Inauguration: Detours on the road to history
Local residents miss out on close-up view of President Obama’s swearing in
Debra Gildea caught glimpses of President Barack Obama’s inauguration last Tuesday on the television at a restaurant nine blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
Jack and Marianne Cleary stood with a small crowd a few blocks away and listened to a radio broadcast of the swearing-in ceremony on a cell phone — like the huddled masses of the pre-television era yearning for news from a faraway front.
Heath Williams sat with his girlfriend in the garden behind the Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington, D.C., and strained to hear Obama’s words of “hope over fear” and “unity of purpose” through the echoes reverberating from the sound system along the National Mall.
It was the best they could do.
Bearing Witness: Tuesday will be one of those indelible days. One of those days when an oath can carry the weight of we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
Obama and King: Thoughts shift to historic black figures as Obama is inaugurated as the nation’s first black president.
The Senator’s View: From his seat behind the podium, Sen. Bob Casey Jr. could see the more than 2 million people who crowded National Mall to witness Obama’s defining moment.
Young and Lucky: As their bus idled in the congested stadium parking lot, Casey Rose and Eric Nole rewound to the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Roadblocks to History: For some, the trek to D.C. ended in disappointment as security equipment broke down, crowds overflowed and ticket holders were turned away.
Gildea, Williams and the Clearys were among the thousands of people whose weeks of planning and hours of waiting to attend the inauguration — to witness Obama’s historic moment — ended in disappointment as security equipment broke down, crowds overflowed and ticket holders were turned away.
“We were disappointed we were not able to see the inauguration, but we certainly were not alone,” Gildea of Forty Fort said.
Gildea had been trying to make good on an election-night promise to attend the inauguration with her son, Shaun, 30, an ardent Obama supporter who lives in Washington.
The day after Obama’s victory, Gidea’s husband, John, made a request for inauguration tickets from the office of U.S. Rep. Chris Carney, D-Dimock Township.
The week before the event, Carney’s office granted the request. The Gildeas received two silver tickets, allowing them access to the standing-room section between the eastern edge of the National Mall and the Capitol.
Or so they thought.
The Gildeas left Shaun’s home last Tuesday at 5:45 a.m. The inaugural ceremony was scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m., with Obama’s swearing in around noon.
After waiting in line at the silver gate for more than two hours, the Gildeas started to see others walking back from the front — silver tickets in hand. Security barriers had been knocked down and the silver section had already been filled, Gildea said.
“Sure enough, it was a gridlock up there,” Gildea said. “The area where we were supposed to be was packed with people. There was no way we were getting in.”
Those left stranded and separated from history started to chant, “Let us in, let us in,” Gildea said. “I turned to Shaun and said, ‘Let’s get out of here before the riots start.’”
They retreated to the District Chophouse, a restaurant on Seventh Street NW, two blocks north of Pennsylvania Avenue, where they had planned to meet up with Gildea’s two other sons, Brian, 25, and Kyle, 23, after the ceremony.
A television in the bar area showed a live broadcast of the history taking place less than a mile away — the pageantry of the Capitol’s west front transformed into a regal facade of red, white and blue; the crowd of more than a million packing the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial; and the indelible image of the first black president in his first moments of leadership.
“We saw some of it, not as much as we would have liked to,” Gildea said, of the television broadcast. “We couldn’t really hear all of his speech.”
The Clearys of Dallas Township could not see any of the ceremony from their vantage point — near the security gate for purple ticket holders at First Street NW and Louisiana Avenue NW.
They waited in line for three hours before learning the gate had been closed after a malfunctioning generator knocked out power to the magnetometers used to scan people for weapons and other prohibited objects.
Sen. Bob Casey Jr., a Scranton native, invited the Clearys to the inauguration two weeks earlier, offering them two of the 393 tickets he had been allotted to give out for the event.
Casey and the Clearys became close after the Senator visited their home last May to deliver medals awarded to their son, Michael, 24, who died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on Dec. 20, 2005, two weeks before he was to return home.
