Five Witnesses on One of Those Indelible Days

Pittston attorney Michael Butera, who is attending the inauguration with his wife and son, shows off a sign from President-Elect Barack Obama's campaign. (Michael R. Sisak/The Citizens' Voice)

By Michael R. Sisak/The Citizens' Voice

Tuesday will be one of those indelible days.

One of those one small step for man and I have a dream days. One of those ask not what your country can do for you and the only thing we have to fear is fear itself days.

One of those days that will live forever in history texts and high school classrooms. One of those days when the words I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States can carry the weight of we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Tens of millions of people are expected to watch Obama’s inauguration on television and the Internet. More then four million are projected to be in Washington, crowding in front of the U.S. Capitol and jamming the National Mall to witness the swearing-in of the nation’s first black president.

Among them: Debra Gildea, of Forty Fort; Robin Field, of Wilkes-Barre; Michael Butera, of West Pittston; Bryan McLaughlin, of Dallas; and John Mavus, of Nanticoke.

Gildea, a staff assistant at the Penn State Wilkes-Barre campus in Lehman Township, will be fulfilling an election-night promise she made to her son, Shaun, a staunch Obama supporter who works in Washington as a film editor.

"We were kind of antsy on election night, with the returns coming in, and Shaun was kind of confident,” Gildea said. “I said, 'I tell you what, if Obama wins, I'm going to come down to the inauguration whether we have tickets or not.'"

Obama won in a landslide, defeating the Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, 365 electoral votes to 173.

The next day, Gildea’s husband, John, called the office of U.S. Rep. Chris Carney, D-Dimock Township, and requested tickets to the inauguration.

“I kind of had given up on it,” Gildea said, last week. “I was very surprised when somebody from Carney’s office called and said they had two tickets for us.”

Gildea’s two other sons, Brian, 25, and Kyle, 23, plan to be among the millions watching the Inauguration from a standing room section on the National Mall, she said.

“I’ve never been to an inauguration,” Gildea said. “Being there, for me, I think it will be part of the change that is overdue for this country. Being there will just bring it home for me.”

Field, an Obama supporter since his campaign for the Senate in 2004, had doubted Tuesday — this historic Tuesday — would come.

"It almost felt like I never really imagined it could get to this point," Field said. "I was always willing to work hard and put 100 percent into it, but there was always the cynicism factor that it wasn't going to happen, that we weren't going to elect someone this good."

Field, 32, an English professor and the Director of Women’s Studies at King’s College, learned last week, in an e-mail message from the office of U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Nanticoke, that she too would experience Obama’s inauguration in person.

Field began volunteering for Obama’s campaign last January — soliciting signatures for the petitions that placed him on the primary ballot in April, making telephone calls, hanging fliers and providing housing for a campaign worker who came from out of the area.

She also served as the advisor to the campus group King’s College Students for Obama and checked tickets when Obama spoke last April at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre.

Field, a native of Peoria, Ill., started supporting Obama for president around the time he announced his candidacy on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill. in February 2007.

A few weeks later, Field started wearing the “Obama in 2008” t-shirt she ordered from a campaign website. Obama trailed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton by 13 points in national polls and by 19 points in Pennsylvania.

“That was really when he was the dark horse candidate,” Field said. “Nobody thought he had a chance.”

Twenty-two months later, Obama is on the precipice of history.

Field will bear witness hand-in-hand with childhood friend Emily Harter Hershenson, a social worker at the National Institutes of Health in Washington whose husband, Tom, coordinated events for the Obama campaign and has been working on the transition.

"To see him sworn in, it's going to be a surreal experience," Field said. "I fully expect to be crying the whole time. The two girls from Peoria, holding hands and bawling over our senator as he's sworn in to be president."

Butera, an attorney who is active in local Democratic politics, attended both inaugurations of Obama’s Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton.

He attended the Democratic National Convention in Denver last August as a delegate and watched with his wife, Mary, and 10-year-old son, Peter, at Invesco Field as Obama accepted the Democratic nomination.

“We witnessed history that night and we’re going to witness history when he takes the oath of office,” Butera said.

The Buteras have tickets in a seating area in front of the U.S. Capitol, but the projected crowds — more than five times the 800,000 people who attended Clinton’s 1993 inauguration — could force them to watch from a distance, Butera said.

“We will be in the general vicinity, one way or another, for the swearing in,” Butera said. “It’s going to be an unprecedented crowd, the biggest crowd they’ve ever seen in Washington, D.C. It’s going to be very hard to move around. Once you land, you’re going to be stuck where you are.”

Butera, 57, said he plans to attend two pre-inaugural events tomorrow night: the Italian American Democratic Leadership Council’s cocktail party at Darlington House and the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee’s “Yes We Did! Celebration” at the Washington Plaza Hotel.

Field said she and Hershenson would attend a pre-inauguration concert and the Youth Inaugural Ball at the Washington Hilton, Tuesday night.

Field promised her students she would bring back “lots of pictures.”

McLaughlin, an engineering student at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, will see the inauguration from a different perspective: marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the inaugural parade as a member of The Cadets, a drum and bugle corps based in Allentown.

“We’re there to do a job basically, and that’s to play, to represent this group,” McLaughlin said. “I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to play for the president or how that’s going to work out. It’s going to be really great knowing that he’s around there, knowing that our president is in the same parade that I’m in.”

McLaughlin, 20, plays the baritone horn. He auditioned for The Cadets in November and December.

After the December tryout, McLaughlin was told he would likely receive one of 75 slots in the corps’ summer roster. He was also invited to perform with the group at the inaugural parade.

“This weekend is really the final audition process for the summer,” McLaughlin said.

Mavus, a junior at Nanticoke High School, began planning his trip to the inauguration a month before Obama accepted the Democratic nomination.

Mavus, who is a member of the wrestling and baseball teams at Nanticoke, participated on two trips to Australia as a “student ambassador” and a “sports ambassador” through People to People — a not-for-profit group founded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to promote cross-cultural communication.

Last summer, the group invited Mavus to join its inauguration program.

“It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Mavus said. “I couldn’t pass it up.”

Mavus will spend five days in Washington with the group — his first time in the capital city — and is scheduled to include visits to the Smithsonian American History Museum and the International Spy Museum with stops at Arlington National Cemetery and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Mavus’ teachers consider the inauguration trip an excused absence.

“It’s considered an educational field trip,” Mavus said.

Mavus, an Obama supporter despite being too young to vote, said he expects to watch the inaugural ceremony from the Lincoln Memorial, near where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963.

That connection with history will make Tuesday even more special, Butera said.

"That makes it so much nicer," Butera said. "The fact that it is the day after Martin Luther King Day, the fact that it is occurring where so many civil rights events occurred, it is presently ironic. Everything is falling into place for a wonderfully historic event."