Hundred-gallon heroes.

Meyerson, Adam

Eight million Americans donate blood each year, with the typical donor giving a pint every seven months. But Mike Hitt, an electrician from Katy, Texas, visits the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center two times a week to donate plasma and platelets (blood components that reduce internal bleeding among leukemia and other patients).Hitt first gave blood in 1969 while serving with the Army Artillery in Vietnam. Since then, he has donated more than 100 gallons of blood and blood components-67 times his total blood volume. Nearly a thousand patients have been aided by his gifts of life.

Hitt is one of 62 winners of the 1995 Jefferson Awards, given by the American Institute for Public Service. These prizes honor ordinary people who, through their volunteer work, are making extraordinary contributions to their communities. The annual awards ceremony, held in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court, is a reminder of the greatness of America-a country where liberty and generosity go hand in hand, and compassionate citizens are free to solve community problems in their own imaginative ways.

The 1995 Jefferson Award winners range in age from 14-year-old Gustavo Renteria of San Jose, California, who teaches English to newly arrived Latino immigrant children so they don't have to suffer in bilingual-education classes, to 106-year-old Billy Earley of Florence, Arizona, who has volunteered more than 128,000 hours (equal to 64 years of a 40-hour work week) since she started with the American Red Cross making bandages for wounded soldiers in World War I. Mrs. Earley doesn't plan to retire from her volunteer work for at least 10 more years.

Other 1995 winners include DWe Williams of Oklahoma City, a foster mother who has adopted five children with special needs, including one boy born without limbs; Mattie Hill Brown of Wilson, North Carolina, who feeds 200 hungry people every week in the soup kitchen she set up in the town's Masonic lodge; Ken and Twilla Eden, who dress up as clowns in Boise, Idaho, to entertain kids with cancer; 17-year-old Joshua Mele of Fayetteville, New York, who designed habitat for and stocked 4,400 trout in a nearby fishery. Charles Fortney of Tunnelton, West Virginia, who has served as a scout master (for 46 years),president, and a trustee of his local United Methodist church, is a walking definition of the term ";pillar of the community."

One of the awards this year is shared by two brothers, Leslie Colston and Bill Colston Jr. Both are paramedics certified in advanced training with the Riviera Volunteer Fire Department outside Corpus Christi, Texas. These brothers arrange their schedules so that at every hour of the day one of them is always on call and prepared to respond to a medical emergency. The Colstons are among the 1.5 million Americans who provide fire protection and ambulance service without pay.

The brainchild of Sam Beard, a developer of low-income communities and a former aide to Robert Kennedy who lives in Wilmington, Delaware, the Jefferson Awards is one of those rare ventures that draw support from across the political spectrum. Liberals on the board include Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti and Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle; conservatives include William E. Simon, the former treasury secretary, and R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.,Spectator. Liberals like to honor nonprofit helpers of the needy; conservatives like voluntary, nongovernmental ways to address community problems.

The awards also mix public service with business self-interest, an old American tradition. Nominations come from local newspapers and TV stations, which see marketing advantages in celebrating hometown heroes. WGAL-TV in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, sells corporate sponsorships for its nominations. The Indianapolis Star received 150 suggestions from its readers, and more than 200 Hoosiers, including Governor Evan Bayh and Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, attended the paper's lunch honoring its nominees.

Mike Hyland, the executive director of the Jefferson Awards, has been a TV reporter and a press secretary on Capitol Hill. ";The media and Congress are cynical institutions obsessed with finding corruption,"it is to work for an organization that looks for heroes."

";I don't deserve this award,"donor non pareil, as he surveyed the other winners. Other Jefferson Awardees said the same as they learned about him. Thomas Jefferson would disagree. The awards are a fitting tribute to Jefferson's vision of a democracy sustained by independent citizens of energy and character. ";I agree with you,"to John Adams, ";that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents."

For more information, contact the American Institute for Public Service, 621 Delaware St.,302-323-9659. E-mail: info@aips.org. The Institute also has a World Wide Web site at: http://www.dca.net/aips/

Adam Meyerson is the editor of Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship.