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Please send your questions and comments to: metro@mto.infi.net This page was posted Aug. 4, 1996 |
Local hero Americus turns out to salute Angel Martino Joe Kovac Jr. The Macon Telegraph AMERICUS - In towns like these, small ones, when you make a real name for yourself, get on TV, get the locals pulling for you against the world, come back home a bona fide Olympic champion, and get your name on the County Gas & Hardware sign, you get yourself a parade. And on a summer day in Sumter County, Ga., when you ride through town sitting in the sunroof of a black Corvette with gold medals a'clinking, hanging around your neck, they will give you the keys to a brand new green Pontiac. And if you're Angel Myers-Martino, you will cry. No, you didn't cry when they played that national anthem and be-medaled you four times over, but when President Carter is riding shotgun at the front of your parade on a Saturday afternoon, by goodness, that new green Pontiac tugs on the tears. When the parade ends and the crowd gathers and the president says you're some kinda swimmer, "a streak of lightning" even, you'll know why all the people jammed the three lanes of Lamar Street outside the Windsor Hotel to see you smiling up there on that second-floor veranda. That's when you'll be modest as can be and tell your neighbors, "I was nervous because I thought nobody would show up." You'll say, "I'm surprised and happy that everybody came out." Then you'll run down and hop inside that new green Pontiac, honk the horn three times and be a hero while the TV news cameras and the little girls with sunflowers watch you shine. You'll be listening when that president who knows you as "friend," as "champion," talks about his locker room visit with you at the Games, when he heard that fellow from Norway wondering, "Who is that man standing next to Angel Martino?" You'll begin to realize that perhaps small-town heroes are the biggest of all, the ones who get their names put up in lights on the County Gas & Hardware sign, the Cotton's Real Pit Bar-B-Q sign, the Tillman Eye Care sign, the Heilig-Meyers sign and the sign at the Clinic Drugstore. You probably won't ever see all the signs, the welcome homes, the way-to-go's, or hear all the people you did proud talking about the way you did it. You won't hear an engineer draftsman named Jay Adkins who showed up at your parade say you've "gotta be doing something pretty good, something real special, for me to get off work and come down here. We love America and Angel is America." You won't hear parade watcher Sam Peeples saying, "It's OK, real OK. I need to get something like this going on for me." You won't hear the boy named Damien Brown sitting with his back to the Windsor Hotel waiting for you and talking about how you "can swim like an angel," how you've "made everybody proud, real proud." But you will hear the hollering, the clapping and the Lamar Street serenade of a few ladies with Diet Cokes: "We love you, Angel!" And you will say the right thing: "I'm proud to be from here and to call Americus my home."
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