Hello and welcome, y'all! We're Curtis and Glenda Hightower of Marietta, Georgia. Curtis taught shop at the high school for 29 years, and I keep the books for our church. When Atlanta got the Games back in September of 1990, we looked at each other across the supper table and said, "We're going." Six years later, we went! Our son-in-law Darnell built us this page so the whole family, and anybody else, can see what we saw.

The Tickets We Got

We filled out the ticket order form last year like everybody else and prayed. Here's what came in the mail:

ADMIT TWO · SOFTBALL · Golden Park, Columbus Drove down to Columbus to watch our USA girls. Curtis says it was hotter in those bleachers than in the Atlanta paper's weather report, and he's right. First time softball's ever been in the Olympics, and our girls went on and won the gold medal. So there.

ADMIT TWO · TEAM HANDBALL · Georgia World Congress Center We had never heard of team handball. Now we're experts. It's like soccer, except you throw it, and like basketball, except you can get knocked flat. The Europeans in the crowd knew every rule and every player. We cheered for whoever they cheered for.

ADMIT TWO · BASEBALL · Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium We saw Cuba play. Those men can hit a baseball. Curtis kept score the whole game in the little book he's kept at every Braves game since 1966.

ADMIT TWO · DIVING · Georgia Tech Aquatic Center A morning session. I don't know how anybody goes off that high board on purpose. Beautiful.

ADMIT TWO · ATHLETICS, EVENING · Olympic Stadium · Thursday, August 1 THE BIG ONE. We were in the stadium the night Michael Johnson won the 200 meters in those gold shoes and set the world record, 19.32. When the time went up on the board, 80,000 people made a sound I will never forget as long as I live. Curtis, who does not cry, cried. He'd deny it, but I was there.

What We Watched On TV

• Opening night, July 19. When Janet Evans ran up that ramp and handed the torch to Muhammad Ali, I cried and so did everybody on our street. His hands shaking and him standing there so proud. Curtis said that was the best-kept secret in Georgia.
• Kerri Strug. Hurt her ankle on the first vault and went right back and did the second one, landed it on one foot, and the girls won the team gold. Her coach carried her out to get her medal. Our granddaughter has decided she is going to be a gymnast.
• Amy Van Dyken won four gold medals in the pool.
• Carl Lewis won the long jump. That's nine gold medals over four Olympics.
• Michael Johnson won the 400 too, first man ever to win the 200 and the 400 at the same Olympics.
• The women's soccer team won the gold over in Athens, Georgia, in front of a stadium full of people. A lot of little girls were watching that one, ours included.

The Park

Centennial Olympic Park was the place to be. Music at night, people from every country on earth, the fountain with the rings in it where the children ran through the water. We were down there Thursday night, July 25th, trading pins and listening to a band.

Early that Saturday morning, the bomb went off. Two people died and more than a hundred were hurt. We found out when we woke up and turned on the TV. We prayed for them all at church on Sunday, and we'll keep on praying for those families. The park opened again on Tuesday and we went back down, and so did thousands of other people. That's what you do.

Glenda's Pins

I came home with 212 pins. Curtis says I have a problem. I say he has a scorebook from 1966. Pin trading was the most fun I had all summer. You'd just walk up to anybody with a pin board and start talking. My favorites so far:

• A peach with the rings on it, from a lady from Macon.
• A pin from Norway with a little Viking ship that a young man traded me for two Georgia peach pins (the pins, not the fruit).
• Izzy, the mascot, in a baseball cap. Curtis says Izzy looks like a blue tooth in sneakers. I think he's cute.
• A school bus pin I got from a bus driver who came all the way from Ohio to drive for the Games. He said he'd been lost twice already. We gave him directions.

Curtis's Two Cents

It was hot. The trains were packed and some of those buses didn't know where they were going. There were too many fellows selling T-shirts on the sidewalks. And I wouldn't trade one minute of it. The whole world came to Atlanta, and Atlanta did all right. --C.H.

Coming Soon

• Our pictures! Nine rolls at the drugstore. Darnell says he can scan the best ones.
• The Paralympics. We have tickets for later this month and we'll tell you all about it.
• Glenda's complete pin list, with the country each one came from.