Marianne Cleary campaigned for Obama. Jack Cleary, a decorated Vietnam veteran, voted for Sen. John McCain — the Republican nominee who lived for five years in a Hanoi prisoner of war camp.
“I wanted Obama to be our next president,” Marianne Cleary said earlier this month. “I felt it was my responsibility to voice my opinion. I hate to use our situation to put ourselves out there, but then I think, ‘Who knows better than us about the state of the country?’”
As they waited last Tuesday, the Clearys talked with the others around them — a woman and her three children, a young couple and a 63-year-old man who had also served in the military and remembered taking the same non-stop bus trip from Columbus, Ga., to Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.
The bus could not stop, Jack Cleary said, because segregation still pervaded the South at the time and black soldiers, like the man in the inaugural line, would not be able to get service at restaurants and other businesses along the route.
Decades later, people of all races were joining together to witness history in Washington — a city of Union influence and southern geography that provided the crucible for civil rights in the 1960s.
“Martin Luther King and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is kind of history to most people. It’s reality to us,” Jack Cleary, 62, said.
As Obama’s defining moment neared, and the chances for the purple ticket holders to get into the inauguration dwindling, Cleary’s former comrade proposed a solution — a marriage of modern technology and an old-fashioned
approach to gathering news and following history.
“One of the fellows there said, ‘I’ve got a Blackberry. I think we can listen to it on the radio,’” Jack Cleary recalled.
The Clearys, the man, his wife and niece, and the others they had spoken with, gathered around and “listened in awed silence,” Jack Cleary said. They developed their own memory of a day captured in millions of photographs and video recordings and preserved on hundreds of front pages and dozens of magazine covers.
“I’m not sure if standing and talking to that fellow, who was my age, and listening to Obama’s words on the radio wasn’t more memorable than sitting in the purple seats and seeing him on the Capitol steps,” Jack Cleary said. “I don’t know, maybe the glitch worked out for the best. “The way it turned out, we had a great appreciation for being with the group we were with.”
Williams of Hunlock Creek drove with his girlfriend, Sarah, six-and-a-half hours from Syracuse University, where he is a senior majoring in journalism.
Without tickets, they planned on heading to the National Mall as early as 2 a.m. last Tuesday, to wait for a spot among the masses who had come from across the country by car, train and chartered bus to see the inauguration.
An acquaintance of a friend changed their plans.
The acquaintance had extra tickets in the blue section — the oppose side of the purple area where the Clearys had been trying to go.
Williams and his girlfriend got in line around 8:30 a.m. and waited, and waited, and waited — for nearly three hours.
“We were beginning to worry that we wouldn’t get in on time, but we kept the faith that we’d get in and stayed in line,” Williams said.
Security officials eventually closed the gate, citing similar problems with scanning equipment and an overwhelming number of people with bulkier winter clothing than had been planned for — even on a day with a high temperature of 31 degrees.
“Once they closed the gate and stopped letting people in, it was pure chaos,” Williams said.
“It was just a mob of thousands of people pushing every which way. We panicked as it began to dawn on us that we might miss the moment we had traveled all this way for.”
According to WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, 52,500 tickets were given out for the blue section, despite recommendations from the U.S. Park Police, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and D.C. Fire to limit the number to between 24,400 and 40,733.
The same amount of tickets was distributed in the purple section, despite recommendations from FEMA and the fire department to lower the number by several thousand.
Williams and his girlfriend reverted to their original plan. They asked a police officer for directions to the National Mall. They rushed to the Mall, but all of the entrances were blocked off and said to be, “too full.”
“The best we could do was sit in the garden behind the Smithsonian castle and attempt to listen to the ceremony,” Williams said. “But the echoes from the distant Jumbotrons were too much. We couldn’t see or hear a thing.”
The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, the group responsible for organizing the inaugural festivities, issued an apology last Wednesday.
“We realize how important this inauguration was to so many people and the difficulties they endured to get here, so once again we deeply apologize to those guests who were not admitted,” the committee said.
Last Thursday the committee said it would send copies of the inaugural invitation and program to ticket holders who were shut out, along with photographs of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and the ceremony.
“I was hoping for lunch at the White House,” Gildea joked.
