years in a row in the first round of the NCAA tournament: Georgetown in 1981, Ohio State in 1982, and West Virginia in 1983. The Dukes lost to eventual national champ North Carolina, 52-50, in the 1982 event after upsetting Ohio State. The Tar Heels, with Michael Jordan, won the national title that year over Georgetown.
In football, JMU – with future NFL star and Pulaski County native Gary Clark – upset Virginia in 1982.
The JMU baseball team made the College World Series in 1983 – the first school from the state to do so.
The family of Slonaker lived on Middlebrook Street in Harrisonburg from 1974-1980 before moving to Belmont Estates in Rockingham County for four years. The family moved to the Charlottesville area in 1984 and has been in Ruckersville for 16 years.
Slonaker spends part of his winters in Florida, and earlier this year he attended the national title football game that was won by Indiana and coach Curt Cignetti, who left JMU to take over the Hooisers.
While wearing a JMU T-shirt before the game at a Florida hotel, the Ruckersville resident ran into a fan of the Miami Hurricanes. “Are you a Cignetti fan?” the Miami patron asked Slonanker. “I said I would be on the sideline opposite Miami, rooting for JMU Mid-West,” who reminded the Miami fan that Cignetti took several of his players from JMU to Indiana.
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David Driver
