NORTH RIDGEVILLE —  If you show up for Sunday’s North Ridgeville Corn Festival parade, you may get to check out a Clyde teenager judged good enough to advance to Hollywood as one of the “Top 40” of NBC-TV’s “America’s Got Talent.”

Johnathon Burkin, 18, will perform as a member of the Hi Society Baton Corps from Fremont, according to Dee Dee Carte, the group’s director.

While his successful New York City audition actually took place some months ago, viewers didn’t know until Thursday night’s episode that Burkin had advanced to Hollywood for the finals as a member of the show’s “Top 40.”

A 2008 Clyde High School graduate, Burkin has been a member of the twirling group since he was 11, according to Carte, who oversees the baton twirling corps with a sister.  The group, which currently boasts 50-odd members ranging in age from 3 to 20, was begun by their parents.

“He leads them down our street several times a year,” said Sharon Smith, who works in the Clyde city manager’s office. Located about 40 miles southeast of Toledo in Sandusky County, Clyde is a city of approximately 6,000. Burkin is employed by the city, but Smith did not elaborate.

“We’ve been getting a lot of calls today from people out of town who are trying to find him,” said Smith on Friday. “They’ve been asking ‘is it really someone from Clyde?’ and I’ve been telling them, ‘yes, he’s really from Clyde.’ ”

A five-and-a-half-minute YouTube video of Burkin before judges Sharon Osbourne, David Hasselhoff and Piers Morgan, showed the Clyde teen clad in black shirt and slacks as he twirled a fiery baton during a routine that saw him standing, kneeling and continuously moving about the stage. When the routine was over, Burkin told the judges about his lifelong love of twirling, and how he persevered in the face of taunts and ridicule by schoolmates.

“You can tell them to shove it,” said Hasselhoff. “You were terrific.”

Carte said Burkin is planning to attend college in preparation for entering the medical field, most likely in nursing.

Contact Steve Fogarty at 329-7146 or sfogarty@chroniclet.com.

 

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