Witness to history
Gallup woman recalls inauguration experience

Mary Ann Armijo braces for the cold while waiting for President Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony to commence. Courtesy Photo

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — It was the most exciting of times. It was the most painful of times.

That, in a nutshell, is a description of Mary Ann Armijo’s adventures in Washington on Inauguration Day Jan. 20.

She and her husband, Duke, managed to secure two of those prized tickets to the Inauguration which gave them — along with 240,000 other people — the right to stand in the National Mall in front of the Capitol building and breathe the same air that Barack Obama was breathing as he was sworn in as president of the United States.

“I managed to catch a glimpse of him when the crowd parted for a second,” Armijo said a week after the event.

To get that glimpse, the Armijos had to get up at 3:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day so they could get to the Capitol and begin standing in line at 4:45 a.m. This began the painful experience of standing — often with little movement — until the inauguration ceremony was over some eight hours later.

The procedure was for everyone to get in line and then be admitted into the Mall area beginning about 8 a.m. She remembered crowd control officers telling people not to push, pointing out that everyone had tickets and it was still four hours before the inauguration would begin, so there was no hurry. While she would have problems with crowds later in the day, this crowd complied and everything went smoothly.

But equally hard to take was the cold temperatures which lasted throughout the day.

But people who watched the documentary “March of the Penguins” know something about being in a crowd in the cold. The ones who are the coldest are the ones on the outside of the group, and while she was surrounded by the crowd, their body heat and the crowd’s blockage of the wind made the temperature quite acceptable, she said.

It was only when there was a break in the crowd that she said she could get the brunt of the cold weather.

She estimated she was about 350 feet from the podium where the ceremonies were taking place but when she was told this amounted to three and a half football fields, she changed her mind and said she was closer than that.

But no matter how close she was, her view of the ceremonies itself came from one of the Jumbotrons that were placed throughout the mall area.

This is where the exciting part of the day occurred; the memory of the standing, the cold and all of the other problems that came up in getting to the noon ceremony all faded away, she said, as she began a part of that historic moment.

When the ceremony was over came her next big adventure — the five hours it took to get back to their hotel two and a half miles away.

“It would have been faster if we just walked, it but we decided to take the subway,” she said.

The first problem the Armijos encountered was the Capitol security force which had blockaded off many of the roads to the Capitol so people only could go in one direction, whether that was the direction they wanted to go or not.

After about three hours of standing, pushing and maneuvering through the crowd, the Armijos found themselves within 50 yards of getting on the subway.

Then someone in front of them fell down.

As the rest of the crowd realized that something was standing in their way to get where they wanted to go, the crowd seemed about ready to become a mob, so the Armijos decided that the wiser course was to get away from the crowd for awhile. Luckily, Armijo knew where she was — near the offices of U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the man who gave her the tickets — so the two inched their way through the crowd and managed to get to a cafeteria next to Bingaman’s office where they sat and relaxed for two hours while the crowd got smaller.

This was the time tens of millions of Americans were watching the inauguration parade on their televisions.

Armijo said the two saw a part of the last of the parade as they were making their way to the subway, but because of the crowds and the distance to the parade route, one could not see both events.

Eventually, the Armijos made it back to their hotel, and Armijo said they just laid their bruised bodies down on the beds and marveled that they had made it through the day.

There was no talk of making it to one of the inauguration balls that evening, partly because they were so tired and partly because they had been to one the day before.

That was the New Mexico Ball where Armijo said her most vivid memory was being introduced by Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. and Vice President Ben Shelly to movie actor Val Kilmer, who has a home in New Mexico.

Her other memory of those two days in Washington, she said, was the vendor booths, all selling mementos with Obama’s picture on it. News stories would later say that tens of millions of dollars were spent by people, like the Armijos, who wanted to take something home with them to remember the occasion.

Armijo said she and her husband decided to be at least somewhat selective about the whole process and only purchased officials memorabilia sponsored by the inauguration committee.

“The other thing I remember is making a lot of new friends from all over the country,” she said.