Gris: Love has a way of healing
In many ways, this year’s Cherry Blossom Festival is no different than any of the others for Lee Robinson.
Pink has the city surrounded on all sides. It is tacked on doors, tied on mailboxes and painted across storefronts and car windows. Folks wear it, eat it, live and breathe it.
The cherry tree in his front yard is starting to bloom. He has watched it grow over the years, right along with his daughters and now grandchildren.
Lee has had sweat equity in the festival for most of its 33 years. As a four-term state senator, he was a member of the Clean Community Commission, the forerunner to Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful, which gave birth to the festival in the early 1980s.
He has continued to serve on the festival’s board of directors, has been festival chairman and presided over four festivals as Macon’s mayor from 1987-91.
Still, there is a marked difference this time around. The third week of March has a rough edge to its spring bouquet.
Lee has good weeks and bad weeks.
Last week was a bad one. A round of chemotherapy. A trip to the doctor. Another scan.
This week should be a good one, a respite from the front line of tubes, needles and monitors.
At least that is his hope as he makes plans to put on his pink sports coat and enjoy the pinkest party on Earth.
You view the world through a different lens when you have cancer.
In October, Lee was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. He watched his wife, Irene, battle the same disease for six years. She died on New Year’s Eve in 2010.
Two weeks ago, festival president and CEO Jake Ferro announced this year’s event was being dedicated to Lee and 24-year-old Sean Pritchard, who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia last month.
Sean is the festival’s director of programming and a 2009 graduate of Mount de Sales. Not long after he began working with the festival, he was assigned the titan duties of coordinating the Tunes & Balloons event.
Lee, with his background in aviation, helped mentor the personable young man. They became great friends.
Now, they are making their cancer journeys in lockstep.
For the past year, Lee has been called the “Pink Baron” around the festival office. A licensed pilot and certified flight instructor, he volunteered to fly to airports across the state to promote the festival. At every stop, he distributed brochures and asked local officials to sign the back of his pink flight jacket.
Lee is 72 years old. His strawberry blond hair has turned white. A lifelong Maconite, his father, Jack, came here as manager of Sears Roebuck and later opened Robinson’s Hardware. Lee graduated from Lanier High in 1961 and enrolled at Georgia Tech to study industrial management.
He met Irene Scales his freshman year. He and a friend pulled up next to her car at the Steak ’n Shake in Daytona Beach, Florida. When they spotted the Auburn sticker, they assumed she and her friend were college girls. But they were still high school seniors from Atlanta. The Robinsons married after dating for five years.
He served 31 years in the Army and Army Reserve. He spent a year in Vietnam in 1969-70, where he commanded a platoon with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
Lee got involved in politics working for Garland Byrd’s congressional campaign in 1964 and lieutenant governor race two years later. Lee was elected to the state Senate in 1974.
He remembers when Carolyn Crayton, who started the Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful Commission and founded the Cherry Blossom Festival, would come to the state capitol with her cherry trees in tow.
“Now you can travel all over Georgia and see those Yoshino cherry trees the legislators took back and planted,” he said. “It’s amazing.”
As mayor, Lee made a goodwill trip with Crayton to Washington, D.C., in 1988 to present Mayor Marion Barry with a gift of 100 trees.
He can laugh about it now. Macon’s festival was still a tenderfoot at the time, while Washington’s National Cherry Blossom Festival had been around since 1935.
It was like trying to impress Orville Redenbacher with a bowl of popcorn.
Now, however, Macon has more than 300,000 Yoshinos and leads the free world in cherry blossoms.
Whenever Crayton came to him with her wish list, he learned “the only appropriate response was, ‘Yes ma’am.’ ”
He was able to get the hotel-motel tax modified to give the festival a fair share with the Macon-Bibb Convention & Visitors Bureau. And 25 years ago this spring, the festival headquarters broke ground at the corner of Cherry and New streets, made possible by a $300,000 contribution from YKK.
Lee found them the property on the opposite corner of what would later become the American Cancer Society office, now another important organization in his life.
He admits the cancer diagnosis blindsided him. He has always been a fitness buff who runs and swims. He had never been sick more than five days in a row in his life.
His greatest strength and endurance has been his faith. It has helped him wrap his arms around the situation he now finds himself in.
“I truly believe God is sovereign,” he said. “I prayed for the peace that passeth all understanding, and he gave that to me almost instantly. So I have a peace about this. My other prayer is that I want every cell in my body to be rid of the cancer.”
Lee is a member of Ingleside Baptist Church, where he is an ordained deacon. Over the past 12 years, he has been on international mission trips to Peru, Bolivia and Russia.
“It has brought me closer to God,” he said. “Now God is using this to bring me even closer. It’s a spiritual place that’s hard to describe.’’
He also believes that purpose is at work in the festival, a time when the city puts on her finest clothes.
“I see God’s hand in it,” he said. “It’s a ministry, a way to reach people. I love for the tourists to come, but one of the prime things we are doing is celebrating our city. It’s an outpouring of love.
“When the festival is dedicated to you, that love is also focused on you. And that’s a wonderful thing, because love has a great way of healing.’’
This story was originally published March 21, 2015 at 8:41 PM with the headline "Gris: Love has a way of healing ."