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SUMMER | TCA 2017
Talking TCA
h u n t e r l i v e s ay | C O N V E N T I O N S A N D M A R K E T I N G C O O R D I N AT O R
B Y d o r o t h y c o x
Ask most folks to name who they would like to invite to a fantasy dinner party and
they come up with names of famous composers and writers, pop stars, past heads of
state, actors and such. Ask Lawrence “Hunter” Livesay who he would invite and he replies,
“my friends and family.”
Credit his friends and family for being an important reason he didn’t leave his home
town of Alexandria, Virginia, and pursue a music career in Nashville, Tennessee, or New
York City.
This guitarist who comes from a family of musicians (his grandfather R. Eugene Livesay
played the organ for 42 years at his neighborhood Methodist church) had at one time
aspired to head to Nashville or New York, as many musicians do. But, he told Truckload
Authority: “I thought about it and just saw so many people trying to do it and just sort of
giving up … . I saw a lot of my friends going down those paths and not having any success
doing it. So I was more than happy to move back home” after graduating from Clemson
University in 2014.
And although Livesay still plays the guitar “every day,” he parlayed his love of music,
the performing arts and playing live gigs into his related talent of audio engineering
and then into business administration, marketing research and coordinating logistics and
sound for live events.
Which led him to his job as conventions and marketing coordinator for the Truckload
Carriers Association.
“I never would have imagined doing what I’m doing now,” Livesay says, “but it’s funny
how much crossover there is between planning conventions and putting on a [musical]
show.”
Even as a youngster Livesay had an interest in pulling off live shows.
“I think definitely outside of school I was focused on music and playing music with my
friends trying to get gigs together and trying to see if we could get a place to play. And we
would just sort of invite everybody over to one spot and various bands would play and we
were throwing little parties like that, so I definitely wanted to do music and started to have
an interest in doing live event stuff.”
Livesay may have received the technical gene from his mother, Laura Livesay, who
was a computer teacher at the middle school he attended while his father Larry Livesay
has held various federal government positions, including with U.S. AID and the FDIC. His
mother is retired from teaching school now but does tutoring “just about every day,”
Livesay says, and his dad does security and is on contract with the Environmental Protection
Agency.
It turns out both Livesay’s middle school, Alexandria Country Day, and his high school,
T.C. Williams High, are famous. But not for the same reasons.
The middle school received fame inadvertently for serving fourth graders what the
school’s kitchen staff thought was frozen lemonade but turned out to be frozen margaritas
left over from a PTA meeting the night before.
“That was kind of a big scandal,” Livesay says. “My sister was in that fourth-grade class.
You should have seen the note they sent home. It was on Howard Stern. Everybody was
talking about it.”
T.C. Williams High School, as football fans know, was featured in the iconic 2000 movie,
“Remember the Titans.”
“Actually,” Livesay remarks, “I was in the last class to have been in the old building.
They knocked it down I guess in between my sophomore and junior year, when we moved
into a new building. I mean, every time we had a substitute teacher we would watch ‘Remember
the Titans’ for sure. I’ve seen that movie probably 150 times.”
Everything at T.C. Williams is still named after the famous football team: “We’ve got
36 Truckload Authority | www.Truckload.org TCA 2017