MEDINA, Ohio -- In his office on the Medina Public Square, Sam Livingston has a board on the wall that reads “DTFW.”
The letters are an acronym that stand for “Do the f****** work,” a motto Livingston lives by. A Marine and Army veteran, the disciplined Livingston believes in arriving 15 minutes early anywhere he goes.
The Medina resident is a former Cleveland firefighter, a business coach and real estate agent who owns Marathon Real Estate Group. He’s also a community volunteer, helping lead Feeding Medina County’s annual turkey drive and cleaning gutters, trimming hedges and doing other home improvement at veterans’ homes.
Livingston is cleveland.com’s Homegrown Hero for November.
To nominate a frontline worker for the December Homegrown Hero, please click here. To read about October’s Homegrown Hero, please click here.
“I’m a little bit of rough sometimes,” Livingston said. “Usually I just point at the sign and I don’t actually say it, but they know that means do the work. That means stop with the excuses. If you do the work, the results will come, and that’s just what it is.”
Joining the Marine Corps at 17 years old, Livingston endured a tough boot camp, and was a reconnaissance Marine for six years. He then joined the Army Reserves for 14 years, where he was in Iraq for 15 months and Afghanistan for nine.
Livingston retired from the military in 2013. Two years later, he met Sandy Hinkle, the executive director of Feeding Medina County. At the time, Livingston was working with Leadership Medina County, a nonprofit that works to build a web of quality leaders in the county.
Hinkle needed someone to remodel a building on Lafayette Road, and with Livingston’s construction background, he helped fix the building. He also learned more about Feeding Medina County, how they provide “Weekender bags” filled with food for children to eat on the weekends, along with feeding seniors and hungry families.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, Hinkle told Livingston that Feeding Medina County needed turkeys to provide for families. Livingston made phone calls to businesses and posted on Facebook. He’s volunteered for the turkey drive for six years now.
“You know, there’s not a lot of people that really dig in and make it work for people in need,” Hinkle said. “We all talk about it, we all know there’s a problem. We all see it, we all have our comments on it. But Sam rolls his sleeves up, and he gets in and he does whatever needs to be done.”
Livingston’s caring demeanor improved the life of an Air Force veteran in the aftermath of a 2014 flood. While the veteran was on vacation, his home was flooded up to two feet. He didn’t have flood insurance, so Livingston helped secure money to replace dry wall, carpet and cabinetry. An HVAC company also helped provide a new hot water tank and furnace. The veteran didn’t have to pay for anything.
Livingston’s help has also extended to his friends, including Dale Phelps, a real estate agent in South Elgin, Illinois, who used to live in Cleveland and now works for the same international brokerage Livingston works under.
When Phelps bought his home in Illinois, it needed work, and Livingston drove to Illinois to help redo the basement. The job would have been “virtually impossible” without him, Phelps said.
“I look at Sam like he’s family,” Phelps said. “He’s like a brother. For him to come out and do that, it meant the world to me.”
Livingston doesn’t call himself a hero.
Livingston considers military members who have died during service heroes. He considers his close friend, who nearly died of cancer and is a Cleveland firefighter, to be a hero. He also thinks people who stand up for what they believe in, whether right or wrong, are heroes.
“It sounds weird when someone says that about me because honestly I just show up,” Livingston said. “That’s really mostly what I do is I just show up, and things happen around me, and sometimes you get the credit.”
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December 06, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Marine, Army vet Sam Livingston always ready to do the work: December Homegrown Hero - cleveland.com
"work" - Google News
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