From being an Olympian to a pioneer for her race

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"I don't think I'm all that interesting," said Staton, a Chicago native and a longtime Voorhees resident who is black.

Staton may not think so, but there's a lot of evidence that says otherwise. She has a case filled with the hundreds of medals she's won in the sport; she has lots of impressive newspaper clippings; and there's the poster-size picture on the side of her kitchen counter that shows her with other women on the U.S. track and field team at a ticker-tape parade in New York City, right before they competed in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland.

In the tidy black and white kitchen of her comfortable, two-story home on a recent afternoon, Staton said the parade photo was taken at what is now "Ground Zero," the location of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

She saw the country go through the whole civil-rights movement in the 1960s, she experienced being one of the first black schoolteachers in the Paulsboro School District and she was once the only black member of the Catholic Youth Organization girls' track team in Chicago, which later became a powerhouse that included blacks and whites.

"We became the greatest track team, and we were the first interracial," Staton said, while preparing for a trip back to Chicago for a 60-year CYO reunion. "I'm sort of proud of that. It was four white girls and myself."

The team became a powerhouse after the CYO sued the Illinois Central Railroad and won. On the way to a meet in Texas, Staton was asked to move to the area of the train where the blacks were after the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line.