Full Circle: How a UPS Driver’s Tip Led to One of Our Best

About nine months ago I found myself looking for a new reporter. I was done with just finding someone to fill a seat and only do what I told them. I knew I might be waiting around forever until the right person would come along, and I was okay with that. A few weeks into the void, I found a phone number lying on my desk. Our Rocky, our faithful UPS delivery man, told us his daughter would make a good reporter.
The short of the story is I reached out to his daughter, Bryleigh, and it was a very good call. Rocky never lets us down, and he certainly didn’t lead us astray.
Bryleigh started part-time with us in July 2025 and quickly moved into a full-time role with us. It was in her first few days and weeks that I realized just how connected to her I already was.
I noticed her mom’s name on Facebook. That was very familiar... could it be the same? Sure enough, it was.
Bryleigh is cousins with Angela Maimon, who worked with me here years ago (Angela Stewart, then). Angie was a fireball of a reporter and wrote some of the best editorials I’ve seen. I credit her columns with getting the benches pulled from the courthouse (unpopular, as it were), and getting people to pay attention to law enforcement illegally parking around the inner curb of the courthouse, making it difficult for traffic to circle downtown.
Since she started, Angie quickly became a good friend and one of my favorite people, and she still is to this day. She married Alan Maimon, a veteran newspaper reporter who worked at the Courier-Journal’s Hazard bureau when they met. Alan is still a great investigative reporter, and after years in Las Vegas, has settled the past decade or so in New Jersey.
But here comes Bryleigh — Angie’s cousin. She has the same spirit and tenacity I saw in Angie. It was wonderful to find that energy again with someone that had a great sense of humor and was cultured and yet sensitive to the ways of Appalachian folks, as she was proudly one herself. She fit in as well as anyone in recent memory. She and Jeff Ledington will go down as two of my best hires. Along with Kasey Morris-Floyd and Tasha Stewart, if I do nothing else while leading this newspaper, I can say I’ve made a handful of great choices in staff.
I talk about Bryleigh for good reason. She deserves the recognition, but also, this serves as a goodbye column for her. Bryleigh is moving on from our community, and moving back home to the mountains of Virginia where she spent most of her life. A Harlan native, she is a product of Pennington Gap and that region.
Friday is Bryleigh’s last day with us at The Mountain Advocate. It makes me truly sad to see her move on. She’s been a joy to not only work with — she definitely completed a circuit of fun, humor and camaraderie within our office, but she’s been a great reporter. She’s intelligent, curious, and knows how to represent herself and her company very well.
We wish Bryleigh the very best, and pledge to work with her as much as we can to help her stay connected to the world of journalism, which she has found a love for. I believe it is imperative to foster and pour into upcoming generations to one day take over the seats we find ourselves seated in.
Wherever life takes her, Bryleigh has a solid future ahead and we will be cheering her on from the sidelines.
Thank you, Bryleigh, for being a part of our crazy team and getting to know this community so well. It’s truly been a pleasure.