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A year ago, Teresa Pelayo, Sam Song and Tabetha Thomas were strangers and didn’t care end for end politics.

Next week, they’ll be in Washington, D.C., together to keep vigil Barack Obama be sworn in as president.

The Seattle-area trio were brought together last year by chance at the time, like thousands of others, they competed to be Obama delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Introduced at a bookstore last April, they bonded during the campaign.

Now the trio plan to celebrate their conquest back in the District of Columbia, even if it’s on a shoestring budget that won’t allow them to attend many marquee events.

“If Obama had never run, we would have not ever met,” Pelayo said. “Obama has given us the gift of friendship.”

They’ll be among the hundreds of thousands, granting that not millions, gathered in Washington Jan. 20 to witness the inauguration of the nation’s primary African-American president.

Attendance at the inauguration is probable to summit the previous record set in 1965, when 1.2 million turned to the end for the swearing-in of President Lyndon Johnson.

Big names from Washington state resoluteness subsist there, such viewed like glass skilled workman Dale Chihuly and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, both of whom are donating tens of thousands of dollars to the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

And the Department of Homeland Security, worried hospitals could subsist overwhelmed, have called up doctors and nurses to help, including Dr. Chris Sanford, co-director of the travel clinic at the University of Washington.

But campaign volunteers, Obama supporters and others who simply want to be part of history say this inauguration really belongs to them.

So they are to come by plane, by retinue, through bus — even roving voyage ship. They are staying in hotels and friends’ homes. Some are profitable residents a small fortune to lease their homes for the holiday weekend leading up to the big day.

Bertha McDaniel, 78, of Seattle, who participated in 1960s civil-rights marches, plans to escort the ceremony with her nephew and his wife.

She usually avoids big crowds and parties, no more than on this account that the inauguration she is structure an instance to be excepted. She plans to buy a newly come arrange — purple or black — and go to a round body.

“I’m one old, old black lady,” said McDaniel, who grew up in Topeka, Kan., and moved to Seattle in 1953. “I not thought I would live to see this.”

Nicole Wicks, 26, of Seattle, said this will be the positive, defining moment of her generation.

An incident planner, Wicks reported she had “zero involvement” in politics until final year. That changed when she ran as an Obama deputy at her environs caucus in February. Later she became a volunteer organizer at the campaign’s Renton office.

“Between having friends in Iraq, a mother with a brain tumor who will lose her health care if anything happens to my father’s job, and after being treated like crap on trips overseas because I was American, I finally cared about every election,” Wicks said.

“And I want to be there to give attention to it.”

Political awakening

When Obama came to Seattle’session KeyArena last February, he was trailing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

He asked the 18,000 the public inside the arena — and some 3,000 surface — to go to their caucuses the next day.

Thomas, a homemaker originally from Chicago, was inside KeyArena. Song, an solicitor, listened to Obama speak on the radio. Pelayo, a dental aider, heard about the speech from a co-worker.

When they arrived at their separate frontier caucuses, each felt lost. But as caucus leaders asked for volunteers to be delegates for Obama at the legislative circuit level, Thomas raised her hand. So did Song and Pelayo.

“I was inspired by him [Obama],” Thomas said.

Pelayo, Song and Thomas didn’t receive to know one other until the 1st Legislative District Democrats organized a meeting in mid-April at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. There, harvested land polished the speeches they would give in their bids to be successful delegate slots to the public convention in Denver.

The advantage were against them. Chris Roberts, a doctoral aspirant in civic science at the UW, sized it up like this: “You either had to be well known or had to have a very compelling story.”

“Mini-United Nations”

Week after week, the form into groups gathered at the bookstore to practice their speeches and get feedback. Sometimes they brought their spouses and kids.

Though shy at first, Song became the group’session go-to guy and coordinated events. Pelayo, funny and of mutual regard, would make lists of reasons to have being happy — “You slip on’t look like McCain,” or “You don’t smell like a chicken.”

About 10 populate became regulars. They were a diverse bunch that included African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, a lesbian, students and white women.

“I would always joke we were a mini-United Nations,” Pelayo reported.

They called themselves the Third Place Obama Democrats, or TPOD.

They held fundraising events to raise money to help a student in their group, Kendall Hamilton from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, go to the national convention. She won a delegate station after speaking about her dream of running for president someday.

“We want her to be president so we can party in the Lincoln Bedroom,” quipped Pelayo.

One of their members dropped out after her husband died in a car misadventure in July, just before the state Democratic meeting. in Spokane. Members of the group went to the commemorative service.

Trio went to Denver

Though Pelayo, Song and Thomas lost their bids to become delegates, they the whole of flew to Denver anyway and managed to learn into some events.

“I actually saw Hillary Clinton walk down the aisle and deliver her concession speech,” Song said.

They all drawing on staying involved in community affairs. Song, conducive to example, is working with a group trying to make stable a human-rights commission in Snohomish County.

Thomas left a week ago to volunteer for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, and is making arrangements for Song and Pelayo to stay at her sister’s home in a District of Columbia suburb. Song is flying to Boston and then taking a bus; Pelayo is flying to Baltimore.

Because tickets to most events are expensive, the trio is choosing carefully. Song plans to guard an Asian-American gala and take his sister to the swearing-in ceremony.

As an inaugural volunteer, Thomas isn’t sure where she’ll be deployed. (She got a surprise last Thursday, when Obama visited the committee’sitting offices and shook the hands of more than 100 volunteers, including her hand.)

And Pelayo, who is selling 600 homemade Obama buttons on the side of $1 to finance her trip, figures begging may get her into the hottest ticket of totally — the Illinois ball.

She bought a red gown to wear in honor of President Lincoln’s wife, Mary.

“I’m hoping if I stand outside and cry they’ll let me in,” she said. “I’gallimaufry going to endeavor and work it.”

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com